An Observation

This has been a long coming entry.

Recently there were a couple of comments made with respect to... various social observations. Comments that one can easily finger as being out of touch with reality at best and frivolous lip service at worst.

It made me start to think about the unsteady balance between criticisms/comments from an ``expert'' and the same from ``common sense''.

On the one hand, the ``expert'' is a person who has spent lots of time and effort studying the particular social observation. He/she has probably formulated various formal hypotheses and done some testing on them to confirm/deny the cause of the said observation. He/she has staked his/her entire career into looking deeply into such matters under his/her domain of expertise, and therefore whatever he/she says regarding their domain of expertise should not be taken lightly, since it is generally well considered.

On the other hand, the ``expert'' may be systematically biased due to the prevailing dogma present in their domain, causing tunnel vision that is compatible with said dogma. Such tunnel vision can lead to the ``expert'' missing the entire point of the true causes of the social observation since the systematic biases disallow any alternative explanations for the observation. Under such circumstances, the ``common sense'' perspective is likely to provide a better intuition of what is going on, and can be a good source for further research follow up in the way the Ig Nobel Prizes try to reward.

But proving ``common sense'' is not as glamorous as advancing a dogmatic theory, or if the ``expert'' is lucky, a completely new perspective that no one has seen. Thus much of the ``expert'' population ends up ignoring ``common sense'' as much as possible, which leads to... interesting pronouncements that are simultaneously prognostic and vague.

All in all, if the purpose is merely to explain, I think we can stop right here and be done. The problem arises when actual public policies are to be crafted based on such social observations and their causes to address a particular concern. At what point should ``common sense'' be a strong enough voice to demonstrate that the prevailing ``expert'' opinion is completely inapplicable?

I think that is one of the fundamental problems that affect the way modern democracies and republics are run.