Common Sense

Ah, I do love 'common sense'. I especially enjoy it when one person harrangues another with the words, "have some common sense!", or "don't you have any common sense?" Fun times.

But, what exactly is common sense? Presumably, it must be some sort of sense that is, in some way, common.

Now, if a common sense is to be developed, it must be borne out of our experiences, as we pick up a set of facts and trivia, and use them to develop best practices to deal with the world. But, of course, everyone has a different set of experiences, which means each person will learn different facts and trivia, and so develop different practices. That's just common sense.

Fortunately, though, there is something that will bridge the gap between a person's 'unique sense' to a truly 'common sense' - and that is an intuitive grasp of how things work. Push that button, and this happens, eat that and get food poisoning, and so forth.

So, that's that, then? Well, no.

There are two significant problems with such an intuitive grasp. The first is that it simply doesn't work with complex systems. Push this button, and that might happen, but not if it's too hot, too cold, or a Thursday, and only if you ask nicely. But that's okay, because how many complex systems are there out there? Well, the population of the world is somewhere in excess of 6.6 billion, so that's quite a lot, and doesn't even include such things as the weather...

And even if we restrict our thinking to things that are not complex systems, we don't have to go very far at all in maths, physics or probability before it becomes increasingly apparent that many things are simply counter-intuitive. In other words, using intuition to understand 'how things work', and thus bridge the gap between 'unique sense' and 'common sense' just won't work.

Actually, what people who complain about others lacking common sense are generally saying is, "I knew X, and I assumed that you knew X as well, where plainly you did not until now. Therefore, rather than admit my error, I'm going to belittle your intelligence." It annoys me just a little.