What are some examples of 'common sense' which are nonsense?
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.
This is a common argument in our house.
In Germany, people are very concerned about Zugluft, i.e. draft from opening multiple windows.
Not on a train?
I've been hearing it for years, always argued against it.
If "common sense is not very common", why is it called common sense?
Slightly off topic, sorry.
When people say that, they mean they're so much smarter than everyone else they could fix it all in a moment.
Of course, in reality, the cranky old man saying that has just stayed so uninformed about the issues he doesn't know what he doesn't know.
"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.
That's more of an turn-of-phrase, no?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Don’t eat snow to rehydrate yourself. It will only make you freeze to death faster. Melt the snow outside of your body first.
Wait, how does that work? It seems like it should take the same energy to melt it either way.
Also, do people not know every berry isn't edible? Even here where not a lot grows, there's plenty of decorative ones around that will give you the violent shits.
Ideally you'd use an external heat source to melt the snow so you're not wasting your body heat on it (it's also generally a good idea to boil water of unknown quality before drinking it to reduce the risk of getting sick, which would be especially bad if you're lost in the wilderness). Failing that, I've also heard people recommend filling a water bottle with snow and putting it in between the layers of clothing you're wearing so it's not directly touching your skin, that way you don't lose a bunch of heat really quickly.
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)
The best way to actually figure out directions is to learn how the sky works. It's not complicated, really - stars stay in the same place, the sun and moon slowly move along the ecliptic (a specific big circle), and it all spins around the poles with the time of day.
Although, I've heard you actually can use moss for packing wounds, since it's pretty absorbent.
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 Westerners, 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.
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)
'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 reduce induce 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.
In the case of inverter air conditioning it might make a small difference at it won't throttle down as it approaches the intended, not commanded, target.
that putting the thermostat up higher will heat the house up quicker
If you have a 2 stage furnace, this may actually be a thing.
that your base metabolic rate slows as you age and is primarily responsible for you putting weight on in middle age
Is this not true?
No. At least, it's not the general cause of 'middle age spread'.
The base metabolic rate refers to how your individual cells respire when at rest. And a brain cell in 20 year old respires much the same way as a brain cell in a 45 year old. Same for all other organs. There is a gradual decline but it's on the order a single percents.
Organs and tissue at rest respire at different rates, so some of the change people notice is due to change in body composition. Muscle at rest burns twice the calories as fat however this is still only a minor contribution.
Base metabolic rate doesn't vary much at all. The vast difference in daily calories consumed as one ages is general activity level.
Overall metabolic rate = base rate (varies a little on body composition) + calories burned in general activity (varies a lot)
People typically are less active between 20 and 40. This is not just sport but also lifestyle. People become more efficient in their habits as they age. They drive instead of biking or walking. They sit in the sun on holiday with nice food and wine rather than dancing all night. Etc
Lifestyle choice is the primary cause of excess calorie intake and 'middle age spread'. Not "my metabolism that I can't do anything about".
that putting the thermostat up higher will heat the house up quicker
Same with electric range/ovens.
Is this true?? I always assumed that electric ranges simply had a variable duty cycle controlled by the knob. That would mean that if you want to get a pot up to a specific temperature, the fastest way is to set the knob to high until you reach the temperature, then reduce the knob to the desired temperature.
This is different from how an HVAC works, where you set an actual temperature and the HVAC runs until that temperature is reached.
But I could be totally wrong about how electric ranges work.
that the moon's apparent size is due to how close it is to earth (same for seasons and the sun)
Explain?
Also, what's the size/proximity of seasons?
The visual difference of the minimoon and supermoon is not that great, see here but hold your phone at arms length. This is the maximum difference (taken 6 months apart) that the moon ever is relative to itself. In practice, from one night to the next or one month to the next the difference is barely noticeable.
When people say "the moon was huge tonight" what they are generally seeing is the moon illusion
The reference to seasons is badly worded, but what I was referring to is that the earths seasons have nothing to do with how close to the sun it is
Huh, these are all common sense statements I would have assumed true. Four our of four, good work!
- that sugary sweets make kids act "hyper"
Do you happen to have a source for that? Coz I have witnessed kids act like a horde of wild monkeys on crack right after eating dessert on multiple occasions.
I listed it because it's one of the things I would sworn by too having seen it first hand. However when you conduct a double blind experiment, kids still get excited at parties / treats / days out / when their friends are over when there's no sugar in the treats.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/medical-myths-does-sugar-make-children-hyperactive
In otherwords as parents we massively underestimate how excited or crazy kids can get just because they're excited and not because of something in their bloodstream..
Police are there to help you.
They can help you for the rest of your life
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".
"The squeaky wheel gets the grease"
"The nail that sticks out gets hammered down."
Good call, I'll start looking out for these!
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!
there's actually aword for this type of mixed idiom: malaphor
I like saying "we'll burn that bridge when we come to it".
Most people don't catch it.
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.
Way to stop them is put ice over the back of neck, plug nose with tissue and clear clots each 2 mins.
Any reason not to just let it run? If not on blood thinners.
You can let it run.
I find it clots better by using tissues to plug the flow.
Pressing the crosswalk button over and over will make the light change faster.
Well it finally changed the 8th time I pressed it, so checkmate.
Sometimes buttons don't work the first time you press them.
The buttons are intended to be placebo except in some places.
Same goes for most "close door" buttons in elevators btw. 😁
I'm in one of those places. In Utah, many crosswalk lights won't turn on at all unless you press the button, and the button can completely change the light timing and ordering (e.g. a protected left turn light activates at the end of a cycle instead of at the beginning).
Traffic engineers here are sometimes allowed to do some fairly interesting things.
In my experience it's only automated in the cities and most of the lights are manual everywhere else.
I don't have evidence, but I have heard there are also times of day when it's automated and when it's manual. So you might need to press it at midnight but not during rush hour. Interesting if true.
Apparently some are wholly disconnected, but not all, leading to some pedestrians just standing there through multiple traffic cycles because they read a cracked article in 2010 that said the buttom doesn't do anything. Pressing a second time definitely doesn't do anything but provide stress relief though.
Related is elevator close-door buttons. I hold them down for a long time which seems to work well, but for some elevators it doesn't.
Common sense itself.
Some people put way too much stock in "common sense" as some blanket assumption and insult to lob at anything and everything they don't like.
They internally define what they believe to be "common" and everything that deviates is outside of that. They use it to fuel their own sense of self satisfaction and smugness, while additionally fueling negativity and hatred for others.
It fuels their toxicity and comes to define their view of everything, which is typically grossly oversimplified for their own needs.
Precisely.
Is common sense just an earlier, naive label for confirmation bias?
A key aspect is that it doesn't even require confirmation.
The harder it is to pull a bow, the faster the arrows.
Isn't that true, all other things being equal?
Depends.
Compound bows are designed such that you put in a LOT of energy where your mechanical advantage is high (at the start of the draw) then less as your mechanical advantage diminishes (at the end of the draw).
This makes the bow very "light" to pull and easy to hold drawn, but the energy with which the arrow will be fired is higher than almost any other design, save some cross-bows.
In a traditional long bow yes. In a modern compound bow, not necessarily.
If everything is equal, the arrow gets out of tune. If you tune the arrow it becomes heavier.
"Bigger is better"
“Survival of the fittest”
bitch, explain cows
Cows are the most fit for their environment. Their environment being a useful and sustainable food source for humans to cultivate.
In all of my ecology classes they were super specific about re-framing that concept as "survival of the fit enough"
You don't actually have to be the best example of something to have your traits carried along, just good enough to consistently make it to reproductive age and then procreate.
It helps explain a lot of weird survival mechanisms - it doesn't have to be the best way to do things but if it consistently works, then it's good enough. Like the old saying "if it's stupid, but it works, then it's not stupid"
Fittest for the purpose of being chosen by farmers to participate in breeding.
Lol a better example would be "bitch, explain humans" we're the biggest anomaly to this statement. In ecology we refer to our evolutionary perseverance as "survival of the collaborative"
Bulls seem like they are capable of herd defense, they are kept isolated for a reason. Same with roosters and chickens.
Cows are not a natural species
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.
Is the goal to point out contradictions in the pairs you gave?
the sky is blue
an unbiased perspective
More abstract concepts that generally trouble the intuition of many:
the irrelevance of laminar to turbulent flow
time and gravity are related
magnetism is not magic
entropy precludes perpetual motion
The sky isn't blue in many cultures. It's been shown that words for blue only occur in a language after that culture has discovered a blue dye. And that limitation in available words also constrains how you see and think about the world.
This is covered in Guy Deutscher's book The Unfolding of Language, which is an excellent read.
I was going with Rayleigh scattering, but that works too
The sky is actually the entire colour spectrum with a bias toward the short wavelength end of the spectrum, which is why it appears pale blue-ish white.
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.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?
That means you ahould take the immesiate payoff or be happy with what you have instead of spensing a bunch of time trying to get more.
it also means don't risk everything you have for a somewhat opaque promise of something better
Hehe ok I'll wear those down votes. I didn't understand the reference as I heard it first on The Two Ronnies as 'a bird in the hand is worth two in the shepherd's bush' which I think think might be a carry-on reference.
I didn't see why l would want a bird in my hand in the first place.
PS - what happened to your D key?
we need more working powers to keep our wealth and our standard of living up. obviously, as things are crumbling around us, this means we don't put in enough effort to maintain things, and more hands would help.
that is a false thought. The labor market is regulated by supply and demand. That means, fewer workers lead to higher wages and a higher quality of life. It might seem paradoxical, but having a smaller workforce means people in the country will be able to afford more stuff.
That is especially important as people discuss the birth-rate, and immigration, in all countries, also in the US and in Europe. People say things such as "women have 1.6 children on average, which means our population is declining, and obviously that is the reason why our quality-of-life seems to be going down as well". However, the opposite is true. As automation takes over and well-paying (and meaningful) jobs are eroded, having fewer people around doing all the work actually drives wages up, and leads to an improved quality-of-life.
The labor market is indeed regulated by that supply and demand. That is a foregone conclusion. However, that doesn't guarantee necessarily higher wages and thus higher quality of life, proportionately speaking.
That itself is a struggle over whether "general profit", after accounting for wages, is reinvested for the social needs, such as housing, food and water, education.
Assuming that "general profit" (savings) + wages (needed for laborers' means of subsistence) = value created.
And assuming wages are sufficient enough for higher quality of life.
But put into the equation the landlords, the shareholders, industrialists that dominate our world by virtue of owning the property that shapes it, who want to depress wages, if it means more "general profit", and direct their savings towards more capital accumulation
