Makes sense. I agree.

I will use my common sense without saying it out loud because people in the political discourse have ruined it for us.

I guess that makes three (you, your professor and me) who don’t use the term “common sense.” Great comment!

Another way to look at the notion of “common sense” is that for most people most of the time, the ideas we put in that category are those that we will not allow to be disproven. Not to get into a religious argument, but devout Catholics believe firmly in the Holy Trinity. They didn’t dream this up themselves: people who they hold in deep respect TOLD them this Trinity exists, and it has been part of their belief system so long that it takes on the form of reality. But to anyone not raised in that tradition, this notion is laughable. Both sides lean on common sense to bolster their arguments. Both sides can’t be right, yet they hold onto their opposing views as “common sense”.

There must be people who think it is “common sense” to force people to take off their shoes before boarding an airplane because ONE person tried to bring a bomb aboard that way (or else why has it gone on this long?). Then there are those of us who are inclined to believe the entire effort is based on rubbish thinking. Both sides rely on un-provable “common sense”.

Such is the reason our Founders gave us representative government instead of a true democracy. Imagine the worsening of our worries had that been the case.

What we need is uncommon sense, a rare commodity in a nation of PC-driven lemmings.

I read your blog entry. I think that here’s a lot of room on a continuum beginning with behaviors and reactions derived from pure instinct and ending with how velocity vector addition works or how time “flows” in a strong gravitational well. I think that somewhere on that continuum rests “common sense” and it is indeed “common” and not the domain of “belief”. There’s a set of “correct” “computations” that our brain performs, that is common to us all and can be called truly shared, except in the case of a malfunctioning organ. If you can’t carry 10 bricks at once you won’t be able to carry 20. If jumping from a 20 feet tall ledge hurts once, it will hurt when you do it again, and doing so from a 100 foot one will hurt at least as much. Reaching for the bird on top of the tree 300 feet way with your hand won’t get you dinner that night. 20 ant bites are worse than one bite. The addition of small integers seems “common sense”, though I might be wrong there. Suspending a hammock to spider web will get you bump on the head. A linear relationship between a dependent and independent variable seems common sense, i.e. two cows will give me twice the milk, two dogs will guard me against twice as many wolves, etc. I don’t think those things are beliefs, I think they are “common sense” derived from an interpretation that our brain makes of nature and its laws by virtue of its ability to do math outside a formal context.

I agree with you that when applied to complex situations it can often fail (i.e. do our brains have a “feel” on exponential or factorial growth, there is more than one type of infinity [aleph-naught, aleph-one, etc], life or crystal growth are not anti-entropic), but we shouldn’t dismiss it altogether, even in politics. More taxes means less money in my pocket, a lower minimum wage means lower wages for a minimum wage worker, no job for me means less money for me, no healthcare for me means more pain and possibly worse, in a world of finite resources some will run out at some point in time, etc.