It’s not. The common sense I was accused of not having involved anticipating things I couldn’t possibly guess. It wasn’t about what I did, it was about the result, which wasn’t what the other person wanted. I didn’t know what they wanted, I didn’t know that what I was doing was not what they wanted, but I was apparently supposed to have the “common sense” to know all that.
Could you be a little more vague, please? 
For the most part, people’s beliefs are driven more by what they want to believe than on facts and reason.
Intelligence can help someone avoid believing things that are completely stupid, but it can also help a person come up with clever ways to rationalize the things they want to believe. So that cuts both ways.
And being very intelligent can sometimes give a person more confidence and the ability to believe that they have it right and everyone else is wrong, where a less intelligent person might be more apt to bow to the weight of public opinion.
[In general, intelligence is very overrated, though useful in certain fields.]
I define common sense as being about to use reason to reach a conclusion about how the world operates based on the convergence of two or more simple and ordinary set of conditions.
Like, if you cross the street without looking, you might get hit by a car. Cars + pedestrian inattentiveness = accident.
If you pinch a baby, it will probably cry.
If you curse out the boss and turn in your assignments late, don’t expect to be promoted.
If you stink and dress sloppily on your first date, your chances of a second date are next to nothing.
Can you give us an example of a prediction you were expected to make that was considered common sense, but isn’t comparable to the cause-and-effects I just described? When I hear people contesting the notion of common sense, it makes me doubt we’re talking about the same thing.
I wish I could remember some specifics, but it was 25 years ago. I was just agreeing with Monty that “common sense” means different things to different people, which cancels it out.
Can you share with us a specific example of what you’re talking about please?
Online IQ tests can give an average person an Extremely High IQ number. Just saying…
I’m a long time member of Mensa and use to go to a lot of various Mensa meetings. There were a few really strange people there. However most were relatively normal people who happened to be able to think rather quickly and deeper.
As far as common sense, I’m a really good mechanic having worked on cars, bicycles, and even aircraft for 24 years. I’m in IT now. As an aside: get 50 Mensans in a room and 50 IT people and you’ll find that the IT people are much stranger. Also about 10 of the IT people would qualify for Mensa.
As far as master links for chains, tell your friend that both KMC and SRAM make great master links for bicycle chains. I just bought 4 on EBay for 10- and 9-speed chains.
Okay, I cannot remember anything specific, but here’s the best approximate example I can think of.
Someone would phone my roommate while he was at work. I took the message, but didn’t write it down as I was expecting him home in an hour and I knew I’d remember it. The hour passes and he still isn’t home. Turns out he ran into some friends and went out to dinner. I had scheduled to go out with my friends later that night, so before he came home, I’d already gone out - end result he didn’t get the message from me until after work the next day, which was very late.
He argued the common sense thing to do was to write the message down. My logic was to tell him as I had no reason to think he wouldn’t be home at the regular time.
My argument is my “common sense” is just as valid as his “common sense”.
In this example I did do the wrong thing, and as I say it’s not an actual thing that happened, but it’s the fact that what I thought was logical “common sense” thinking was considered by him to not be.
A lot depends on the IQ test. Some have a fairly wide standard deviations. Years ago I took a couple of proctored IQ tests. I scored 148 on one but it was actually lower than the 138 that I scored on the other on the percentile scale. If memory serves, one was Standford-Binet and the other was the California Test Of Mental Maturity. However both were at or above the 98th percentile.
The ‘common sense’ thing to do would be to write down the message before you went out, so he would see it when he got home, not when you remembered to tell him the next day.
When I had room mates, back in the bad old days before everyone had cellphones, we had a notebook by the phone for just that kind of event, and for any other messages we needed to convey - like buy milk, or feed the cat.
You didn’t have common sense.
You see, common sense would recognize the fact that sometimes unexpected things happen, and would likely take simple, easy steps to prepare for unexpected things–such as writing down a message.
This one was really mind boggling to me. I thought I knew what a master link was, but then I had to look it up because how can we be *out *of them? Just…make more.
Of your four examples of your friend being wrong, you were wrong 50% of the time. Coverage of the molestation and child porn charges made it as clear as they reasonably could that they had tons of evidence against him. If I were talking about it, I wouldn’t have gone around saying he was guilty before his plea, but it was pretty clear to me he was guilty.
Likewise, I’ve read at least a dozen articles in the past year about raising the minimum wage to $15/hour in various isolated places, especially Seattle. Even assuming he got confused about whether it’s been implemented, he sounds a lot more knowledgeable than you on the subject, since you seemed to think the idea was on par with 911 conspiracies.
I don’t understand the master link thing at all. Is that a joke?
I share your confusion. It’s like saying that the world is out of chairs. There’s all kinds of master links out there from bicycle chains to conveyor belts. Unless he was speaking of some specific niche of master links his statement made no sense.
There was no need to mention minimum wage, Jared or 911 in the op. Those three issues, while strongly proven, still have some room for debate left in them. Once he said “master links” his argument got ridiculous.
I know:
This is why I was being circumspect instead of being specific, because you’re missing my point. The incident I just described DID NOT ACTUALLY HAPPEN, it is an example of the cross-purpose thinking that confused me. He kept saying I had no common sense. I believed I did, it just didn’t align with his. Which makes it not “common” at all.
I have since learned that what he really wanted was for me to anticipate his expectations and fulfil those, like any considerate person would. “Common sense” never actually figures into it at all. Now I try to be that way every time.
Do you dispute that at this point, you should have realized your initial assumption was wrong and immediately reevaluated the logic of not writing down the message? Since the prudence of your choice was contingent on your roommate coming home soon, common sense (as I define it) would dictate a change in action when he didn’t.
I don’t think your logic was as valid as his. You had plenty reason to think he wouldn’t be home at the regular time, because he failed to show up at his regular time!
Abomination!* Take thy divination witchcraft and get thee back to Hell, foul sorceress!
An IQ test really doesn’t measure your intelligence, rather it measure your POTENTIAL intelligence, which are quite often miles apart.
Most people would have written down the message before they left. That would have been the most common behavior. So, it’s common sense.