To think that "common sense" isn't as common as people believe?

Having studied health and safety planning, managing safety and root cause analysis it's astonishing in looking at an incident and how people react when "common sense" should kick on

• people saying put when a clear danger is enclosing them.

I think ‘lack of common sense’ is actually usually lack of questioning. I go straight to Who, What, Where, When, Why & How for pretty much everything. I find there are very few things I can’t figure through, no matter how unusual or difficult if I just work the problem

Any new scenario or uncommon event I start asking questions until I know I really understand it.

So many people I interact with seem to just accept everything at surface level. So in your example, I’d have asked if there were any rules about the 5 people or what they ate in order to get the free meal.

I agree about self esteem being an issue, constant criticism can be quite debilitating and eventually internalised. It's probably even more noticeable in the social media age. I've met a few people who are really good at giving feedback in a constructive way, it's a truly valuable skill.

A sense of humour is helpful and getting old enough to run out of fucks to give. I loved my friend's phrase, I'm not laughing at you, I'm not laughing with you either, I'm laughing towards you.😁

you could argue that the restaurant owner should have had the common sense to know that a) lots of patrons won't have any common sense b) chancers will try and get round anything that isn't watertight!

therefore it should have been common sense on their part to be explicit on the terms of the offer so it can't be misinterpreted. I think if OP took the restaurant to court (which would obviously be a complete overreaction) she'd probably win because technically she had met the terms of the deal as written. Using 'well obviously what I meant was x,' doesn't really stand up if what you said (or wrote) was y.

yes! 'Alexa, what's the weather like today,' rather than looking out the window.
Or 'Chat GPT says....'

There was a post on here recently where the poster had an x month old baby that was quite small, so didn't fit in the 'correct' size for their age - say baby was 10 months old, they were asking 'The 9-12 month old size is far too big for her, but she's too old for 6-9 month sizes so what do I dress her in?' with posters replying '...just keep her in the old size until she grows out of them?' I mean, that's what I call common sense!

I worked with a woman who was completely devoid of common sense, it was infuriating. The job involved a fair bit of problem solving but she could only do it if she had set answers as templates.

It made me realise that having common sense is about anticipating various outcomes. Lacking it is like not being able to cook a basic meal you have all the ingredients for without a recipe.

I almost feel common sense is the ability to solve a problem by looking at the bigger picture of what resources or capacity you have around you and making a decision that's efficient and the least hard work.

A colleague and I were working together. We needed to provide refreshments for a focus group. This was in the midst of a high pressure audit. We looked in our cupboard and noted we needed more crockery. Colleague's instant response was 'I'll go out and buy more'. This would have been time draining when when had a million more pressing things to do and costly.
My response...let's ask the onsite kitchen if we can borrow theirs. To me common sense to use what already exists. Colleague knew we had onsite kitchen (it was for another service in the building)

Is this common sense or just different ways of finding a solution? I don't know.

I volunteer in a community centre, I mentor people (so I help build people up, guide them in different roles). I help young adults deal with some very unpleasant customers at times. The young people learn at various rates (mostly down to self esteem) but make very little mistakes when comfortable. The amount of awful encounters with the general public is awful, common sense really isn't that common. Don't get me started on entitlement either.

My DH also has dumbed down other people's jobs within the company he works for as much as possible to avoid them making mistakes, turns out you can't teach lazy.

I grew up with ‘common sense isn’t common’, and I absolutely agree.

I haven't read the other thread, but I assume it means not children having a meal from the children's menu, rather than over 18s only.

Common sense is subjective. What I might think is the bleeding obvious, and common sense, others might not. 🤷‍♀️

otoh I think 'keep away from small children' is generally good advice that could be written anywhere.

I think people who need to be told that a packet of peanuts 'may contain nuts' are on a steep learning curve.

I think a lot of people who are autistic lack common sense. So as common as that. And then add those who have low intelligence. There’s your group.

Weirdly this reminds me of Friends when they were having a competition and both thought they’d won because they’d interpreted the rules in a different way- I can’t remember the details though!!!

That sounds so frustrating @VoltaireMittyDream , I really feel for you!

Thinking about it, "common sense" really just means "the knowledge you pick up incidentally through life experience" - e.g. you touch the hot pan, you get hurt. Lesson learned. But since people learn in all sorts of different ways, it's a pretty useless generalisation to assume that everyone has, or should have, identical common sense.

What's more, we often ignore it even when we have it. It's common sense to "read the fine print", but how many of us have signed up to some stupid website or other, and ticked the box saying we agree to its (unread 18-page) terms & conditions?

@VoltaireMittyDream I hear you - and the really frustrating thing is the lack of acknowledgement for you

my dd has adhd and seems incapable of understanding why the world is against her so I do get it

I’m pleased for you that your DH and DC can learn through natural consequences! My ND relatives unfortunately can’t learn this way, because they don’t have the underlying skills.

The consequences when I leave them to try to learn to be independent often affect all of us very negatively.

Things like DH not opening his post & chucking it straight in the bin because ‘nobody sends important things in the post anymore’ but of course he had never signed up for paperless billing and so he didn’t know an account went into unauthorised overdraft and accumulated fines for YEARS and his credit rating (and mine by association) got wrecked.

He and my DM are constantly losing bank cards / car keys / PIN sentries / phones

They never keep track of passwords, and are never able to work out how to log into portals to make medical appts, so they don’t bother and then run out of meds to manage their asthma, hypertension and congestive heart failure, and we end up in A&E

Add to that the constant misunderstandings, not remembering important information, not being able to summarise or pick out salient points or main themes, not being able to speak to a doctor because they go situationally mute, not being able to remember to use a planner or calendar so they miss appointments when they do manage to book them.

Neither have any understanding of how impaired they are. If things are difficult for them it’s because the rest of the world is doing it wrong.

My DC shares these difficulties as well.

It is very very hard, and nobody ever recognises how much work I’m doing to keep the wheels from coming off for all of us.

From the perspective of a chancer doing whatever is most likely to make the other person so uncomfortable they do what you want is common sense 😁.

That restaurant OP was a chancer - chancers NEVER check a voucher or offer beforehand, because they know they probably won't qualify, but are going to try it on anyway. They hope to make a staff member uncomfortable enough to go along with their freebie snatch.

My daughter worked at a chain restaurant through 6th form.

This is spot on.

@VoltaireMittyDream I agree

but if you are the one with common sense or the one relied on to find things it can be pretty infuriating.

on the looking for things - i have had that with DH - just stands there. So now when he asks if i know where something is (which I normally do because i am an observant person) I say no and leave him to it. Funnily enough he always ends up finding it (although funniest was when he couldn’t find his keys and tore the house apart - dd asked if he’d checked his pocket and would you believe it…).

Now DH isn’t ND - he’s just a knobhead, but with my ND son I am very clear that it is not my responsibility to find his things and that he can ask me nicely to help but I expect him to have a look in his room/pockets/hallway etc and whilst he may not know where it is - neither do I. He is a lot better!

Both DH and DS are high IQ but neither got the common sense gene!

That is indeed the problem with ‘common sense’..

I am yet to see a "teen menu" in a restaurant, they eat adult meals, complete non-issue

Most child-menus have an age limit on them, to avoid people taking the piss.

It’s never nice to make fun of someone for lacking ‘common sense’. It’s never nice to make fun of anyone, full stop.

In the example mentioned, the restaurant’s wording was unclear. But I would not have assumed that a child counted as one of the ‘party of 5’, because restaurants are money-making businesses and will have based their business model on 5 people drinking alcohol and/or getting the fancier menu items than usual at a birthday celebration, and that would cover the cost of the 5th plate.

If kids counted, you could theoretically take 4 toddlers with you who ate £5 meals from the kids menu and drank water and you’d get your dinner for free, and the restaurant would be out of pocket and have a god awful mess to clean up afterwards.

I wouldn’t have consciously thought all of that through in my mind, it would just sort of be there as an understanding based on having lived in the world a while and formed a mental model of how things generally work.

So I would have checked with the restaurant first.

I also don’t believe we can really change the entire world to suit the way everyone’s individual minds work - because outside of the average range there is just so much extreme variation. As everyone likes to say, if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.

And once you’re outside of that bell curve, very clear language helps to some extent, but you also need a kind of interpreter who knows the exact, particular things you struggle with.

As someone in a very neurodiverse family, it is way more than a full time job for me to do all the everyday thinking and connecting the dots and spelling things out for loved ones who struggle to understand a ton of little daily things, make inferences, understand how one bit of information relates to another, think of how to phrase a question, take basic care of themselves, or bring to mind what they ought to do in a particular circumstance.

Have a headache? ‘Common sense’ would suggest drinking some water, checking you’ve taken any regular medications, maybe taking an over the counter pain reliever. This is second nature to most people, but my relatives can’t make that connection and just go into a state of helpless panic because it was unexpected, and they don’t know what it means or what to do. These are people with PhDs, so no learning disabilities.

’Common sense’ means average sense, as someone else has pointed out. And I do think that having a very high IQ means your sense is uncommon in all sorts of ways, IYSWIM. As backed up by a lot of the literature about giftedness & twice exceptionality.

But when you are supporting numerous people who, for example, fundamentally reject the entire concept of looking for something because ‘how can I look for it if I don’t know where it is? That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard!’ and follow you around debating the semantics of it all for hours while you find all their lost belongings and put them together for the day, you realise just how much human civilisation, collaboration and functioning relies on people being able to make connections and inferences, and find things out that they didn’t already know, and recall stored information that is relevant to the situation at hand.

I think a lot of ‘high functioning’ (esp with high IQ) ND people don’t have any idea how much support they need, and how much is actually being provided to them, all the time, by their loved ones.

And that it’s no simple, easy thing to identify what someone else doesn’t understand, and what exactly it is about it that they’re not understanding, and finding the bits that can be explained differently, and trying several ways to explain them differently, drawing diagrams, breaking it all down into sequential chunks, putting it in writing, making sure they can remember where the written instructions are stored, making sure you’re not asking direct questions / ONLY asking direct yes or no questions / not attempting to speak to them when they’re not expecting to be spoken to, etc.

Not everyone has common sense, and that’s just how the world is, and it means life can be pretty difficult for people who don’t have it and their loved ones - and it’s nobody’s fault, but for the most part nobody’s deliberately designed the world to exclude people who think differently out of sheer meanness.

'Common sense' would be to check the applicability of the offer/voucher before the meal, rather than after, by mentioning it whilst ordering. The vast majority of people do this with vouchers etc, especially ones that require ID, like the Birthday offer did.

That restaurant OP was a chancer - chancers NEVER check a voucher or offer beforehand, because they know they probably won't qualify, but are going to try it on anyway. They hope to make a staff member uncomfortable enough to go along with their freebie snatch.

Besides the kids and adults menus I'd also have thought that you'd check the terms of that sort of offer before ordering.