@thatfrisiangirlish@blahaj.zone
2026-10-09 11:41 UTC
I have grown to absolutely detest the idea of "common sense", literally because it is neither common, nor does it contain a whole lot of sense.
It is an amalgamation of tropes that taken together make a person solely relying on it a gullible fool. The reality is that our environment is too complex to do without extensive theory and expertise to fully grasp, that fixation on practical results will calcify into meaningless, arcane tradition, and that one person's concern for community will violate another person's reality.
That is not to say that to operate a light switch, you need to understand all of the theory involved in electricity down to particle physics, know electric installation, or anything else besides "tap this switch, expect this light to go on" to reasonably expect that light to, indeed, turn on. But what you should be aware of is, you are operating on a huge amount of abstraction that makes your act of turning on the light an act of magical thinking by operating a magic sigil. Even moreso if your light is "smart", and you operate it from your portable magic mirror, aka smartphone.
That is not a defect. That is how human societies share work, by making you a magical thinker except in the area of your expertise, which is usually narrower and shallower than you are comfortable to admit. There is no "normal", there is "in my experience", with a lot of circumstances, caveats, ifs, buts, and border cases.
Your common sense is for managing your own life, and even there, it'll hardly do it all justice for the waking hours of a single, average day. For everything else, you need expertise.
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