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"common sense" is common sense because it is not "specialised sense" or "expert sense" So if politicians base their decisions on "common sense", they confess t
by i5heu 1mo ago
"common sense" is common sense because it is not "specialised sense" or "expert sense"
So if politicians base their decisions on "common sense", they confess to not being able to use experts that refine their knowledge and position about a topic.
A "common sense" strategy is therefore what is most popular and on the basis of the understanding of laymen without deeper understanding or knowledge.
- scotty79 1mo agoCommon sense is the sense of commoners. The entirity of science if a fight against common sense. In Poland the closest phrase to "common sense" is "na chłopski rozum" which means "according to villager's mind/smarts".
- dspillett 1mo agoA significant part of science is plucking the true bits from common sense. A fair chunk of what we call medicine is folk remedies that stood up to rigorous testing.
- teamonkey 1mo agoYes, but the testing bit is what makes it a scientifically-proven method and not a folk remedy. There are also a lot of folk remedies that have been disproven as medicine. They too were ‘common sense.’
- ToucanLoucan 1mo ago> There are also a lot of folk remedies that have been disproven as medicine. They too were ‘common sense.’ "You know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine." - Tim Minchin
- perpetuallunch 1mo agoModern medicine is dominated by very new ideas and technologies. Gene therapies, targeted cancer treatments, blood pressure medication, antibiotics, surgery, joint replacements, sterile practices, vaccines, hormone replacement therapies.
- wavemode 1mo agoCurious what you mean by this. There is very, very little medical knowledge today that aligns with historical folk wisdom. (Even simple things like "an apple a day" - apples are fine, but foods like berries, kiwis and avocados tend to have both lower sugar and much higher nutritional content.)
- latch 1mo ago"common sense" is common sense because it is the "sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts" (1). Maybe what you meant to say is that the position isn't, in fact, "common sense", that it is neither sound or prudent? (1) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/common%20sense https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/common%20sense
- LodeOfCode 1mo agoKeyword being "simple". The common sense solution often turns out to be unsound based on a more detailed perception of the situation
- XorNot 1mo agoi.e. "every complicated problem has a solution which is simple, elegant and wrong"
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- fuzzfactor 1mo agoOh yes, "sound" and "prudent" haven't been in the ballpark nearly as often as they used to be :( The dictionary definition is in spite of the fact that the phrase "common sense" is more often than ever being used to rebrand what was formerly known as "common lack of sense". They wouldn't say it if it wasn't false :\
- StilesCrisis 1mo agoIn politics, "common sense" just means that they don't have a real justification. You can just apply it to anything and your base will accept it.
- einpoklum 1mo ago> don't have a real justification. Oh, but the ju$tifi¢ation is all too real for having that kind of "common sense".
- jp191919 1mo agoI see this all the time with "common sense" gun control.
- StilesCrisis 1mo agoAnytime I see "common sense" adjacent to politics, it's a dodge. It's for issues that pander to their base or where they're just getting bribed. If there's a better reason, they'd say it.
- bs38 1mo agoYou dont need deeper understanding of knowledge for everything. Ask Grandma whether she needs a chemical engineering degree to bake apple pie. Then there is the Theory of Bounded Rationality which tells us expertise may exist but resources, time, energy, info, attention etc etc may not therefore bounds and limits of expertise alone must be recognized and solutions reached are satisficable rather than optimal. Aiming for optima when other factors havent been sorted just creates new problems.
- PurpleRamen 1mo ago> Ask Grandma whether she needs a chemical engineering degree to bake apple pie. Grandma doesn't bake with "common sense", she is using the specialized knowledge of cooking & baking.
- Borrible 1mo ago[flagged]
- ToucanLoucan 1mo ago> You dont need deeper understanding of knowledge for everything. Ask Grandma whether she needs a chemical engineering degree to bake apple pie. You've clearly never baked before. Baking is a chemical science. You have to adjust temperatures for your freaking elevation relative to sea level. Granted some recipes are pretty forgiving, sure, but far from all, and some are downright merciless in terms of complexity and effort required. Even people who do it constantly have items that just don't turn out because it's legitimately hard shit.
- Eldt 1mo agoYou seem to have conflated a chemical engineering degree with the concept of baking being a chemical process
- halostatue 1mo agoNo, but baking is still a process that requires skill — and that skill is not 'common sense'. If making sourdough were 'common sense' then _everyone could do it correctly on their first try_. They don't. Most fail and never try again because the skill level required for sourdough is too high. I'm an _expert_ cook, but I'm still having to go through the frequent failures of learning how to pickle with brine (fortunately, my failures have been mostly edible and have not turned moldy). Even vinegar pickling requires a certain level of expertise before you can do it successfully, even though that level of expertise is _roughly_ "knowing how to boil water".
- blaze33 1mo agoFor at least a few years, "common sense" has been hijacked by populist politicians, now it just means whatever simplistic idea that fits their worldview, even when it's not complicated to see that said idea is clearly misguided. The original meaning seems lost to me.
- bitmasher9 1mo agoFurthermore, using the phrase “common sense” to describe an idea inherently dismisses any individual that will argue against it. They either are too dumb to have common sense, or too much of an elite to have common sense.
- RobotToaster 1mo agoIt's basically become a thought terminating cliche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
- icantevenhold 1mo agoIt is what it is
- jakeydus 1mo agoI think you care way too much about this topic.
- reactordev 1mo agoThis is the word smithing they are known for. By labeling “common sense” means anyone who argues against it is against “common sense” because every argument is a strawman argument.
- ben_w 1mo agoAlways meant that, so far as I can see.
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- smolder 1mo ago"Common sense" might also mean "do the simple thing" which, given how cheap it is to invest in renewable energy sources like solar farms, and how much room we have to build daytime capacity that way without large scale storage, might mean installing a lot more solar. Don't pretend the current US admin is anything but corrupt and stupid.
- throwaway173738 1mo agoDon’t overthink it. Burgum means “don’t disagree with me I’m always right” when he says it.
- perpetuallunch 1mo agoDay time. And what of the night? Freeze in the dark.
- andrecarini 1mo ago> And what of the night? Nuclear.
- bryanlarsen 1mo agoNight can be handled by whatever currently handles day time generation, be it nuclear, natural gas, hydro, whatever.
- benj111 1mo agoWind, hydro, some kind of storage? Nuclear? Gas and coal peaked plants? We can at least plan for an eventuality that is likely to happen. How much planning is/was there when gas suddenly gets cut off?
- freeone3000 1mo agoBatteries. Or pumped storage. Or lifting a really heavy thing and letting it fall slowly. Or retaining an amount of fossil fuel capacity to be turned on during peak consumption and sun and wind dips while still focusing on renewables and storage with the goal to reduce the duty cycle of peaker plants to zero.
- xtiansimon 1mo ago> “… without deeper understanding or knowledge.” Ha! Like the common sense to dam migratory river systems to make hydroelectric power. Good idea at the time, and who cares about salmon. I have a toaster, and a percolator, and a new fangled “ice” box (formerly chilled by ice, now a maker of ice). S/ My common sense says 1.2B compensation to not do something we otherwise need is bananas as opposed to the common sense—pound salt response. Good thing I’m not in government, yeah. /s
- u02sgb 1mo agoWe have a hydroelectric dam near us with a salmon leap next to it. Good visitor attraction too. It'll provide power for decades with little maintenance and not much further in the way of environmental issues now that it's built.
- perpetuallunch 1mo agoDams are subject to silt buildup up, which requires maintenance. They’re so destructive to local ecosystems that environmental groups have blocked any new hydroelectric dams being built in Australia for over 40 years. All modern concrete eventually fails, and dams are notoriously difficult to remove and replace. Fortunately they last long enough that if you paint them pink and plug a torch battery in to them they can remain somebody else’s problem for quite some time.
- perpetuallunch 1mo agoBut it’s not $1.2 billion people to do the thing. It’s only $1.2 billion to not do the thing. To do the thing would require paying the original contracted amount. Whatever that might have been. Melbourne, well Victoria the whole state, is looking at a similar scenario for rail tunnels many believe serve little purpose. Around $1.2 billion to stop the work now and pay the early termination penalty. Plus maybe another billion (estimated, who really knows) to bury the tunnel boring machines and remediation work. Or something like $200 billion to complete the work and operate the rail network over some number of probably too many decades. Although this number seems to increase at a regular cadence. A new road tunnel was recently completed and people who use it often report they are the only vehicle in the tunnel. Meanwhile our roads haven’t been maintained in a decade and are literally falling apart. It’s not uncommon to hear reports of multiple cars being recovered after suspension and wheel damage from the same section of poorly maintained road in one day. All of this in a political and economic setting so corrupt the now former state Labor Premier came out and admitted knowledge of a criminal element having infiltrated the union that represents the workers on the projects. She was recently replaced with her deputy. As if that helps. Electricity prices have also increased by something like 150 to 200 percent more than inflation over the past 20 years but mostly the past 6 years (so this decade) because state and federal governments seem to want to insist on ramming Net Zero down our power lines, yet we export around the same amount of gas as Qatar. And we have the worlds largest know uranium deposit and yet we have a ban on nuclear power reactors. Please explain?
- gadders 1mo agoThere will always be a place for common sense - the Greeks used to call it phronesis or "practical wisdom". You also need to distinguish between expert opinion and elite opinion. The two are not the same.
- pibaker 1mo agoIn practice "common sense" just means "things I learned from public TV when I was ten and never bothered to learn more about." Renewable used to be more expensive but that hasn't been the case for almost a decade. But you still see people, even on this "news" site for technologically curious people, claim that fossil fuel is the "obvious" cheap option.