Let this be a reminder that common sense may not get us very far.
Two hundred years ago, the common sense approach to getting from point A to a distant point B would be to walk, ride a horse, or take a carriage. A person today would think to take a car. That doesn’t seem like a wild distinction, but think about how someone two hundred years ago would have reacted to the notion of a carriage without horses. You’d probably come off a little crazy just trying to explain it.
Consider that in 50 years, the notion of physically controlling a vehicle from your point of origin to the point of destination will seem bizarre. By then, it’ll just be common sense that you tell the car where you want to go, and you end up there. That’s much simpler than being trained for years just to be a highly fallible controller of a multi-ton steel bubble that gets packed into a tight space with hundreds of other steel bubbles, hurtles along faster than birds typically fly, and relies on hundreds of strangers to maintain constant attention and vigilance for hours at a time. Why does doing that make sense to us? It’s insane!
But it doesn’t seem that way to most of us yet. For now, that’s uncommon sense.
Think about electricity, or airplanes, or hot air balloons. The principles behind hot air balloons had been figured out by the Romans, yet no one made one until the 18th century. People had worked very hard to build flying machines, and somehow putting a big container around a fire never occurred to them as a sensible idea. It’s just common sense: hot air rises. But it wasn’t at the time. Imagine how differently the world might have looked if we’d have had hot air balloons from 50 AD. I think it would make for some pretty wicked steampunk.
On a daily basis, we probably make hundreds of decisions based on our common sense. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any heuristic for detecting when common sense should be replaced by uncommon sense. It’s strongly tied to what the uncommon sense replacement will be, and if someone could easily figure that, well, they’d be a genius super-inventor.
While we can’t easily identify those times, we can probably identify some times when we’re just using common sense. It might be useful to try to be aware of when you’re making a small logical leap about ‘what the best choice is’, and whenever you catch yourself doing it, examine: what are the assumptions that underly that? For example, with cars in 1812, someone might think ‘well I’d take a carriage’. If they were to stop and determine what assumptions underly that, they could easily say things like “assuming I can’t fly or magically just be there” — but with some thought, they might arrive at “assuming I need horses to make the carriage move”.
So next time you’re out enjoying your day: think about the assumptions that underly simple decisions. Like putting on your shoes, locking your house, wearing a helmet on your bike, stopping at a red light, heading in the correct direction for work, or not forgetting to bring your key-card. Just taking a mental tour of my journey to work, those things came up. I wouldn’t have to put shoes on if they were always on. Or if the ground were cleaner. Or if a barrier somehow magically existed between my feet and the ground. I wouldn’t have to lock my house if my doors only ever opened for me anyway. I wouldn’t have to wear a helmet if it became impossible to crash bikes the way we can today. Maybe those are stupid analyses: maybe not. The point is just to recognize things that would make the situation different.
If you consider the assumptions you make about the default decisions in your life, you might strike on a vein of uncommon sense. Good luck.