What is 'common sense'?

http://thelongandshort.org/issues/season-four/what-is-common-sense-.html

by jeremynicolas • 11 years ago

47 42 11 years ago

thelongandshort.org

meeper16• 11 years ago

It is the most uncommon thing of all.

Animats2• 11 years ago

This is why web developers shouldn't be given control over scrolling.

cristianpascu4• 11 years ago

Specially to create carousels. :)

robert_tweed• 11 years ago

The term "common sense" is a pet hate of mine. Considered objectively, it's the opposite of empiricism. It's what happens when you jump to the most obvious conclusion, regardless of whether or not it's the right one. It's the intellectual equivalent of vigilante justice.

cristianpascu4• 11 years ago

Considered objectively, it's the opposite of empiricism.

It's not. Because we call it a sense, it might have nothing to do empirical senses. It has to do with what we believe about the world, including right and wrong. Common sense can be very well justified (the justification being outhere, although not all are aware of it), or it might be something seen on TV or read on HN. Perhaps it's fair to say that it's the core of a culture, defining it at <x, y, t>. Of course, cultures are all mixed up since 1969, thus everyone is all high about their objectivity. Back in the day, long before I was born, it was better.

analyst74• 11 years ago

Am I reading this wrong, or is cristianpascu basically saying he miss the good old days before minorities had rights?

shawn-butler• 11 years ago

"Common sense" derives from Aristotle's use of "sensus communis"

He noted that animals and humans share the same 5 perceptual senses, sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch. And animals are also able to make distinctions combining one or more of these senses just as humans do.. (e.g., white and sweet = yum, compared to white and salty = yuck).

Animal rationality has no place in Aristotelian philosophy so the common sense was posited as that facility that both humans and animals share that unite multiple perceptual sensations into self-evident truths that are not just simple facts but also not requiring logic or rational consideration / synthesis.

tunesmith• 11 years ago

I think you're more describing a heuristic or a rule of thumb, aren't you? I think the root problem of all of this is that it's impossible to tell ahead of time when it's more efficient to use shortcuts, and when it's actually worth the time to go through the exhaustive analysis.

tehwalrus2• 11 years ago

The phrase common sense is awful, as @robert_tweed says, it is the opposite of a considered opinion.

In politics, however, this idea is particularly egregious, as the article elucidates.

If you're wrong about a scientific theory or a computer program, you can tell well enough by testing the things. If you're wrong in politics, it is extremely difficult to obtain empirical evidence that this is the case.

That is not to say that it's impossible: there is plenty of research out there, and like all human-centric scientific research some of it is flawed, and most is statistically weak. As far as I can tell, "common sense" as used by UKIP, Gove, etc means assuming that any results which are contrary to your brain's initial guess are either wrong, or actually malicious[1].

The Lib Dems (who I stood for in the election) have actually tried to do the probably-impossible here and build a platform on evidence-based policy[2]. Much good it did us in the poll, of course.

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2298146/I-refuse-s...

[2] not that it stopped some of our candidates trotting out the awful line, as the article points out.

cristianpascu4• 11 years ago

it is extremely difficult to obtain empirical evidence that this is the case

Hume would say it's impossible. And there's plenty of research out there to back him up. I'd disagree with him, but I have to disagree with you first. It's common sense among philosophers to be humean. :)

reagency2• 11 years ago

To err is humean.

wmil• 11 years ago

Common sense can best be thought of as the collection of small facts that people have acquired through thousands of years of observing humans and the results. eg, Folk Wisdom.

It's much more useful than you seem to think it is.

Look at priming. It was a recent academic fad, Malcolm Gladwell included a big section on it in "Blink". The idea that you could influence people to walk more slowly by making them read a list of words associated with old age defied common sense. Surely someone would have noticed this effect before.

And the result was that the common sensers were right. Key priming studies turned out to be outright fraud. The rest weren't repeatable.

reagency2• 11 years ago

Priming is a broad topic. Only certain kinds were debunked.

Wikipedia summarizes "Although semantic, associative, and form priming are well established, some longer-term priming effects were not replicated in further studies, casting doubt on their effectiveness or even existence"

alextgordon• 11 years ago

The Lib Dems (who I stood for in the election) have actually tried to do the probably-impossible here and build a platform on evidence-based policy. Much good it did us in the poll, of course.

Interesting you mention that. The Lib Dems didn't do the common sense thing: ditch their leader. Even after a bloodbath in the European elections, even after opinion poll after opinion poll showed considerable negativity towards him.

They had an abundance of data, but a total lack of common sense.

tehwalrus2• 11 years ago

If I'd had anything to do with it, they would have done.

hzhou321• 11 years ago

Common sense should not be defined as common knowledge. It is not describing a type of knowledge which one simply know or ignorant. Rather it describes a most general type of critical thinking process where common people will reach the similar conclusion when they are asked to engage in the critical thinking.

For example, cutting vegetables. I would say it is a common sense to always put your holding figures on top (rather than under the vegetables or on the side). It is not a common knowledge -- for one, not all or quite a portion of our population never cut vegetables before so it can't be a common knowledge; and for two, many who try to cut vegetables will make mistakes of injuring their fingers due to lack this common sense.

However, it is a good example of common sense, if we imagine, that we ask any common people to think about the situation and devise or choose from a couple vegetable holding position, most of will reach the common conclusions.

Therefore, common sense is a common critical thinking process shared by us.

The problem with common sense is that most people -- or many of us most of the time -- do not engage in critical thinking, as a result, fail to benefit from common sense.

squiggy22• 11 years ago

I'll just paraphrase your last sentence. As that old adage goes.

The problem with common sense is, its just not that common.

cubix• 11 years ago

For example, cutting vegetables. I would say it is a common sense to always put your holding figures on top

That's not actually what most experts advocate. Chefs are trained to hold from the side, but with their finger tips curled underneath their knuckles for protection.

https://youtu.be/cV0c7qiNjuI?t=1m56s

benihana• 11 years ago

Which is a perfect example of the fact that 'most commonly arrived at conclusion' doesn't always mean [other adjective] (best, safest, fastest, most efficient) conclusion.

jessriedel• 11 years ago

If I had to pick a direction that that chef is holding the carrot from, it's "top".

Retra• 11 years ago

Now you're talking about uncommon sense.

e40• 11 years ago

I've been thinking a lot about this lately, because some people in my life are exhibiting a great lack of common sense.

I think common sense is the ability to correctly prioritize possible solutions to problems, or to prioritize desires vs needs vs abilities.

I often see people incorrectly prioritize solutions because they let their emotion and desires get in the way. When this happens, usually something bad happens and the person making the decision gets exasperated. Do they look to the root cause (their incorrect priorities)? Never. They always find an external cause or ignore the failure.

It's incredibly frustrating to watch this happen in someone else.

fapjacks• 11 years ago

I can see where you're going with this and can agree with it, but feel like it's an incomplete definition. To use a quote (I think by Einstein, but I'm lazy and not looking it up): "Common sense is what tells you the Earth is flat." And it's true, this is "common sense", but it doesn't abide by your definition.

delinka2• 11 years ago

Not sure about the UK, but in my neck of the woods here in the US, "common sense" refers to not being physically reckless, especially toward others. I understand that politicians like to co-opt terminology for themselves. Let's blame the politicians, not 'proper' vocabulary.

vezzy-fnord• 11 years ago

I think that's the "Golden Rule". Either way, your definition of "common sense" isn't particularly common, and whether it even makes sense has long been the subject of debates in ethics.

delinka2• 11 years ago

Human language is ambiguous. As it has been since it was invented. And people abuse this ambiguity to further their interests.

Ultimately, that's my point. Are there any colloquialisms that everyone would agree can have only a single definition?

markvdb• 11 years ago

Nazi Germany used the term "gesundes Volksempfinden", not only as a part of its internal propaganda, but even as a legal principle.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesundes_Volksempfinden

(Sorry, I couldn't find a relevant wikipedia article about it in English.)

AdieuToLogic3• 11 years ago

Pretty quick on that Godwin's Law[1] trigger man...

1 - http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/godwins-law

api• 11 years ago

Common sense is optimization of decision making with heuristics and data compression. It comes at a cost-- cognitive biases, illusions, etc.-- but imagine trying to function in the world if you had to reason through and empirically test each decision.

"Will that lion eat me? How should I construct a study to AAAAAhhhh!!!"

In common use the term is also used to refer to intuition, which is something else. Intuition is also a bit of a sloppy term but mostly reveals to massively parallel so-called "right brain" modes of cognition that rely heavily on huge scale pattern recognition instead of linear paths of logic.

meerita• 11 years ago

I really loved to read "Everything is Obvious" (once you know the answer) book. http://everythingisobvious.com/the-book/

synesso• 11 years ago

This is a pet hate of mine too. When I hear this phrase I'm automatically inclined to disagree. I mentally hear it as "I'm not prepared to think enough".

TheLoneWolfling• 11 years ago

What on Earth does this website do to scrolling, and how can I stop it?

JesperRavn• 11 years ago

There are some things that there is no reliable scientific data on. Almost any argument is going to rely on these things in some way. E.g. Black people commit much more crime per capita than White people. Some people might consider it common sense that no amount of discrimination by the justice system could account for such a gap. Other people might say the opposite: there is so much specific evidence of discrimination that we should expect the overall system to be extremely biased.

Sure, specific studies might fill the gap, but more questions will be raised about the details of those studies, and the cycle continues.

While we should use all available evidence, at the end of the day we need more information than object evidence can provide, in order to form opinions about important topics.

captaincrowbar• 11 years ago

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein

Animats2• 11 years ago

Important question, weak article.

"Common sense" used to be a term used often in AI research, although seldom implemented. Collecting large numbers of factoids has been done (see Cyc and ConceptNet). That didn't lead to common sense, although it helps some quesion-answering systems.

A useful working definition is that common sense is the predictive capability needed to get through the next seconds to a minute of life. This is what you need to not fall down, get hit by moving objects, and avoid predators. If you can't manage that, life will be short. It's a basic function of animal behavior.

Not enough has been done in that area. It's essential for robots. Google's self-driving cars have something like that, trying to predict what other cars are going to do in the immediate future.

One way to work on this problem is to have a system that looks at movie clips, and is asked to predict what happens next. It can, of course, be trained by looking at what does happen next. Image analysis is now far enough along to attempt this. Anyone doing that in recent years?

AdieuToLogic3• 11 years ago

Interesting take on a vague and, IMHO, insoluble question due to its intrinsic subjectivity based on an agent's previous exposure to its observable world.

Continuing along an AI theme, wouldn't "common sense" be closer to the choices selected from the belief network developed by an agent's percepts over time?

kev6168• 11 years ago

Common sense is the unsolicited opinion offered by a bystander, usually in hindsight and starting with the phrase "It's common sense that ..."

afarrell• 11 years ago

As someone who worked on Open Mind Common Sense as a freshman, I should warn y'all that it accepted submissions from random people on the Internet and so contains many statements that are patently ridiculous.