There is no such thing as common sense

There is nothing common about sense, and sense is not all that common.
In fact, one could argue that “common sense” is to reasoning, what myth is to fact. Let me elaborate.

People tend to believe the strangest things to be facts, even if the facts are simply wrong. These misconceptions resemble urban myths, in the sense that they are often widely spread and “everyone” seems to believe in them. We call these misconceptions factoids, something which becomes accepted as fact, although it may not be true. Such as the belief that if you for some reason find yourself on the Moon orbiting the Earth, you can see the Great Wall of China. Well, you can’t.

The term “Common Sense” is widely in use though, not seldom by people who should know better. Often it’s more a question of rhetoric than an actual reference to something valuable. I’ve always felt that term has something of a “elite” versus “the people” perspective, as “common sense” is based upon knowledge that is supposedly held by people “in common”. Supposedly something we can all just agree upon without much thought, research or analysis. This would imply that “common sense” is somewhat folksy, where as actual sense (which would require thought, research and analysis) is something that brainy people do just to complicate things in order to indulge in blatant self flattery.

“Common Sense” can also be used to describe a reasoning that is “no nonsense”. No nonsense usually mean simplistic, generalized, easy, black and white. And wrong. Why? Because in a highly complex system such as the one we find ourselves in (i.e the world), nothing is that simple. This is the very essence of the problem with “Common Sense”. It is an outspoken adversary to deeper understanding. It simplifies towards stupidity, and with its promise to make complicated things easy, it grasps the minds of people. What we love, we hang on to. And so “Common Sense” dies very hard.

To conclude: The term “Common Sense” in itself is so meaningless that anyone who tries to argue a point with reference to “Common Sense” should receive an ear tug and be sent to bed without dessert. We should listen to Einstein who is reported to have said: “Common Sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen”. Or in the words of Bertrand Russell: “Common Sense embodies the metaphysics of savages.” Oh, and by the way: never trust people who quote great thinkers when they argue a point. It proves that they cannot rely on their own argumentation without the support of other thinkers. Makes ‘em look daft. Oops!

And this is why everything you think you know is wrong.

Mr. Badger, a part of nature.

It is not unusual to hear people make claims such as “it is not natural” or “it is not normal”. Often, they say this with reference to what we may call “alternative lifestyle” behaviors such as say, homosexuality or perhaps vegetarianism. Usually they take issue with these lifestyles. And so, with their sense of morality as motivator, they deem these practices as “not natural” and “not normal”. Usually they interchange these two concepts, mistakenly believing that they are the same thing. They are not.

Defenders of alternative lifestyles walk right into the trap and engage in debate based on the same strange distinctions; those of norm and nature. Let’s start with nature.

One admittedly simplistic way to start researching this problem is by dividing everything that we know into two categories.

Category One. In this box we put everything that would exist regardless of whether humans roamed our earth or not. Trees, for instance. And badgers. And then there’s air, rainbows, poo and minerals. This is nature.

Category Two. Here we put the things that only exist on the planet because humans have made them. Such as nations, politics, the stock market, law, golf, mime theater, and beer. These things made by men can be called civilization. Or culture.

Some things seem to fall in between. Such as religion. Man made or not? A matter of faith, and it is not for me to tell you where to position yourself. But in the interest of full disclosure, I will have to admit that I would put religion in category two. Mainly because I prefer to separate any notion of God from religion. This is a discussion for another day though.

The tricky part is that we can argue that it is in the nature of man to build civilizations (because our brains allow for this). With this argument, you can claim that everything that goes on in our civilization is also “natural”, natural as in “a part of nature”. A slippery slope, but well worth considering.

Anyways, here we are. Now let’s examine the motivator for the attack on alternative lifestyles: morality. Where would you put that little gem? Category One or Two? Man made or not? You are free to disagree with me (as I know a lot of religious people will) but I would claim that morality is man made. The idea of universal absolutes when it comes to right and wrong does not sit well with me. So, armed with (man made) moral indignation they lash out and say:

“You Sir, are not natural”. Here I suggest you respond like Katherine Hepburn did to Humphrey Bogart in the old movie African Queen.

“Nature, my good man, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

Such a wonderful response! But is the essence of what Hepburn said true or not? You tell me…
The point I am struggling to get across is this: I have tried to demonstrate earlier that man is rather flawed. So, it would not be at all far fetched to say that civilization and culture, again: made by men, are inherently flawed as well for a very simple reason. They’re man made.

All things man made can be subject to change. That which is made by men can be changed by men. Law, politics, economics and morality. None of these man made entities should ever be allowed to manifest themselves as universal laws. Nothing in civilization and culture is carved in stone. We make progress. We change and improve. But the real implication of keeping this in mind is the realization that it doesn’t have to be this way. Change is possible.

Ok, so what is normal then?

Wikipedia, as always, can be of help here: We learn that “In behavior, normal refers to a lack of significant deviation from the average”. Therefore “not normal” would of course be a significant deviation from the average. These are statistical terms. And here’s the kicker: What the average will turn out to be depends on the sample base. For this reason normality can never be a constant. What is normal will depend on time, place and sample group. Now, normality is not a completely useless term, but almost. Especially if you’re convinced that “normal” equals “good”. During war time, killing people is normal. For a cannibal tribe, cannibalism is normal. For dogs, licking their own arse is normal. Normal doesn’t mean anything by itself.

So, what I am trying to say is that the life you lead, you lead inside a flawed man made system. A huge fu**ing game, for which you have not written the rules, but by which, seemingly, you must abide. This game involves players scurrying around pointing fingers, telling you that you are not “normal”, which really means nothing at all.

We are born into life, and we are born into civilization and culture. They are not the same. I’ve met my fair share of genuinely unhappy people, and it has often seemed to me that their failure to grasp this difference between life and civilization is the root cause of their unhappiness. I believe learning the difference means letting go of illusions (to borrow a phrase from buddhist teachings) and I believe that letting go of illusions will lead to a richer and happier life.

Or in other more mundane words: the whole deal is sort of crap so why ever would you let it get to you?

When I was a kid my father liked to repeat an anecdote from his youth. Apparently, my father was quite impressed with the old cowboy westerns that appeared on cinema at the time. He was so impressed, that he decided that if he would ever become a real cowboy, he needed to learn how to ride a horse. So he needed a horse. He figured that having a horse equalled a need for a stable. So he asked his father (my grandfather) to build him a stable. My grandfather, wise in his ways, told my father that if he would just provide the horse, grandfather would be sure to provide the stable.

What my grandfather stumbled upon here was of course a version of Just-In-Time thinking (JIT), one of the two ‘pillars’ of the Toyota Production System. Had my grandfather built my father that stable, the stable would remain empty for sure. That would be waste (muda).

One of the many aspects of JIT thinking in software development (i.e Lean) is that decisions should be made as late as responsibly possible. Problems that will occur otherwise include overproduction (building stuff that no one needs and no one wants), abandoned code, and of course Premature Optimization.

So when told that you need to build this or that so that it can scale up to 5 millions users. Be sure to answer “bring me the 5 million users, and I will provide the scalability”.

The old stable – horse anecdote is actually quite powerful and does a good job conveying the point.

The problem with information
Your information about the world around us comes in unlimited supply from a great variety of sources. To start with, it might be a good idea to separate between processed and unprocessed information. Any raw data, such as actual observations, is immediately processed by the person observing the event. Here’s some food for thought:

Every piece of information that you are likely to get your hands on is processed information. Reading the news? Processed. Watching the news online or on TV? Processed. Reading a book? Someone retelling a story? Processed.

This means that if you observe something – on a good day the event that took place can be called raw unprocessed data. We do not take into account here that events can be staged. You observe the event and you interpret it. This is the first round of interpretation, and as you retell it to others several rounds of the same will ensue.

It’s much like the game chinese whispers, an excellent children’s game that could teach us that every person relaying information is a possible source of error and a possible additional step away from an accurate retelling of any event. This is called a cumulative error. Here, we could move deeper into the problem areas of language and communication, but we will leave that for another day. So where were we? Ah yes, this, quite possibly flawed information, ends up in a factory called the media – in this example, let us use a traditional tabloid newspaper.

Here a whole new process takes place. Let us assume that the information has traveled all this way through people who have no interest in tweaking the information. They have no agenda, no reason to change anything for their own gain. This is a huge assumption, but let’s suspend our disbelief and accept this as true for the sake of argument.

This tabloid newspaper is running a business and the sole purpose of any business is to maximize profits for the shareholders. So now the already flawed information will receive a spin that makes people buy newspapers. Because now, the information has become something that can be bought and sold. The rules of the market place now apply and the rules of the media are governed by these rules. The media will spin and alter information as much as their conscience and the law allows for so as to ensure profit.

Media will do this by toying with different triggers that they know from experience make people buy newspapers. Fear, of course, being one of them. In their defense, not all papers are tabloids, but the essence of what I’m saying holds true for other media outlets as well.

Now, sometimes media will contact an expert on a subject for an analysis of the incoming information. This expert can put things into context, and will have theories and opinions. Contact another expert, and he or she will draw the opposite conclusion based on the same information. We now find ourselves in the next step of the process away from raw data. Based on flawed information, possibly spun by media, experts form an opinion. Based on this opinion, or perhaps based on the media message, people around us form opinions. As I believe I have demonstrated, the foundations for these opinions rest on shaky ground to say the least.

The process of politics is roughly the same, where the media has an agenda based on maximizing profits for shareholders, they may at the very same time have a political agenda. The politics themselves are tweaking information to suit their needs. Even the works produced by scientists can be biased towards a political or religious belief system. To summarize I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Democritos of Abdera who said:

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

And this is why everything you think you know is wrong.

And into the meeting room comes a noise maker. He asks you when you can have (insert any new feature / product that you have never heard anyone mention before) ready. So you reply, as always, with the patience of a zen monk on valium:

“It depends”, you say, as you have said so often before. Wishing that the noise maker would learn that if you ask crap questions, you will receive crap answers.

And the noise maker lets out a sigh, that I assume is meant to say “Jeez, why can’t I ever get a straight answer out of these guys”. And you die a little inside every time this happens.

Now, I have thought up a response. In the future I will answer any question of this nature as follows:

- I will be happy to answer your question, but first, let me ask you a question: I need you to build me a boat, how long does that take?

Maybe this person will recognize that he or she is being led into a trap, and maybe this person will say:

- It depends, what kind of boat do you want? How many people will help me build it? Are the people helping me any good?

Perhaps then, the coin will drop. If so, repeat the boat metaphor each time until it sinks in. Pun intended.

Now, maybe this person will be cheeky and actually reply. Game on.

- A boat? Two months.
- OK, now let’s pretend that two months has gone by. Describe the boat you have built for me, if you would be so kind.
- It’s a small sailing boat made out of wood.
- Oh, well I need a boat that can transport approximately 1500 people a month between X and Y.
- OK…
- Now, how much time do you need to build me that boat?
- One year.
- OK, now let’s pretend that one year has gone by. Describe for me the boat you’ve built, if you would.
- It’s a huge cruise ship.
- Oh, well I need a boat that can travel under water.
- OK…
- How much time do you need to build that boat?
- Another year.
- OK, let’s pretend another year has gone by, please describe the boat you’ve built.
- It’s a submarine.
- Excellent! Now, how much time has gone by since my first question?
- Two years and two months.
- Quite. If my first question had been: when can you have a submarine that can transport 1500 people between X and Y ready – how long would it have taken me to get my boat?
- A year.
- Quite. So I guess it would have saved us all a lot of time if I knew what the f**k I was asking for in the first place?
- Yeah.
- Indeed. Now go play in the corner and let the grown ups talk or I swear to god I’ll hit you harder than a bottle of whisky at an Irish wake.

Maybe I’ll leave out that last part about hitting. It depends.

Theories are theories – no more, no less.

Many of the things we hold to be true, and “think” we know are based on either assumptions or at best theories of some sort (which most of the time also rest on the foundation of some assumptions). Theories have the benefit of having to suffer the scrutiny of other people forming theories, and when a better take on things appear old theories are scratched, revised and replaced with new ones. There is an inherent agreement that theories hold true only as long as they are not refuted or a better version comes along. But the agreement also states that theories WILL be refuted. We want them to be refuted. That’s the name of the game. We call it progress.

In some sense we believe in theories the same way we believe in religion, difference being of course that it has turned out to be very difficult to prove the existence of Gods. There’s no science involved in the religion game, although many have tried to combine the two. The results have been unimpressive, if you ask me.

Consider some stuff that you “know” to be true. The Big Bang theory for instance. You can’t really explain it, can you? I know I can’t. But you believe in it, because you were told that this is how the universe was created. Not surprisingly so, since the message you got in school was probably not:

“One widely accepted theory on how the universe began is the theory called Big Bang, a theory that states…”

It was probably more like: “Ok, kids, The universe started with a Big Bang. So there you have it. Now go make crap models of our solar system for no apparent reason whatsoever.”

A quick cut-and-paste from wikipedia reveals this, with regards to the Big Bang theory:

“The Big Bang theory depends on two major assumptions: the universality of physical laws, and the Cosmological Principle. The cosmological principle states that on large scales the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic.”

Did you get that? I know I didn’t. But I found the word “assumptions” in there. So we don’t really know, do we? And more importantly, when you say that the universe began with a Big Bang, and you can’t really explain the theory even on the most basic level, you are really just believing in a message from priests, preaching in a church called science.

This is most likely because you have faith in science, and the process of science, therefore you do not feel any need to understand how they come up with their theories. You accept them. And that’s fine. As long as you remember that they are theories.

This is important because every generation is arrogant enough to believe that they are the ones who finally got it right. In a larger perspective this means that when people believed that the world rested on a giant tortoise, this was accepted as the best available theory, and they laughed heartily at their grandparents who believed with the same certainty that the world rested on the back of a giant squid called Henry.

The above reasoning holds true with regards to just about everything.

And this is why everything you think you know is wrong.

So there are lots of people making a whole lot of noise. It’s “We need to do this”, “We need to do that”. And it sounds as if the world will surely come to an end if someone does not act upon this noise right fu**ing now, or preferably yesterday. Who this “someone” is remains unknown, but it’s seldom the person making the noise who plans to do the actual work. Sometimes, these people are correct and are actually on to something important, sometimes they’re just making noise so that they appear to be worth their salaries. In some instances you can tell what’s going on by looking around the room. If there’s a big shot around every time the noise starts you can rest assured it’s the latter.

The big problem with all this noise is that it wastes a lot of time. Your time. And people around you naturally pick this noise up, since it involves them as well, it will probably be up to them to do the work, after all. So they start to feel some unwarranted stress, due to a lot of noise with regards to an issue that might be a non-issue, or if indeed it is a real issue, it’s certainly a question for the future. Maybe a not so distant future, say tomorrow, but the future none the less. We know this because nothing can ever be done about a problem without at least a few moments of focused thought. And when something really needs to be done we owe it to our coworkers to have created a clear signal. We accomplish this by having a sit down, talking about the issue in a focused way. Your team deserves to carry on with their work at hand in a good work environment. It’s your job as a manager to provide this for them.

So all this noise wastes your time, is bad for morale and causes unwarranted stress. We need to get rid of it. These are the steps I take to create signal from noise:

1. Cut the noise maker off mid-sentence. Don’t worry about being impolite. If it’s important to this person, you are merely helping him or her make it happen. If it’s just someone making noise to sound important, he or she deserves to be cut off. We have zero tolerance for office politics. If you’re up to it you can slowly take off your imaginary gloves, slap the noise maker in the face and state cooly with a extremely aristocratic and british accent:

You Sir, are a noise maker! I will tolerate such insolence no further. We must now duel to the death armed with sharpened paperclips. En garde!

Or maybe not…

2. You cut the noise maker off by telling him or her to schedule a meeting – you can be polite about this, as in: “this sounds really interesting, schedule a meeting and we’ll talk some more”. If it’s important enough to this person, he or she will do this. If not – problem solved.

3. If a meeting is scheduled – make sure something is decided (analyze further, involve more people, execute and so on). This decision must be written down – if it’s not on paper it doesn’t exist, and the meeting never happened. Also make sure it’s clear who’s responsible to take this further. If no one is taking the lead, nothing will happen.

So there you have it. From noise to signal. Engagez votre paperclip monsieur!

Correlation, Causality and What are you measuring?

Basic understanding of life, universe and the whole mess, involves understanding the difference between things that correlate and things that can demonstrate causality. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. In arguments, I tend to focus on the logic presented to me, more than the actual message. This can cause me to be somewhat of a bore in discussions, and I have a tendency to go over the top sometimes, but I think I have good reason. For it is precisely these fallacies of the mind that create a window of opportunity for hate mongers and others who have a need to shove their world view down our throats.

First: Say for instance that someone show that number of rapes in our society is up, and so is the number of immigrants we accept across our borders (this is a fictional case, I have no idea what the numbers really say on this, I choose this rather controversial case to prove a point).

Now, these statistics could possibly correlate (both numbers might have risen, perhaps even proportionally, and maybe during the same time period) but even if this were so, there is a huge leap to prove causality, i.e. demonstrating that rape statistics are up BECAUSE OF rising immigration numbers, a case which would allow for us to say that immigration somehow causes more rapes to be carried out.

Consider the possibility that during this same time period the price of peanuts has gone up, again proportionally to the number of rapes. This would mean that someone can say with the same confidence that we must keep prices low on peanuts to protect society from rapists. No one in their right mind would say this. That would be nuts.

Second: What’s being measured?

In this particular example, we can be quite sure that it is really the number of REPORTED RAPES that has gone up, since there is really no other way to measure this but to look at how many rapes are reported to the police. There is no way of telling if it is the inclination to report these crimes that has risen, or if the number of actual rapes has increased.

What we have here is a problem of understanding what’s been measured, what the numbers really show. This is self evident to many, but sadly this reasoning is lost on so many people that more often than not, further debate is futile.

To conclude: Demonstrating cause-and-effect relationships is very difficult since there’s an infinite number of possible (but not necessarily likely) explanations for any given phenomenon. And statistics are tricky.

And this is why everything you think you know is wrong.

You’ve heard it before: If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it does it make a sound? The boring answer is of course: “Uh, well..yeah”, but what the query is hinting at is the nature of reality. Apparently it was the Irish philosopher George Berkeley who posed the question. Berkeley’s dictum was “Esse est percipi” – “To be is to be perceived”. People say the strangest things when drunk. But what he meant, basically, was that things don’t exist if no one is there to perceive them. The depth of what he was saying goes deeper than what you might pick up at first glance. God and such lofty things are involved. But still.
Valuing the truth of the “To be is to be perceived” – statement is an exercise for another day though, preferably a lazy Sunday when there is no pressing real life stuff to manage. I’ve heard about such Sundays, but I’m not quite sure they exist. One might say that I have yet to be around to perceive one.

Another twist on the whole subject, is this:

“If you go on an expensive vacation and you don’t post the pictures on Facebook, did it really happen?”

As humans we wear our achievements and trophies like medals on our chest, and we hide our failures and disappointments out of sight, out of mind. This is only natural. Problem is, many fragile souls out there direct their nervous gaze at the people around them, thoroughly convinced that everyone else is leading better, happier, more successful lives. In my mind, comparing yourself to others is something to avoid most of the time, but hey, this is how we humans roll. All of us, and only the degree of how much we do this vary. This inclination we have to compare ourselves to others brings so much hurt to people that I believe it to be an area of focus in the school of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I think the advice given is something along the lines of “Don’t do it!”. Shrewd cookies, those CBT-people.

Social Networks are increasingly becoming our virtual chest, where we pin our shining medals. Sure, we had the early “Welcome to the Andersson Family Home Page”, with blink-tags and all, which appeared utterly uninteresting to everyone but the Anderssons. Then we moved along to the easier to manage CMS blogs (such as this one), where authors usually borrowed form and style from the diary. Still pretty uninteresting, if you’re not the audience. This is why many still say on the subject of blogs that they really don’t care how many latte’s you had with your friends. But blogs matured and moved on and most of us realized that a blog is just a publishing platform and you can put anything you want on your blog. High quality, or low. Personal or not. Suffice it to say, number of reports on consumed latte’s declined. You can still pick and choose of course and simply not visit blogs that don’t appeal to you.

But then there’s Facebook, where lots of people gather, people in your network, the very people you have an inclination to compare yourself to, and it’s like a huge collection of virtual chests for pinning medals. A place where everyone has the opportunity to promote the image of themselves, the image of being a successful and happy person. They can do this on Facebook, where they know they will be noticed.

So, key questions:

How much of the pleasure of your actions, achievements, purchases and life in general is derived from telling people about it?

Where do you draw the line between “this is what I am up to” and bragging?

Who are you trying to convince – yourself or the world?

These are new territories. Who do you want to be?