By Nadine Moedt (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: September 18, 2013
You often hear people invoking common sense to sum up or explain away a situation. Simple adages are used to explain away more complex situations, underestimating a situation to the point of misinformation.
Take this headline for example:
A new study has been released by UMass Medical school with findings that suggest American citizens are living “longer and more healthily than ever before,” with an “increase in average life expectancy during the previous two decades, [and] with quality-adjusted life expectancy also increasing.”
It’s a fairly obvious statement, right? America is among the top ten wealthiest countries in the world. And think of all the advances in medicine nowadays! We have the cure for pretty much everything, so of course people are going to live longer. It’s just common sense.
How would the reaction go if the article reported the opposite? That Americans are living shorter and unhealthier lives than ever before?
You could justify it either way. Americans eat more fast food than any other country in the world. Think of the obesity rates, the spike in cancer rates, in diabetes. They eat junk food and have junk health down there – everyone knows that. Common sense, really.
It’s said that hindsight is 20/20. It’s a dangerous road to go down; so-called common sense is oversimplified and often contradictory – it’s not something you should rely on.
Consider the typical common sense phrases the tried and supposedly true “folk wisdom” we tend to fall back on when it comes to relationships. Of course “birds of a feather flock together;” people of similar interests fall into company with each other. But what about the whole “opposites attract” thing? It’s easy to find a couple who were attracted to each other’s unique background.
Do “too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth,” or are “two heads are better than one?”
Is it “nothing ventured, nothing gained” or “better safe than sorry?” Do “good things come to those who wait” or should you “strike while the iron is hot?”
The list continues.
It’s so easy to take a situation and apply this common sense to it once you know that outcome. The real issue with doing so is not that common sense is often wrong, but that people do not learn from their mistakes or the mistakes of others.
Justifying in hindsight or using oversimplified adages does resolve our own internal confusion and fear, but it often misinforms and does not help us understand the nature of any given situation. So-called common sense is not as sensible as it might seem.
