3/22/2023 0 Comments Wordor a common sense idea![]() Simply put, that’s not what common sense is for. Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but what you were doing in most of these cases was nothing short of ridiculous: applying your common sense to talk about problems such as these is as wrong as applying nail polish to your eyes. What about every single discussion you’ve had about politics, or economics, or the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the healthcare plan? Well, practically every problem which involves us “anticipating or managing the behavior of large numbers of people, in situations that are distant from us either in time or space.” What kind of problems are we talking about? However, when we use common sense to solve problems that are not grounded in “the immediate here and now of everyday life”-that’s when we’re bound to make serious mistakes. Watts is not talking about day-to-day situations: everyday life, he says, is effectively broken up into small problems, grounded in very specific contexts, and in cases such as these, using your common sense is quite harmless, even beneficial. Of course, if something is a grab bag of logically inconsistent beliefs, and if that grab bag is carried by virtually every human on this planet, then we’re bound to misuse it-and it seems, we do this quite often. “Common sense,” he concludes, “is not so much a worldview as a grab bag of logically inconsistent, often contradictory beliefs, each of which seems right at the time but carries no guarantee of being right any other time.” The Misuse of Common Sense But because we never specify the conditions under which one aphorism applies versus another, we have no way of describing what it is that we really think or why we think it.” ![]() “Of course,” notes Watts, “it is not necessarily the case that these beliefs are contradictory-because we invoke different aphorisms in different circumstances. Look before you leap, but, then again, he who hesitates is lost. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight is out of mind. Interestingly enough, as sociologists are fond of pointing out pretty often, many of these aphorisms appear to be direct contradictions of each other.įor example, birds of a feather flock together, but opposites attract. It is what lies buried inside proverbs, aphorisms, and saying-you know, the obvious thing. In practical terms, it is what tells you to not go to work without your pants on, or, say, cheat your trusting friend out of his money. ![]() “Roughly speaking,” informs us Watts, common sense “is the loosely organized set of facts, observations, experiences, insights, and pieces of received wisdom that each of us accumulates over a lifetime, in the course of encountering, dealing with, and learning from, everyday situations.” And just like many ordinary things which are around us all the time-like, say, time itself-it is also pretty difficult to define it. “Common sense is so ordinary that we tend to notice it only when it’s missing,” notes Duncan James Watts in the first chapter of Everything Is Obvious. Everything is Obvious Summary PART I COMMON SENSE CHAPTER 1 The Myth of Common Sense What Is Common Sense? You’ll enjoy it very much if you like to read about biases and prejudices, about human behavior and the problems with future predictions. ![]() Who Should Read “Everything is Obvious”? And Why?ĭrawing on the very latest findings in the social sciences, Everything Is Obvious reveals some things which, as its blurb states, have “important implications in politics, business, and marketing, as well as in science and everyday life.”Ĭonsequently, it is not an exaggeration to say that this book is for everyone. ![]()
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