How “Common” is Common Sense?

@article{nokey,

title = {A framework for quantifying individual and collective common sense },

author = {Whiting, Mark E. and Watts, Duncan J. },

doi = {https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2309535121},

year  = {2024},

date = {2024-01-16},

urldate = {2024-01-16},

journal = {PNAS},

volume = {121},

issue = {4},

abstract = {The notion of common sense is invoked so frequently in contexts as diverse as everyday

conversation, political debates, and evaluations of artificial intelligence that its meaning might

be surmised to be unproblematic. Surprisingly, however, neither the intrinsic properties of

common sense knowledge (what makes a claim commonsensical) nor the degree to which it

is shared by people (it’s “commonness”) have been characterized empirically. In this paper,

we introduce an analytical framework for quantifying both these elements of common sense.

First, we define the commonsensicality of individual claims and people in terms of latter’s

propensity to agree on the former and their awareness of one another’s agreement. Second,

we formalize the commonness of common sense as a clique detection problem on a bipartite

belief graph of people and claims, defining pq common sense as the fraction q of claims shared

by a fraction p of people. Evaluating our framework on a dataset of 2,046 raters evaluating

4,407 diverse claims, we find that commonsensicality aligns most closely with plainly-worded,

fact-like statements about everyday physical reality. Psychometric attributes such as social

perceptiveness influence individual common sense, but surprisingly demographic factors

such as age or gender do not. Finally, we find that collective common sense is rare: at most a

small fraction p of people agree on more than a small fraction q of claims. Together, these

results undercut universalistic beliefs about common sense but also open new questions

about its variability of that are relevant both to human and artificial intelligence. },

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{watts2014common,

title = {Common Sense and Sociological Explanations},

author = {Duncan Watts},

url = {http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/678271},

doi = {10.1086/678271},

year  = {2014},

date = {2014-09-01},

journal = {American Journal of Sociology},

volume = {120},

number = {2},

pages = {313-351},

abstract = {Sociologists have long advocated a sociological approach to explanation by contrasting it with common sense. The argument of this article, however, is that sociologists rely on common sense more than they realize. Moreover, this unacknowledged reliance causes serious problems for their explanations of social action, that is, for why people do what they do. Many such explanations, it is argued, conflate understandability with causality in ways that are not valid by the standards of scientific explanation. It follows that if sociologists want their explanations to be scientifically valid, they must evaluate them specifically on those grounds—in particular, by forcing them to make predictions. In becoming more scientific, however, it is predicted that sociologists’ explanations will also become less satisfying from an intuitive, sense-making perspective. Even as novel sources of data and improved methods open exciting new directions for sociological research, therefore, sociologists will increasingly have to choose between unsatisfying scientific explanations and satisfying but unscientific stories.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}