It's Just Common Sense

Nothing lets me know more quickly that someone and I have next to nothing in common than when s/he harrumphs, "Can you believe he said/ate/asked/did that?...Why, it's just common sense!" This outraged tag phrase separates the dull from the rest of us with lightning speed. I may admire many abilities of people fond of invoking the idea of common sense, but intelligence will not be one of them.

The way I see it, there are two main kinds of people walking around: those who are baffled and awed by the universe most of the time and those who are dead wrong fifty times more often than they'll ever find out. I envy the latter sometimes. How comfy it must be to be able to believe that predictable sense exists in any great supply. I don't know about you, but the more I find out about how things actually work, the more hyper and uncertain I become. How much more soundly I could sleep if I didn't know that chickens match their eggs to their earlobes! (See below.)

When I tried to blow the mind of the one thoroughly sensible person I know by telling her about shrimp being responsible for flamingos' pink she said, "Well, that seems to make sense." "Do blue jays only eat blueberries? Do cardinals only eat tomatoes?" I asked.

It's one thing to accept things as they are presented to you; some good may inadvertently come to you and yours if only by virtue of being this easygoing and agreeable, and hey, we all have to take massive amounts of secondhand information for granted before we can even get out of bed in the morning. I think it's a much more pernicious thing, however, to confidently extrapolate a multitude of unproved implications from a fistful of isolated facts. This seems to me very foolish, but you need only read about any popular crusade to see this approach is favoured all the time.

I wonder about Occam's Razor sometimes. I understand that reducing the number of variables up for consideration may lower the odds of a person being led astray of the truth by irrelevancies, but why should the simplest explanation be favoured on principle when there are so many first principles still to be discovered and when so many phenomena aren't simple or obvious in the least? If you hope to sculpt sound theory with Occam's Razor, you'd better hope you're only one step away from cracking the whole code when you start shaving.