Common sense is a moniker used to get support from those that often do not understand what they are trying solve or worse, have ulterior motives not aligned with what they say they are trying to solve.
Every single “common sense” rational is purely surface level, lacking any nuance, understanding, or depth.
I listen to non-experts cling to the common sense argument as if I want common thinking to govern a solution for truly complex problems.
I don’t go to my doctor or an engineer for common sense solutions EVER.
Why would I ever trust anything or anyone stating common sense rhetoric? I don’t.
Simple and straightforward solutions are not always the same as the common sense schtick yet even then, I am distrustful of any simple solution put forward without proper evidence.
Usually if it “feels” right and seems simple. A red flags goes up. Once someone uses the phrase “common sense” it’s game over.
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The first solution you can think of is always flawed. That’s the rule.
Anytime I hear or read the phrase “common sense” this means I have just identified a person’s political belief system.
So you only go to your doctor hoping they find complex issues with you? Guarantee more times than not your medical issue is a very common thing, and it’s why doctors can diagnose most things easily
A lot of people mistake their reactionary beliefs for common sense
Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem, that is neat, plausible, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
“It’s common sense!” is definitely an appeal to majority fallacy an awful lot of the time. I have no evidence; just trust me bro.
But sometimes it’s just shorthand. I’m not going to rigorously prove to you that you shouldn’t try to take a selfie with a moose, but you shouldn’t do it.
Yep. Unless you are dealing with the actual simplest of problems, “common sense” often just means “I don’t want to actually think about this…”
Common is a logical fallacy for a reason. That’s because it has absolutely nothing to do with reasoning. There is no actual “sense”. It’s just a way of saying something “feels right” because other people also think it feels right.
People who read one article about a topic and come into a situation with a common sense solution based on it? Always loud and wrong. Always.
I disagree, I consider everything during my day to day. I look at the grander picture and act accordingly.
Common sense to me is to try to accurately predict how whatever is happening can be fixed, while affecting everything else the best way possible.
If they had an argument they would make the argument- that their way is cheaper bc of (facts), that their way is faster bc of (learned experience).
Is there nothing that is common sense then?
Older folks tend to do this a lot. Their common sense is often just ignorance.
“common sense” is one of the many things I’ve heard all my life that i actively avoid saying bc it makes you sound like a shallow tool in most contexts
It’s common sense to wipe your ass after shitting. Anything more complicated than that is too specialized to be a common sense thing.
While this is a thing that does happen (wrapping a poorly thought out idea in the cloak of common sense)…
Overthinking/overdesigning an idea, concept, or thought can produce its own fallacies (making something so complicated, that it can no longer be properly unwrapped and understood by the average person, or where you can use the internal logic of an idea to prove something untrue, such as the use of statistical manipulation).
A complex idea, that can be also explained in simple terms, is usually the right one.
Common sense only applies to common situations, when you encounter a novel issue then you go crying for someone with expertise
Do you see any common sense in what is taking place in America right now?
Common sense just means shit that makes sense as long as you don’t really know what you’re talking about.
absolute, all-or-nothing statements like “any time” and “always short sighted” very often indicate flawed reasoning as well. they certainly don’t allow for the nuance, understanding, and depth you claim to value.
some “common sense” is highly subjective and based on experience and epistemologies you’re taught. other common sense is truly a common experience, without any need to know how or why it’s the case. e.g., what will happen if you drop a ball? it’ll fall down. do you need to understand gravitational force to know that?
I agree with your general point that people should be able to explain their actual reasoning in a lot of domains, but some things are actually common sense without necessarily knowing why, and generalizations are a kind of simplified thinking that can be similarly dangerous.
I agree a lot of the time but I don’t think this is always true.
To me, “common sense” is a less fancy way of saying “intuition.” It is important to listen to your intuition, while recognizing it can be wrong.
When you’re coming up with a technical solution to a hard problem it does help to step back occasionally from the details and look at the big picture and do a gut check on whether it makes sense. Like, “we just re-invented something that already exists,” or “we can bypass these three complicated steps with something much easier,” or “it shouldn’t be taking ten minutes to verify a user login, something is wrong.” If your intuition tells you something is wrong, it often is.
And for many everyday problems, people have enough experience with the world that their intuition is pretty good. So like, “This person claiming to be a Nigerian prince probably is not going to give me a lot of money,” is an intuition you build up based on just living in the real world. I would call not responding to a spam email a good application of common sense.
However, yeah when you are dealing with something very technical and someone who isn’t an expert uses their intuition, they will often have a bad intuition and get it wrong (and honestly even experts have the wrong intuition all the time). And when people double down and refuse to admit their first impression was wrong, that makes everything worse.
Common sense is not that common.
Not sure where that phrase comes from, but I have started saying it any time someone uses “common sense” as a solution for a process gap or something. I HATE the concept of “common sense”.
The problem is that what is common for one person is not common for another. Different people think differently, especially when you take culture, language, education and history into account. It’s common sense to wash your hands after the bathroom, but it wasn’t before germ theory was understood. Some places put signs in public bathrooms to not put feet on the seat because in other areas of the world standing floor toilets are more common. American toilet stall doors have a giant gap at the floor that many Europeans think is barbaric and common sense dictate privacy.
Not sure why all my common sense examples are bathroom related, but that is one of the experiences every mammal has had throughout history, so finding common ground should be easy and it’s clearly not.