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.
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 eat snow to rehydrate yourself. It will only make you freeze to death faster. Melt the snow outside of your body first.
Wait, how does that work? It seems like it should take the same energy to melt it either way.
Also, do people not know every berry isn’t edible? Even here where not a lot grows, there’s plenty of decorative ones around that will give you the violent shits.
deleted by creator
Ideally you’d use an external heat source to melt the snow so you’re not wasting your body heat on it (it’s also generally a good idea to boil water of unknown quality before drinking it to reduce the risk of getting sick, which would be especially bad if you’re lost in the wilderness). Failing that, I’ve also heard people recommend filling a water bottle with snow and putting it in between the layers of clothing you’re wearing so it’s not directly touching your skin, that way you don’t lose a bunch of heat really quickly.
I guess that’s true, if you eat a whole bunch of snow at once you could get too cold - especially if you do it while not moving. If you have a fire, of course this is all a non-issue; just make sure not to light yourself, your surroundings or your container on fire, especially during sleep.
it’s also generally a good idea to boil water of unknown quality before drinking it to reduce the risk of getting sick, which would be especially bad if you’re lost in the wilderness
Hmm. Are there known cases of illness known from snow melt? It’s not guaranteed clean like domestic potable water, but I can’t imagine it carries too much by natural water standards, either.
Hmm. Are there known cases of illness known from snow melt? It’s not guaranteed clean like domestic potable water, but I can’t imagine it carries too much by natural water standards, either.
There’s always a risk of bacteria. Maybe not super high a risk, but getting food poisoning while lost in the woods can really screw you over.
Moss doesn’t exclusively grow on the north side of trees.
My brain was like “why do people so desperately need to find moss that it not being on the north side would mean death?” Before remembering many people don’t know which way they are facing (or left and right) usually. (Also, I’m sure I’d do worse in an unfamiliar area)
“Survival of the fittest”
bitch, explain cows
Fittest for the purpose of being chosen by farmers to participate in breeding.
Cows are the most fit for their environment. Their environment being a useful and sustainable food source for humans to cultivate.
Lol a better example would be “bitch, explain humans” we’re the biggest anomaly to this statement. In ecology we refer to our evolutionary perseverance as “survival of the collaborative”
Bulls seem like they are capable of herd defense, they are kept isolated for a reason. Same with roosters and chickens.
In all of my ecology classes they were super specific about re-framing that concept as “survival of the fit enough”
You don’t actually have to be the best example of something to have your traits carried along, just good enough to consistently make it to reproductive age and then procreate.
It helps explain a lot of weird survival mechanisms - it doesn’t have to be the best way to do things but if it consistently works, then it’s good enough. Like the old saying “if it’s stupid, but it works, then it’s not stupid”
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.
Is common sense just an earlier, naive label for confirmation bias?
A key aspect is that it doesn’t even require confirmation.
That budgets for households, businesses, nd goverments have much to do with each other.
They are more similar than they are different though. The numbers are bigger and the limits aren’t known, but they do exist. Many countries have felt the pain of excessive debt, the arguments that it can’t happen to the US are essentially that the US is a unicorn country.
The US is a unicorn country because the US dollar is the primary currency in the world. If the Euro supplanted the US dollar for that position, then the problems with excessive debt could absolutely happen in the US.
That’s becoming less true year over year though. Excessive debt can make it less attractive as a standard in addition to the growth of both the Euro zone and BRICS.
True enough. And Trump could very well accelerate that with his economic temper tantrums. Still, I don’t know what currency BRICS would settle on; certainly not the ruble, not after Putin cratered the whole country’s economy. The yuan?
What they settle on isn’t too important other than it won’t be the dollar.
Hmm. Business budgets are pretty similar to household budgets.
In government budgets thing do get a little fuzzy, because historically they always run a slight deficit until they fall to war or revolution and “reset”. If it’s a rich country, they can raise taxes whenever they feel like, too, assuming they don’t care about re-election.
the government can go into unlimited debt if it is willing to cause a hyperinflation at some point later in the future to eliminate all of that debt.
Hurr durr but the national debt is like a credit card and all debt is bad. China can just say pay up and we’re fucked.
And other stupid shit my parents used to say.
China can just say pay up and we’re fucked.
Yeah, them and what army? (Well, the PLA, but going into MAD and great power military strategy would be too much of a digression)
A classical example of Westerners thinking human laws are laws of physics somehow. I assume, anyway. It’d be weird to hear this from anyone recently imported.
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 contains 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
‘Building more lanes will reduce traffic’ is a classic.
Of course! Our society couldn’t have multiple moving parts, could it?
And honestly, that’s a great example of why people’s “common sense” is so frequently wrong. What people mean when they say there’s not enough is that the people who aren’t “common” (like them) must all be stupid.
I think it’s just missing a bit of specificity.
Building more bike lanes will reduce traffic. Building more bus lanes will reduce traffic. Building more tram lines will reduce traffic. Building more car lanes will
reduceinduce traffic.Not perfect, but solid logic within reason (Building 100 more bus lanes will reduce traffic).
They enlarged rt 3 near rt 95 in MA many years ago. It was getting backed up due to all of the people moving further out from Boston. I said “It will be full again in a few years.” Yup. It was moving well for a few years so everyone piled into that area because the commute was better and within a few years it was a traffic jam again.
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.
Pretty much anything related to statistics and probability. People have gut feelings because our minds are really good at finding patterns, but we’re also really good at making up patterns that don’t exist.
The one people probably have most experience with is the gambler’s fallacy. After losing more than expected, people think they’ll now be more likely to win.
I also like the Monty Hall problem and the birthday problem.
Related to gambling: being “pot committed”
Pot committed is more a math reality with a small amount of sunk cost fallacy. There’s always a non zero chance someone is bluffing. A 99% chance to lose $11 is better than a 100% chance to lose $10 if you can win $100 on that 1%.
The gambler’s fallacy is pretty easy to get, as is the Monty Hall problem if you restate the question as having 100 doors instead of 3. But for the life of me I don’t think I’ll ever have an intuitive understanding of the birthday problem. That one just boggles my mind constantly.
Really? The birthday problem is a super simple multiplication, you can do it on paper. The only thing you really need to understand is the inversion of probability (
P(A) = 1 - P(not A)).The Monty hall problem… I’ve understood it at times, but every time I come back to it I have to figure it out again, usually with help. That shit is unintuitive.
My favourite explanation of the Monty hall problem is that you probably picked the wrong door as your first choice (because there’s 2/3 chance of it being wrong). Therefore once the third door is removed and you’re given the option to switch you should, because assuming you did pick the wrong door first then the other door has to be the right one
Thanks for the help, it was easier this time 😅
Lemme try my favorite way to explain the birthday problem without getting too mathy:
If you take 23 people, that’s 253 pairs of people to compare (23 people x22 others to pair them with/2 people per pair). That’s a lot of pairs to check and get only unique answers
One of my favourite pages on wikipedia:
The thing about that is that it’s a little too complete. How can there be both negativity bias and normalcy bias, for example?
To make any sense, you’d need to break it down into a flowchart or algorithm of some kind, that predicts the skew from objectivity based on the situation and personality tendencies.
I think they probably appear in different types of situations, not all at once. And maybe different types of people/thinking are more prone to some than to others.
Exactly. I feel like just listing them out is of limited use because of that.
It’s extremely useful, because it’s an index to all the known things that might be useful in a given situation. The point is not to assess all of them, the point is to not miss ones you’re unfamiliar with that may be important in your situation.
I imagine psychologists can do more with it, but in practice the main thing I see formal fallacies used for is as something to shout during a debate, and it never seems to convince anyone.
If you can catch yourself using one, that’s good I guess.
I work in the risk assessment space, so they are kind of critical to be aware of, for me :)
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.
The harder it is to pull a bow, the faster the arrows.
Isn’t that true, all other things being equal?
Depends.
Compound bows are designed such that you put in a LOT of energy where your mechanical advantage is high (at the start of the draw) then less as your mechanical advantage diminishes (at the end of the draw).
This makes the bow very “light” to pull and easy to hold drawn, but the energy with which the arrow will be fired is higher than almost any other design, save some cross-bows.
So, correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t that also change the way that the arrow is accelerated by the bow? Like, it starts a little slower, and then has increased acceleration until the string returns the the starting position? Whereas a long or recurve bow is going to have the hardest acceleration at the very start, since that’s where the most energy is stored?
And if that’s true, how does that affect the flight of the arrow? I know that with stick bows, the arrow bows as it’s being accelerated, and then wobbles slightly before stabilizing a few feet in front of the bow. Some of that is likely because the arrow has to bend around the bow stave. But do you see less of that with a compound bow?
A modern compound bow will fire the arrow in a straight line, directly forwards, as the bow will have a section that allows the arrow to be shot through the space that would be occupied by the stave on a traditional bow. While the bow must obviously be gripped in line with the tension, the rest of the center section is offset to allow the archer to both shoot and sight directly along the line the arrow will travel.
How much firing then causes the arrow to bend would depend entirely on the stiffness of the arrow, but the resulting total energy being imparted is not going to be different just because the acceleration curve is different. If the arrow bends, then yes, you’d lose some energy to that.
But if anything, starting off slow and then accelerating harder as you go is the gentler and more efficient acceleration curve when accounting for that.
If everything is equal, the arrow gets out of tune. If you tune the arrow it becomes heavier.
In a traditional long bow yes. In a modern compound bow, not necessarily.
“Bigger is better”
Police are there to help you.
They can help you for the rest of your life
Pressing the crosswalk button over and over will make the light change faster.
Sometimes buttons don’t work the first time you press them.
Well it finally changed the 8th time I pressed it, so checkmate.
I think we know it doesn’t help, but we do it anyway.
Serious question, why? Stress relief of button-pushing? Thinking it might work and that it can’t be slower than doing nothing?
I just don’t feel any urge to push the button.
There’s no rationality to it. I don’t get out my calculator and graph paper to plot out the best possible course of action. I just push the button a few times. And sometimes I push it a few more times.
Surely there’s some reward or motivation, whether it’s rational or not. Would you feel any different if you didn’t do it?
If I didn’t do it then I’d be thinking about doing it.
I’ll interrogate my inner experience next time I’m standing at the lights, and I’ll report back if I discover anything interesting (unless it’s really damning information).
Apparently some are wholly disconnected, but not all, leading to some pedestrians just standing there through multiple traffic cycles because they read a cracked article in 2010 that said the buttom doesn’t do anything. Pressing a second time definitely doesn’t do anything but provide stress relief though.
Related is elevator close-door buttons. I hold them down for a long time which seems to work well, but for some elevators it doesn’t.
The buttons are intended to be placebo except in some places.
In my experience it’s only automated in the cities and most of the lights are manual everywhere else.
I’m in one of those places. In Utah, many crosswalk lights won’t turn on at all unless you press the button, and the button can completely change the light timing and ordering (e.g. a protected left turn light activates at the end of a cycle instead of at the beginning).
Traffic engineers here are sometimes allowed to do some fairly interesting things.
Same goes for most “close door” buttons in elevators btw. 😁
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?
That means you ahould take the immesiate payoff or be happy with what you have instead of spensing a bunch of time trying to get more.
Hehe ok I’ll wear those down votes. I didn’t understand the reference as I heard it first on The Two Ronnies as ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the shepherd’s bush’ which I think think might be a carry-on reference.
I didn’t see why l would want a bird in my hand in the first place.
PS - what happened to your D key?
I switched keyboards on android, new one doesn’t have autocorrect or swipe, but it doesn’t connect to the internet. I don’t always proofread posts.
it also means don’t risk everything you have for a somewhat opaque promise of something better
