Uncommon Nonsense
The other day I posted a quote by Einstein on "common sense."
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
- Albert Einstein
It generated this reaction:
Loranna Lee Butterwick: Common sense is an actual power of inner sensation (as opposed to the external five senses) whereby the various objects of the external senses (color for sight, sound for hearing, etc) are united and judged.
~ Aristotle
And my reply:
Common sense is an oxymoron and is neither "common" nor logically coherent across case-by-case situations. I like to avoid it altogether. Uncommon nonsense is probably better.
To expand on this discussion, consider the two idiomatic English expressions:
1) "You can't judge a book by it's cover."
2) "The clothes make the man."
Consider the underlying meaning here and you may see a contradiction. What we can say is that first impressions matter, but they should not be the sole basis upon which we judge others.
Finally, I have observed, and I believe this resonates with most people, that once you have learned something new it seems obvious in hindsight. Moreover, you may begin to believe you were the odd one out and that everyone must know this. Not true and a dangerous assumption.
One of the traps I encounter, whether it is in front of a classroom or a boardroom, is not doing a level-set of the audience before launching into my talk. We all come from different places, regardless of how homogenous the group appears. We all hold different knowledges (as Peter Drucker puts it) and different attitudes and perspectives. So creating a safe space for people to feel free to ask questions is essential.
I do it this way: "There is a Zen saying that one should approach every situation with the beginner's mind." That is, just because you know something, take the attitude of learning instead and see how far that gets you. In my experience, the most successful people are not those who know the most, but who can learn faster than the competition.
But that's just common sense.
posted by Dr. Michael Kull at
9:45 AM
1 Comments:
And my counter reply:
The reason for posting the alternative concept was to demonstrate that there are often completely divergent ideas on what these concepts actually embody. It seems as though adding a historical figure to the description of a concept gives it validity, which is why I used Aristotle’s thoughts for my response.
Now thoughts directly from Loranna:
I would argue with the idea of relating “common” to a case-by-case situation. Since the word common is a generality and could be better associated with the word average. Average by definition according to Merriam-Webster online is a single value (as a mean, mode, or median) that summarizes or represents the general significance of a set of unequal values. Which I would say better describes the common population.
I do see after reading your take on the alternative posting that “uncommon nonsense” as you put it would accurately describe your view point here. In addition to that uncommon nonsense just sounds good, it has a nice ring. So perhaps the societies of the future will be discussing “uncommon nonsense” rather than “common sense”.
Now does this make sense or is it nonsense?
11:52 AM
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