# Being smart doesn't mean having common sense **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [May 21, 2016, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330 "2016-05-21T21:38:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![ivylass](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/9de053/32.png) [@ivylass](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ivylass)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2016, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330/21 "2016-05-24T20:23:13Z")
> [@Spice\_Weasel](#): > > I think it’s hilarious because being lost is _my perpetual state of being._ I have the worst sense of direction of anyone I know. I accepted a long time ago that being lost is an inevitable reality of my life. I just follow the people I know around and trust they know what they’re doing. We can never go on a road trip together. We’d drive off a cliff, a la Thelma and Louise. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2016, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330/22 "2016-05-24T21:48:10Z")
I’m ‘book smart’ and do lack a few street smarts. But I’m pretty proud of my internal map. I always know what direction I’m facing, even in a building. I was in a group of brilliant guys trying to find a bar we’d been to in a foreign city a year before, and flummoxing ensued. I was puzzled: “Does no one realize we have to head east and get across the river on one of those two bridges, and the bar’s between them, across from the used bookstore?” The elder of the group said “I can tell you’re a designer. You made a map in your head and kept it there for a year.” I said, “Well, of course…” and everyone stared at me like I was an alien. I’m so happy to be a smarty-pants alien. ---
**Author:** ![Miss\_Woodhouse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/838e76/32.png) [@Miss\_Woodhouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miss_Woodhouse)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2016, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330/23 "2016-05-25T03:00:22Z")
Common sense involves a certain amount of situational awareness and often creative thinking. not everyone can do that. That said, no matter how much common sense you have, you are going to do something dumb at least once in your life. Dumb happens to everyone. I feel like I have quite a lot of common sense but I still misplace my phone and lock my keys in my car every couple of years. ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2016, 4:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330/24 "2016-05-25T04:00:59Z")
> [@Miss\_Woodhouse](#): > > Dumb happens to everyone. I feel like I have quite a lot of common sense but I still misplace my phone and lock my keys in my car every couple of years. It’s quite fortunate that the cabinets in my kitchen intended for storing dishes have shelves spaced just a tiny bit too closely together to fit a gallon of milk on them. ---
**Author:** ![adhemar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3da27b/32.png) [@adhemar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adhemar)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2016, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330/25 "2016-05-25T17:43:04Z")
it is no uncommon that when I am reading on my tablet before going to bed and I close the tablet to go to sleep, I reach up and turn the bedside lamp BACK on. When the electricity is off during a storm I have many times tried to turn on an electric fan. When leaving a dark room I often flip the light switch on. Not that I am real smart or anything to begin with. ---
**Author:** ![Skywatcher](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skywatcher/32/254_2.png) [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2016, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330/26 "2016-05-25T17:57:08Z")
> [@Spice\_Weasel](#): > > I am a really good example of this. > > A classic ‘‘me’’ story is when I was travelling in Greece and wanted to get something to commemorate the trip. My husband and I were getting dressed in our room. I was thinking of buying something Athena-themed, because, I said thoughtfully to my husband, ‘‘I _do_ value wisdom.’’ > > It was then I looked down and discovered I had put my pants on inside-out. Fully buttoned. Pockets flopping out and everything. I don’t think we’ve ever laughed so hard in our lives. Might this have been [last year](http://i.onionstatic.com/avclub/5444/15/16x9/960.jpg)? 😃 ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2016, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330/27 "2016-05-25T17:59:17Z")
I’ve certainly had my share of head slaps. I use my phone for the remote for the Roku now, and every time I end up pointing the phone at the box even though it’s working through the wireless network. It should also be obvious when a mouse doesn’t work on a desk littered with PCs that it’s probably the wrong mouse and not broken. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2016, 6:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330/28 "2016-05-25T18:45:33Z")
> [@Miss\_Woodhouse](#): > > That said, no matter how much common sense you have, you are going to do something dumb at least once in your life. Dumb happens to everyone. Oh, absolutely. There’s been plenty of talk about how there are different ways of being “smart” ([“multiple intelligences”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences) and such). I think the time is ripe for someone to elaborate a theory of Multiple Stupidities. ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2016, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330/29 "2016-05-25T23:16:53Z")
> [@Spice\_Weasel](#): > > I think it’s hilarious because being lost is _my perpetual state of being._ I have the worst sense of direction of anyone I know. I accepted a long time ago that being lost is an inevitable reality of my life. I just follow the people I know around and trust they know what they’re doing. > [@ivylass](#): > > We can never go on a road trip together. We’d drive off a cliff, a la Thelma and Louise. Would you have to stop and ask for directions on the way down? ---
**Author:** ![robardin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/43a26b/32.png) [@robardin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robardin)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330/30 "2016-05-26T03:55:14Z")
> [@Mean\_Mr.Mustard](#): > > My friend, who of course is quite intelligent, had his basement flood recently. His wife sent him to the laundromat with a ton of damaged clothes while she stayed home and worked to salvage what she could. > > He’s gone for 3 hours, then 4, then 5. She’s growing concerned. She calls him on his cell. ‘I’m almost done’, he says, ‘the last load is going into the dryer’. > > It turns out that while she was working her ass off to get the basement back to normal, he was sitting in a near-empty laundromat, doing _one load at a time_. > > It had never crossed his mind to use more than one machine. > > mmm Huh. I’ve only ever used one machine myself, I don’t think I’d have done differently than this guy… At home, growing up in my parents’ house or now my own, I’ve got the one washer and dryer; while in college or living in an apartment, I only ever had enough laundry for one machine load. And often I had to wait for a machine even with just one load. So using multiple machines to parallelize a multi-load set of my laundry would seem like it could be considered rude or selfish. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330/31 "2016-05-26T04:49:08Z")
> [@Spice\_Weasel](#): > > My Aunt is an expert map reader and knows where she is at all times. Last weekend, she navigated five hours on our vacation with no GPS and the occasional glance at a map. Once she’s been to a place once, she never forgets how to get back. I know a kid with Asperger’s, and he’s the closest person I know to someone having savant skills. When he was 7, he could draw contiguous maps of the US, Europe, and the Middle East from memory. He also remembered the directions to any place he’d been one. He was hyperlexic, sort of. He couldn’t read whole books until he was formally taught to read when he was five, but when he was four, he could read street signs and remember the names of streets and numbers of buildings. He’s 25, and still has this ability, although it’s not as impressive, but he never gets lost. Ironically, because his coordination isn’t great, he didn’t get his driver’s license until he was 18. But he’s never been in an accident. > [@](#): > > I think it’s hilarious because being lost is _my perpetual state of being._ I have the worst sense of direction of anyone I know. I accepted a long time ago that being lost is an inevitable reality of my life. I just follow the people I know around and trust they know what they’re doing. I read a stat on the amount of gas that is used by people being lost per year total for all people in the US, and it was staggering. It made me wonder if government subsidies for GPS systems, or phone apps would be a way to conserve gas for a net gain. This was about eight years ago before pretty much everyone had a some kind of smart phone (in the generic sense), and they were coming with GPS apps installed. Actually, MapQuest was saving my butt long before GPS systems. I am not very good at turning a map into the streets I’m on, and while I’m OK at making written directions from a map, if all the roads aren’t marked, I miss turns. MapQuest had the mileage, and that was a big help for times when roads weren’t marked well. OTOH, I’m really good at going back to any place I’ve been once, even if I was there years ago, as long as the roads haven’t been substantially rebuilt. My father had a great sense of direction; my mother, lousy. I definitely think this means something. My husband, who has pretty good sense, has a good sense of direction. His one shortcoming regarding common sense is that it’s easy to bait him into arguing with a crazy person over woo, or conspiracy theories. He just can’t help explaining to a true believer everything that is wrong with homeopathy, why we did, in fact, land on the moon more than once, and vaccines don’t cause autism. Ad nauseum. I could be going into labor, and he’d be standing there arguing with someone literally wearing a tinfoil hat. I don’t know what synapse in his brain is missing that makes him think that’s a good use of his time. My mother occasionally gets hold of a wacky belief. We weren’t allowed to have a color TV when I was a kid, because they were radioactive and caused cancer. She didn’t have her first color TV until I gave my parents one in 1992. I guess at some point she had read about experiments with making color TV using some form of uranium to produce the color red. It was sealed, so supposedly it couldn’t leak radiation, but then there was concern over disposal of old or broken TVs, and so they used something else, that didn’t produce a very true red, but worked well enough, until something else was found in the 1970s that produced a really good red. No TV with uranium was ever marketed commercially, but those experiments meant I couldn’t have one. My father rolled his eyes at this one too, but he knew to pick his battles, and he didn’t care much about color television. ---
**Author:** ![brujaja](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4af34b/32.png) [@brujaja](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brujaja)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 7:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330/32 "2016-05-26T07:19:01Z")
> [@robardin](#): > > Huh. I’ve only ever used one machine myself, I don’t think I’d have done differently than this guy… > So using multiple machines to parallelize a multi-load set of my laundry would seem like it could be considered rude or selfish. Aww, bless your heart! I wish there were people like you at the ridiculously overcrowded laundromats I use. ---
**Author:** ![Machine\_Elf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 12:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330/33 "2016-05-26T12:37:24Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > My mother occasionally gets hold of a wacky belief. We weren’t allowed to have a color TV when I was a kid, because they were radioactive and caused cancer. She didn’t have her first color TV until I gave my parents one in 1992. I guess at some point she had read about experiments with making color TV using some form of uranium to produce the color red. It was sealed, so supposedly it couldn’t leak radiation, but then there was concern over disposal of old or broken TVs, and so they used something else, that didn’t produce a very true red, but worked well enough, until something else was found in the 1970s that produced a really good red. No TV with uranium was ever marketed commercially, but those experiments meant I couldn’t have one. FWIW, [old color TV sets did emit ionizing radiation - in some cases, a shitload of it.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=14253230&postcount=3) But it wasn’t because they contained radioactive material. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330/34 "2016-05-26T13:03:52Z")
> [@Machine\_Elf](#): > > FWIW, [old color TV sets did emit ionizing radiation - in some cases, a shitload of it.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=14253230&postcount=3) But it wasn’t because they contained radioactive material. Yes. That is if by ‘shitload’ you mean not enough to matter. ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330/35 "2016-05-26T18:06:20Z")
Some people are clever about figuring certain things out, but not at all clever about anticipating social consequences. Early in my employment history, I worked at a copy shop. We had a salesperson who negotiated large jobs at a discount. One night, one of the junior shift supervisors working on a large litigation project was photocopying thousands of checks. He realized that if he just put one check at a time on the glass, instead of as many as would fit, he could both make the job take a lot longer AND charge the customer for many more “impressions” (copy count). He designed a handmade matte template to simplify placing each check. He snugly explained he’d spent all night doing exactly that. Of course the job had been negotiated at a fixed price – all he accomplished was to eat up the profit margin and make the whole job a loss. But even if it hadn’t been pre-negotiated, the results – much more paper for the client to struggle with, at many times the usual cost – was unlikely to be a good business strategy in itself. ---
**Author:** ![Machine\_Elf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330/36 "2016-05-26T18:38:32Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > Yes. That is if by ‘shitload’ you mean not enough to matter. Quoting from the post I linked to: > [@engineer\_comp\_geek](#): > > Back in the 1960s, several GE televisions were produced with a misaligned shield over one of the internal vacuum tubes. The end result was that the TV emitted massive amounts of X-rays. Because the X-rays were mostly emitted downward at an angle, there wasn’t any real danger for anyone sitting across the room. However, children sitting close to the television would receive very large levels of X-rays, far in excess of what was even then (in the 1960s) considered to be safe. I would say that “far in excess if what was even then (in the 1960s) considered to be safe” counts as “a shitload.” [Article here:](https://sciencebasedlife.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/sitting-too-close-to-the-tv-is-not-bad-for-your-eyes/) > [@WordPress](#): > > Health officials at the time estimated that the amount of radiation being given off by these defective TVs was about 10 to 100,000 times higher than the rate considered acceptable. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/being-smart-doesnt-mean-having-common-sense/755330.md?page=1)