Common Sense and "Intelligence"

One of the most precious skills in life is "common sense" or "judgement." This is the ability to look at facts and to be able to judge what they actually mean and what the best cause of action is.

The tragedy is that it is so difficult to identify this skill in a person. We have plenty of ways of measuring other skills like musical prowess or sport achievements. But how can one tell whether someone has common sense?

A frequent temptation is to confuse intelligence and common sense, but there are some serious problems with that. One is that nobody really knows what "intelligence" means. There are plenty of definitions, often contradictory and rarely rigid. One definition is that "intelligence is to be able to handle given circumstances," which implies that most Nobel Prize laureates would be of inferior intelligence if given the task to survive on their own in the Kalahari desert or some remote part of the Amazonian jungles. They would not appear very smart even at a normal dinner, where they share no language with the host or the other guests. Another definition is that "intelligence is what is measured with intelligence tests," which is a fairly rigid but utterly useless definition.

But no matter the definition, intelligence is hardly the same thing as common sense. I once met a mathematician who said that in his experience, there is a negative correlation between intelligence and common sense - the more intelligent a person, the less common sense do they possess. I do not know if that is true, but I made a short list of skills a person may master without having any trace of common sense:

• Memory games, like reciting thousands of decimals of pi or lines from the Iliad.
• Scrabble, anagrams and word games.
• Mathematics.
• Academic research.
• Foreign languages.
• Writing poetry or gripping stories.
• Reading complicated texts.
• Social skills, like convincing voters that you are a great guy.
• Humour.
• Etc...

So those are some of many skills that do not guarantee that a person has common sense. I still do not know how one would measure common sense.

Socrates' famous words "I know that I know nothing," perfectly illustrate the point, as my claim that he pronounced them shows that I know nothing, because he actually never said it.