Use Your Common Sense Day

What the day is

Use Your Common Sense Day is observed on November 4, the birthday of Will Rogers, born in 1879 in what was then Indian Territory and is now Oklahoma.

Rogers was a Cherokee Nation citizen, a rope-trick performer turned newspaper columnist and film star, and for a period one of the most widely read commentators in the United States. His public persona was built on plain-spoken practicality, which is why the day carries his birthday.

Origin and background

Common sense is a slipperier idea than it sounds. It generally means judgment that seems obvious after the fact, which is precisely the problem: hindsight makes decisions look far more clear-cut than they were at the time. Research on hindsight bias shows consistently that once people know an outcome, they overestimate how predictable it was, and judge those who got it wrong more harshly than the available information warranted.

Much of what passes for common sense is also local rather than universal. It encodes the norms of a particular time and place, and a great deal of confidently held common sense across history has been simply wrong: about illness, about who could be educated, about what was safe.

Where the phrase does useful work is in resisting overcomplication. Checking the obvious explanation first, asking whether a rule still serves its purpose, and noticing when a procedure has drifted from the problem it was written for are all genuine skills, and organizations lose them easily.

Rogers himself is widely quoted on the subject, though many lines attributed to him are not his, which is its own lesson about received wisdom.

How to take part

• Check the simple explanation before the elaborate one.
• Find one rule at work that nobody can explain, and ask what it was written to prevent.
• Verify a quotation before repeating it, particularly a folksy one.
• Notice when you are judging a past decision by information the decider did not have.
• Read some of Rogers's actual columns rather than the memes.