Everything Is Obvious*

This is one of the few books that I would recommend to anyone off the top of my head. Duncan Watts is a computational sociologies and social networks research pioneer. There are 3 ways in which common sense fails us: 1. Our mental model of individual behavior is systematically flawed. 2. Our mental model of collective behavior is even worse. 3. We learn less from history than we think we do. Third common sense failure reminds me of startup post-mortems that you can read on blogs. Rarely someone says, I don't know why we failed. It appears that everyone gets a keen sense of insight after the fact, and knows precisely why they failed, despite not having a clue while they were failing. Watts is also a very skillful writer, it's a delightful read.