A few questions about Truthiness

First, how many people here laugh along at the people Colbert is satirising? The people who go by gut instead of facts?

Second, how many of those people hold common sense to be one of the more important things to base things off of?

Third, what's the difference?

Yo.

Yo.

It depends on your definition of common sense, which you've left exceptionally vague. The textbook definition of Common Sense is, "sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts" implying one is capable of making a proper decision based all the information given combined with pre-existing knowledge.

However in your first sentence you bring up more of a "Gut feeling" definition, which I don't think has a textbook definition, but I've always thought of it as more of a "This is the thing I need to do, regardless of any other facts or information.

Common Sense is "There is a cliff to the left of me. If I jump down it, I will most likely die. I don't think I'll do that.

A Gut Feeling is, "There is a cliff next to me. I don't know why, but I have a powerful urge to jump off it, so I should follow that feeling."

The short version of what I'm saying here is your argument needs clarification.

Well wouldn't the difference be that common sense often involves an inclusion of facts while going with your gut goes against that?

Gut feelings are usually emotional, or based on beliefs that we have never examined logically. They are not always a bad thing, but they have no real basis in reality.

Common sense is based on some form of logic. "I will, in all likelyhood, die if I jump off this bridge" vs "Momma told me that god would always protect me, so let's jump!".

The whole "jump off a cliff" thing, how is it determined that jumping off a cliff is a bad thing? Is it based off of learning about what happens to stuff that does so, or just going by what "makes sense"? If it's the latter, that's gut thinking. If the former, I think there is a definition difference again. I'm running off something similar to this:

This also works closer to how I tend to see it used. "It's just common sense" doesn't work with simple "sound judgement"; calls for "common sense solutions" would be pointless if it was just that, since I can't think of anyone who even in a strawman caricature wouldn't want sound judgement.

The way I do see it used is "this is the stuff I feel everyone knows". The "feel" part is key there, and I don't think it's that disputable; how many people call it "common sense" when you're researching something or backing it up with evidence? It's common sense not to jump off a cliff, but that's also very intuitive. If your gut is telling you to jump off a cliff, you are either insane or in some very uncommon situation. "Going from the gut" isn't at all dealing with crazy stuff; we're built to do it. It's just a lot less likely to be accurate than going off of sound research and whatnot.

Not to say that common sense and intuition are useless artifacts; they work fairly well in much of personal situations (the closer to small packs of hunter-gatherer plains life, the more it tends to work) and are usually the only choice if you don't have the time or resources to reason or research something out. They just should be seen as subordinate or backup tools, not the go-to choice for everything.

Jumping off cliffs isn't a bad thing. People do it for fun all the time.

I think a gut feeling is based on the subconscious. I mean, a lot of the time, when one gets gut feelings, it's about another individual, and what one's reaction to them should be, right? It could just be subtle cues from the environment around us and stuff.

Or maybe it's just our latent psi energy. I wish. That would be cool.

"Common sense" as I've always understood it is the ability to forsee consequences, and how to avoid the obvious bad ones. The "jumping off a cliff" example is a simple realization that 9.8m/s² is going to give you a world of hurt at the bottom. It's not a feeling of anything. It's just the ability to rapidly assess the facts available to you.

I think GJ is confusing "common sense" with "gut feeling". Or at least talking about people who do.

And yeah, I listen to my gut. But I can disregard it for obvious facts. (For instance, I know intellectually the world is a round ball spinning so fast in an elliptical orbit around the sun, but in my gut I know we're standing still.)

This post has been edited by MFD on Oct 1 2009, 03:12 PM

Okay, let's try this. When someone says "that person needs more common sense", what are they saying the person needs more of? "Book-smarts" or something else? If someone says "we just need to apply common sense solutions", what are they talking about? Stuff that "everyone just knows" will work, or stuff that "makes sense".

I think there's also some misunderstanding on what even intuition and gut feelings are. They're not voices in your head or even an actual "feeling". At the most basic level, it's stuff you think, decisions you make, and so on, that you make without actually thinking through first. If you ever have an answer or something and you can't explain what lead you to it before you're even there, that's using intuition.

To explore further the topic of common sense, let's look at more examples. "Don't jump off a cliff" is a case where it works fairly solidly. But here's another example. On the issue of how to reduce usage of a certain drug by the public, is there anyone here who'd disagree that it's common sense that measures such as banning the sale and use of the drug and destroying it wherever it's found would lower the usage, right? Well, how is that common sense idea come to? It's based on what makes sense? From information and feeling that comes from within.

And with that, I think the combination of intuition in its purest definition and common sense from this usage together encompass the "go by the gut" process.

Common sense as "forseeing the consequences" is not very accurate. While it does work that way sometimes, I think that's more of an overlap than a convergence. It's common sense to know that if you drive down the road real fast-like and while texting that you're putting yourself at higher risk, and someone who does it will likely be said to lack common sense. On a similar note, though, is it common sense that adding working and effective safety features to a road can make it more dangerous and that removing them can lower crash rates and fatal crash amounts? In both cases, you can easily follow the chain of consequences (if the latter isn't immediately clear, it's because when drivers feel safer, they go faster, and not necessarily to the same degree that they actually ARE safer), but only the former would easily be considered common sense. Why? Because it flows from stuff people can easily "know" and "make sense of" without having to do in-depth exterior examinations of issues.


I'd like to preemptively ask that any tangents on "but I think [x] about drug abuse issues" be split, since that's not what this is about.

I don't think there's a contradiction here. It's a matter of complexity. I'd say that part of "common sense" is knowing when a situation is too complex for a quick glance to give you enough information to see what will happen.