Wikipedia defines common sense as “knowledge, judgement, and taste which is more or less universal and which is held more or less without reflection or argument”
Try to avoid using this topic to express niche or unpopular opinions (they’re a dime a dozen) but instead consider provable intuitive facts.
Cold Air will make you sick.
There are plenty of studies debunking it, and yet I still hear about it all the time.
“There’s a first time for everything.”
No, not if I don’t do that thing. I will not have a first time for murder. Getting murdered might be out of my control, but I won’t commit one.
To tilt your head back if you have a blood nose.
This is no longer recommended advice, because you end up drinking the blood which causes vomiting.
- Probably initially said by someone concerned about their carpet.
Way to stop them is put ice over the back of neck, plug nose with tissue and clear clots each 2 mins.
Common sense isn’t just “not so common,” it is a fundamentally broken concept at its core and a crutch that people use to hoist themselves above others they feel they are better than.
The most vulnerable will be hit the hardest.
- Countries are rich because they have free markets.
- Tariffs are a good thing and competition is for losers.
- No one deserves a handout, as money should be earned.
- Large companies deserve a giant economic stimilus, because if we don’t, our economy will crash.
- Being spied upon by your government or foreign governments whom I worship is okay, because I’ve got nothing to hide.
- Outsiders that sells goods that can be used to spy obviously and should be barred from all markets forever because they’ll definitely spy on you and spying is wrong.
- If you feel threatened by another country, a pre-emptive strike should be allowed.
- You don’t mess with the sovereignty of a nation. It’s sacred and should be left intact.
- Police should always be allowed to use overwhelming force and their actions should be lauded
- You should have the right to protect yourself using firearms against tyranny as governments in general are never to be trusted.
A lot of outdoor survival “common sense” can get you killed:
Moss doesn’t exclusively grow on the north side of trees. Local conditions are too chaotic and affect what side is most conducive to moss. Don’t use moss for navigation.
Don’t drink alcohol to warm yourself up. It feels warm but actually does the opposite: alcohol opens up your capillaries and allows more heat to escape through your skin, which means you lose body heat a lot faster.
Don’t eat snow to rehydrate yourself. It will only make you freeze to death faster. Melt the snow outside of your body first.
Don’t assume a berry is safe to eat just because you see birds eating them. You’re not a bird. Your digestive system is very different from a bird’s digestive system.
If you’ve been starving for a long time, don’t gorge yourself at the first opportunity when you get back to civilization. You can get refeeding syndrome which can kill you. It’s best to go to the hospital where you can be monitored and have nutrients slowly reintroduced in a way that won’t upset the precarious balance your body has found itself in.
Moss doesn’t exclusively grow on the north side of trees.
My brain was like “why do people so desperately need to find moss that it not being on the north side would mean death?” Before remembering many people don’t know which way they are facing (or left and right) usually. (Also, I’m sure I’d do worse in an unfamiliar area)
Is common sense just an earlier, naive label for confirmation bias?
A key aspect is that it doesn’t even require confirmation.
Folk idioms that contradict each other are my favourite. For example, “the cream rises to the top” vs. “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”.
I like to try and combine these to see what kind of reactions I get.
The cream rises to who you know.
The squeaky wheel gets hammered down.
He who laughs last, comes around.
Great minds killed the cat!“The squeaky wheel gets the grease”
“The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.”
Good call, I’ll start looking out for these!
‘Building more lanes will reduce traffic’ is a classic.
I think it’s just missing a bit of specificity.
Building more bike lanes will reduce traffic. Building more bus lanes will reduce traffic. Building more tram lines will reduce traffic. Building more car lanes will
reduceinduce traffic.Not perfect, but solid logic within reason (Building 100 more bus lanes will reduce traffic).
They enlarged rt 3 near rt 95 in MA many years ago. It was getting backed up due to all of the people moving further out from Boston. I said “It will be full again in a few years.” Yup. It was moving well for a few years so everyone piled into that area because the commute was better and within a few years it was a traffic jam again.
Of course! Our society couldn’t have multiple moving parts, could it?
And honestly, that’s a great example of the shortcomings of “common sense”. What people mean when they say there’s not enough common sense is that the people who aren’t “common” (like them) must all be stupid. In reality, pretty much everyone in every position is doing exactly what anyone would, if only they knew the situation.
Police are there to help you.
They can help you for the rest of your life
That budgets for households, businesses, and goverments have much to do with each other
Edit: fixed typo. ‘nd’ to ‘and’.
Hurr durr but the national debt is like a credit card and all debt is bad. China can just say pay up and we’re fucked.
And other stupid shit my parents used to say.
China can just say pay up and we’re fucked.
Yeah, them and what army? (Well, the PLA, but going into MAD and great power military strategy would be too much of a digression)
A classical example of Westerners thinking human laws are laws of physics somehow. I assume, anyway. It’d be weird to hear this from anyone recently imported.
the government can go into unlimited debt if it is willing to cause a hyperinflation at some point later in the future to eliminate all of that debt.
They are more similar than they are different though. The numbers are bigger and the limits aren’t known, but they do exist. Many countries have felt the pain of excessive debt, the arguments that it can’t happen to the US are essentially that the US is a unicorn country.
The US is a unicorn country because the US dollar is the primary currency in the world. If the Euro supplanted the US dollar for that position, then the problems with excessive debt could absolutely happen in the US.
That’s becoming less true year over year though. Excessive debt can make it less attractive as a standard in addition to the growth of both the Euro zone and BRICS.
True enough. And Trump could very well accelerate that with his economic temper tantrums. Still, I don’t know what currency BRICS would settle on; certainly not the ruble, not after Putin cratered the whole country’s economy. The yuan?
What they settle on isn’t too important other than it won’t be the dollar.
Hmm. Business budgets are pretty similar to household budgets.
In government budgets thing do get a little fuzzy, because historically they always run a slight deficit until they fall to war or revolution and “reset”. If it’s a rich country, they can raise taxes whenever they feel like, too, assuming they don’t care about re-election.
Also you can juke a lot of QoL stats through interactions with other countries (for better or worse; having a weak currency could improve employment conditions but make it harder for people to get imported goods, impossible for a household to achieve or even make a meaningful decision on)
Less tax is better.
No saying that taxation as it currently exists it optimal, but any decent assessment of how to improve things requires a lot of nuance that is nearly never considered by most people.
I’m not mad at the huge amount I pay in taxes. I’m mad about what I get in return.
Yeah, that’s fair, for sure, to some degree. For instance large fractions of policing funding should be redirected into various social services, and military spending can get fuck off all together.
But also, wealthier people paying more than an equal share of tax is a good thing too, and provides lots of intangible benefits (e.g. better education systems and fewer people in extreme poverty and desperation leads to lower crime rates)
Nuance is boring, voting and/or complaining is easy.
I mean, people are right about slimy politicians too, but they never seem to consider that it’s them that keeps electing those people.
but they never seem to consider that it’s them that keeps electing those people.
How so?
If one doesn’t vote, a slimy politician still gets elected.
If one does vote, in most elections they can only choose from a small group of people who probably fail to represent them, and even if there is a reasonable option, they probably won’t win the vote anyway.
The system is rigged, when it comes to voting there usually* isn’t a correct option. Our political voice must exist outside of elections.
(I say usually, because a few elections are better than other, but generally speaking at a federal level, it’s slime no matter how you vote)
and even if there is a reasonable option, they probably won’t win the vote anyway.
See, this is it right here. Anyone can run, but nobody can win without being slick and two-faced. The idiot vote is the largest block. If you get involved it’ll be obvious pretty fast.
(I say usually, because a few elections are better than other, but generally speaking at a federal level, it’s slime no matter how you vote)
So, you’re assuming we’re all American here. This applies to every democracy, including my own. In America, add a probably terminal deadlock problem in on top of that.
Pretty much anything related to statistics and probability. People have gut feelings because our minds are really good at finding patterns, but we’re also really good at making up patterns that don’t exist.
The one people probably have most experience with is the gambler’s fallacy. After losing more than expected, people think they’ll now be more likely to win.
I also like the Monty Hall problem and the birthday problem.
The gambler’s fallacy is pretty easy to get, as is the Monty Hall problem if you restate the question as having 100 doors instead of 3. But for the life of me I don’t think I’ll ever have an intuitive understanding of the birthday problem. That one just boggles my mind constantly.
Lemme try my favorite way to explain the birthday problem without getting too mathy:
If you take 23 people, that’s 253 pairs of people to compare (23 people x22 others to pair them with/2 people per pair). That’s a lot of pairs to check and get only unique answers
Really? The birthday problem is a super simple multiplication, you can do it on paper. The only thing you really need to understand is the inversion of probability (
P(A) = 1 - P(not A)).The Monty hall problem… I’ve understood it at times, but every time I come back to it I have to figure it out again, usually with help. That shit is unintuitive.
My favourite explanation of the Monty hall problem is that you probably picked the wrong door as your first choice (because there’s 2/3 chance of it being wrong). Therefore once the third door is removed and you’re given the option to switch you should, because assuming you did pick the wrong door first then the other door has to be the right one
The birthday problem is super easy to understand with puzzles! For example, how does laying out the edges increase the likelihood of a random piece to fit.
One of my favourite pages on wikipedia:
The thing about that is that it’s a little too complete. How can there be both negativity bias and normalcy bias, for example?
To make any sense, you’d need to break it down into a flowchart or algorithm of some kind, that predicts the skew from objectivity based on the situation and personality tendencies.
I think they probably appear in different types of situations, not all at once. And maybe different types of people/thinking are more prone to some than to others.
Exactly. I feel like just listing them out is of limited use because of that.
Related to gambling: being “pot committed”
Pot committed is more a math reality with a small amount of sunk cost fallacy. There’s always a non zero chance someone is bluffing. A 99% chance to lose $11 is better than a 100% chance to lose $10 if you can win $100 on that 1%.
The immune system is strong and defends your body against germs.
The immune system works 100% of 50% of the time. Immunology is the best way to convince someone that it’s a miracle that they’re still alive. Anyways, get vaccinated. Don’t rely on your immune system to figure things out
The immune system is strong and defends your body against germs.
Which is why you should get vaccinated.
Vaccination primes your immune system so it can mount a coordinated response the first time it actually encounters the pathogen.
Yup, vaccination isn’t reinforcements, it’s training. It’s having the other team’s playbook before they even step foot on the field.
Another variation of that is claiming how getting sick repeatedly is somehow beneficial for getting a strong immune system. That ignores research, as children who have a lot of common infections early in life have higher risk of moderate to severe infections and antibiotic use throughout childhood. That also ignores viruses for which a durable immunity isn’t currently possible, such as COVID.
EDIT: Basically the immunity system doesn’t work like a muscle.
EDIT: Basically the immunity system doesn’t work like a muscle.
I think the immune system can be likened to a muscle if someone really wants to go with that metaphor, but only if you consider vaccines to be the gym and getting sick is uncontrollable and dangerous physical exertion. So, wanting to develop natural immunity is like wanting to get into street fights to build arm strength. It might kinda work, but you’ll also be in a lot of unnecessary danger.
For real.
Looking up how almost any potentially deadly disease attacks a human body just makes you go “how tf do you beat that”.
The answer is usually just “your immune systems kills it faster than it kills you” and that ain’t some sure-fire defense. It’s a straight up microbiological war happening inside you.
And your body is the “collateral damage” in that war.
Don’t rely on your immune system to figure things out
… in time to keep you alive. I mean, given enough time, the body will figure things out. Vaccines are cheat-sheets to cut that time so it’s accomplished before the host dies.
Or overreact, and kill you that way. Viral fevers, allergies and septic shock are all examples.
Evolution is not a human designer. It’s produces an endless pile of kludges that ends up working well enough. Although, in some ways that’s even more impressive.
Umm, it’s your immune system that detects the vaccine and responds to it by developing antibodies specific to the vaccine (and by extension to the actual disease). Just as it would when challenged in real life by the pathogen.
Vaccination basically gives your immune system a several day head start on producing antibodies.
Not entirely true. Vaccines induce the adaptive immune system, which is slow but precise. Getting sick for real induces the innate immune system, which is god awful and you should not be relying on it. S. pneumoniae causes pneumonia because the innate immune system goes overdrive and kills you before it kills the bacteria. COVID-19 induces cell-innate inflammasome activation and leads to a cytokine storm, which then leads to even more damage to the lungs as the immune cells come in. Both diseases have effective vaccines that do not do anything close to this.
Deadly diseases tend to be deadly not because of the microbe itself, but because the innate immune system overreacts and kills you in the process of fighting off the disease.
Getting vaccinated diminishes the role that the innate immune system plays when you get sick, since the B cells responsible for producing antibodies for the disease are already mature. Having available antibodies also allows the immune system to rely on the complement system, which allows it to detect and kill invading microbes way earlier than otherwise.
No.
Getting sick without already being immune leaves your body trying to speed-run anti-body development, while ALSO fighting the disease using more basic physiological responses.
And even with anti-bodies, you’re not actually impervious. You can still get sick with diseases you’re “immune” to, as even deployment of disease-specific anti-bodies is a complex biological process that can go wrong, come too late, or not be enough.
Given time, a person can develop “immunity” against a lot of stuff, but that still doesn’t mean every cell in your body is then changed in a way where that pathogen just bounces off.
You see this most recently with Covid, as people who are vaccinated still get infections, but unlike with unvaccinated people, the body fights it off in a couple days, rather than a few weeks.
But it does still takes those couple days for the latent immunity to kick in, and for the body to deploy that defense.
Another person already commented on how different components of the immune system respond differently, and might even be what kills you faster than the disease.
This is actually good common sense. It works much more than 50% of the time. You’re responding to the very specific instance of anti-vaxxers, whose claims of relying on the immune system instead of vaccines are not considered common sense by most people.
No, I’m responding to regular people. Your immune system is way less effective than you think, hence the wrong common sense part.
I view it as a thought terminating cliché people use when they’re too lazy ti fully explain themselves. It can be useful for things that are truly obvious, like if you try touching something fresh out of the stove without protection you’ll get burned, it doesn’t really add anything to bother explaining it.
