Wikipedia defines common sense as “knowledge, judgement, and taste which is more or less universal and which is held more or less without reflection or argument”
Try to avoid using this topic to express niche or unpopular opinions (they’re a dime a dozen) but instead consider provable intuitive facts.
The immune system is strong and defends your body against germs.
The immune system works 100% of 50% of the time. Immunology is the best way to convince someone that it’s a miracle that they’re still alive. Anyways, get vaccinated. Don’t rely on your immune system to figure things out
The immune system is strong and defends your body against germs.
Which is why you should get vaccinated.
Vaccination primes your immune system so it can mount a coordinated response the first time it actually encounters the pathogen.
Umm, it’s your immune system that detects the vaccine and responds to it by developing antibodies specific to the vaccine (and by extension to the actual disease). Just as it would when challenged in real life by the pathogen.
Vaccination basically gives your immune system a several day head start on producing antibodies.
Not entirely true. Vaccines induce the adaptive immune system, which is slow but precise. Getting sick for real induces the innate immune system, which is god awful and you should not be relying on it. S. pneumoniae causes pneumonia because the innate immune system goes overdrive and kills you before it kills the bacteria. COVID-19 induces cell-innate inflammasome activation and leads to a cytokine storm, which then leads to even more damage to the lungs as the immune cells come in. Both diseases have effective vaccines that do not do anything close to this.
Deadly diseases tend to be deadly not because of the microbe itself, but because the innate immune system overreacts and kills you in the process of fighting off the disease.
Getting vaccinated diminishes the role that the innate immune system plays when you get sick, since the B cells responsible for producing antibodies for the disease are already mature. Having available antibodies also allows the immune system to rely on the complement system, which allows it to detect and kill invading microbes way earlier than otherwise.
A lot of outdoor survival “common sense” can get you killed:
Moss doesn’t exclusively grow on the north side of trees. Local conditions are too chaotic and affect what side is most conducive to moss. Don’t use moss for navigation.
Don’t drink alcohol to warm yourself up. It feels warm but actually does the opposite: alcohol opens up your capillaries and allows more heat to escape through your skin, which means you lose body heat a lot faster.
Don’t eat snow to rehydrate yourself. It will only make you freeze to death faster. Melt the snow outside of your body first.
Don’t assume a berry is safe to eat just because you see birds eating them. You’re not a bird. Your digestive system is very different from a bird’s digestive system.
If you’ve been starving for a long time, don’t gorge yourself at the first opportunity when you get back to civilization. You can get refeeding syndrome which can kill you. It’s best to go to the hospital where you can be monitored and have nutrients slowly reintroduced in a way that won’t upset the precarious balance your body has found itself in.
Less tax is better.
No saying that taxation as it currently exists it optimal, but any decent assessment of how to improve things requires a lot of nuance that is nearly never considered by most people.
That budgets for households, businesses, and goverments have much to do with each other
Edit: fixed typo. ‘nd’ to ‘and’.
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that putting the thermostat up higher will heat the house up quicker (edit: I have in mind a bog standard UK home thermostat)
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that sugary sweets make kids act “hyper”
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that the moon’s apparent size is due to how close it is to earth (same for seasons and the sun)
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that your base metabolic rate slows as you age and is primarily responsible for you putting weight on in middle age
In the case of inverter air conditioning it might make a small difference at it won’t throttle down as it approaches the intended, not commanded, target.
that putting the thermostat up higher will heat the house up quicker
If you have a 2 stage furnace, this may actually be a thing.
Huh, these are all common sense statements I would have assumed true. Four our of four, good work!
that putting the thermostat up higher will heat the house up quicker
Same with electric range/ovens.
- that sugary sweets make kids act “hyper”
Do you happen to have a source for that? Coz I have witnessed kids act like a horde of wild monkeys on crack right after eating dessert on multiple occasions.
I listed it because it’s one of the things I would sworn by too having seen it first hand. However when you conduct a double blind experiment, kids still get excited at parties / treats / days out / when their friends are over when there’s no sugar in the treats.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/medical-myths-does-sugar-make-children-hyperactive
In otherwords as parents we massively underestimate how excited or crazy kids can get just because they’re excited and not because of something in their bloodstream…
That may be the case. I will need to conduct my own research^^
Make sure it’s a blind test ;)
The claim and evidence here are not logically consistent.
It’s like saying “cyanide won’t make you dead” because, look “people still get dead from falling and crocodiles, even if there’s no cyanide around”.
no, it’s not. it’s a meta analysis of multiple double blind studies. multiple
“For the children described as sugar-sensitive, there were no significant differences among the three diets in any of 39 behavioral and cognitive variables. For the preschool children, only 4 of the 31 measures differed significantly among the three diets, and there was no consistent pattern in the differences that were observed.”
if you did the same with cyanide you would be able to conclude that “taking cyanide and being dead is positively correlated” even if there were other causes of death. in this wide summary of multiple double blind experiements, there is no correlation between sugar intake and child behaviour. that’s not to say kids don’t act up and get hyper, but it’s other causes, most signficantly parents just underestimate how hard kids find it to regulate themselves when having treats of any sort (non-sugar included) or being in a party atmosphere with friends.
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To tilt your head back if you have a blood nose.
This is no longer recommended advice, because you end up drinking the blood which causes vomiting.
- Probably initially said by someone concerned about their carpet.
Way to stop them is put ice over the back of neck, plug nose with tissue and clear clots each 2 mins.
Any reason not to just let it run? If not on blood thinners.
You can let it run.
I find it clots better by using tissues to plug the flow.
Cold Air will make you sick.
There are plenty of studies debunking it, and yet I still hear about it all the time.
I’ve been hearing it for years, always argued against it.
Is common sense just an earlier, naive label for confirmation bias?
A key aspect is that it doesn’t even require confirmation.
Common sense isn’t just “not so common,” it is a fundamentally broken concept at its core and a crutch that people use to hoist themselves above others they feel they are better than.
“Bigger is better”
The most vulnerable will be hit the hardest.
- Countries are rich because they have free markets.
- Tariffs are a good thing and competition is for losers.
- No one deserves a handout, as money should be earned.
- Large companies deserve a giant economic stimilus, because if we don’t, our economy will crash.
- Being spied upon by your government or foreign governments whom I worship is okay, because I’ve got nothing to hide.
- Outsiders that sells goods that can be used to spy obviously and should be barred from all markets forever because they’ll definitely spy on you and spying is wrong.
- If you feel threatened by another country, a pre-emptive strike should be allowed.
- You don’t mess with the sovereignty of a nation. It’s sacred and should be left intact.
- Police should always be allowed to use overwhelming force and their actions should be lauded
- You should have the right to protect yourself using firearms against tyranny as governments in general are never to be trusted.
Is the goal to point out contradictions in the pairs you gave?
If “common sense is not very common”, why is it called common sense?
Slightly off topic, sorry.
I view it as a thought terminating cliché people use when they’re too lazy ti fully explain themselves. It can be useful for things that are truly obvious, like if you try touching something fresh out of the stove without protection you’ll get burned, it doesn’t really add anything to bother explaining it.
the sky is blue
an unbiased perspectiveMore abstract concepts that generally trouble the intuition of many:
the irrelevance of laminar to turbulent flow
time and gravity are related
magnetism is not magic
entropy precludes perpetual motionThe sky isn’t blue in many cultures. It’s been shown that words for blue only occur in a language after that culture has discovered a blue dye. And that limitation in available words also constrains how you see and think about the world.
This is covered in Guy Deutscher’s book The Unfolding of Language, which is an excellent read.
I was going with Rayleigh scattering, but that works too
The sky is actually the entire colour spectrum with a bias toward the short wavelength end of the spectrum, which is why it appears pale blue-ish white.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?
