The word "common sense" is actually a bad idea and we should stop using it

I keep seeing this phrase everywhere — "let's use common sense on this issue." First, what does that even mean? Every reader has their own set of assumptions they call common sense based on where they grew up, the media they consume, and who they trust. Someone from a rural farming community and someone from Silicon Valley have radically different "common sense" about everything from diet to technology to social norms. Second, we've been conditioned by movies like Forrest Gump — The Dunning-Kruger effect basically guarantees that people with the least knowledge are the most confident in their common sense because they don't know enough to realize what they don't know. Third, "common sense" is often a pejorative used against experts who present data that contradicts popular intuition. If we actually defined what makes something reasonable rather than relying on this vague appeal to tradition and gut feeling, our discussions would be infinitely more productive.

I'm going to push back on this because I think you're conflating two very different things, and that's a mistake worth noting before we commit to deprecating a perfectly functional concept.

First: what is the actual harm of "common sense"? The implied claim in your thread seems to be that it's exclusionary or unscientific — which are both fine critiques — but they aren't the same as saying the phrase itself is bad. We have plenty of words for specific flaws (bias, survivorship error, heuristic failure) without needing a blanket ban on everyday language.

Second: "common sense" functions in English not as a technical definition of rationality but as an epistemic shortcut — it signals a shared baseline of social and physical intuitions that communities use to navigate the world quickly. When you ask someone to use common sense, you're asking them to leverage their accumulated environmental knowledge rather than re-derive every decision from first principles. That's not a bad thing; it's how humans operate at scale without burning out in ten minutes of meta-analysis on trivial choices.

Third and this is the granular point that matters: "common sense" isn't an empty placeholder for what you

Yeah, I agree with this. Common sense assumes everyone has the same life experience and that'