The Particular and The Complex

I am increasingly discovering that many people, especially those who have gained expertise in a particular field, find ‘common sense’ to be a thorn in their side. Enough so that they have committed to multi-year investigations or written entire books on the subject. The problem seems to be that we rarely question things that are ‘common sense’. After all, if we questioned every assumption behind everything we thought or did in a day – well, it would be physically impossible. However, once you get far enough into an area of practice or study, incorrect ideas about your area of expertise become as annoying as they are glaringly obvious.

The thing is that most common sense ideas apply in some situations but not others, and we struggle to distinguish the difference. Consider that common sense really is a reliable companion for everyday life. I successfully assumed the chair I am sitting in would support my weight, though I have not sat in it before. I am confident that all the teachers in my high school had attended higher education, though I did not ask them. I project that if I went into the street and spit on someone they would be dismayed and angry, though I will not try this out. In fact, my trust in such ‘common sense’ ideas is re-enforced on a day-to-day basis by my successful application of them.

Duncan J. Watts, author of Everything is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us, is one of those people who have dedicated a lot of thought and an entire book to the problems of ‘common sense’. According to him, the examples I gave are exactly the types of everyday situations where ‘common sense’ ideas most often work. Large problems arise, however, when we try and apply common sense concepts to complex systems and large groups of people. Unfortunately, we do this all the time.

Watts writes:

…common sense is extraordinarily good at navigating particular circumstances. And because everyday decisions and circumstances are effectively broken up into many small chunks, each of which we get to deal with separately, it does not matter much that the sprawling hodgepodge of rules, facts, perceptions, beliefs and instincts on which common sense relies forms a coherent whole. For the same reason, it may not matter much that commonsense reasoning leads us to think that we have understood the cause of something when in fact we have only described it, or to believe that we can make predictions that in fact we cannot make. By the time the future has arrived we have already forgotten most of the predictions we might have made about it, and so are untroubled by the possibility that most of them might have been wrong, or simply irrelevant. And by the time we get around to making sense of what did happen, history has already buried most of the inconvenient facts, freeing us to tell stories about whatever is left. In this way, we can skip from day to day and observation to observation, perpetually replacing the chaos of reality with the soothing fiction of our explanations.

And for everyday purposes, that’s good enough, because the mistakes that we inevitably make don’t generally have any important consequences.
When these mistakes do start to have important consequences is when we rely on our common sense to make the kinds of plans that underpin government policy or cooperate strategy or marketing campaigns. By their very nature, foreign policy or economic development plans affect large numbers of people over extended periods of time, and so do need to work consistently across many different specific contexts. By their very nature, effective marketing or public health plans do depend on being able to reliably associate cause and effect, and so do need to differentiate scientific explanation from here storytelling. By their very nature, strategic plans, whether for corporations or political parties, do necessarily make predictions about the future, and so do need to differentiate predictions that can be made reliably from those that cannot. And finally, all these sorts of plans do often have consequences of sufficient magnitude – whether financial, or political, or social – that it is worth asking whether or not there is a better, uncommonsense way to go about making them. It is therefore to the virtues of uncommon sense…that we now turn.

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