Radical Common Sense

I know you know.

Last night, The Lean Startup author Eric Ries, a well-known business theorist, joined an Interintellect salon I hosted. Like for many others in our generation, Eric’s work was formative in my first years as a founder, and so I had greatly been looking forward to this conversation. His new book Incorruptible turned out to be even stronger, and much more philosophical, than his earlier work. Eric and I had an excellent chat online, surrounded by the friendly and curious attendees typical for Interintellect salons, and covered the many pitfalls and paradoxes of business ethics in the AI era.

As Eric was talking, and as I and the attendees got a chance to clarify our own thoughts about these matters, I kept looking for a good phrase to describe what these types of books are trying to do. Because this is “philosophy for real life”, sure. But then: isn’t all philosophy for real life? (One might wish.)

Eventually, I had to come up with a name for it myself. I call it radical common sense.

In Incorruptible, Eric is revisiting timeless techniques for making one’s life and venture better: seeking good advice, preparing for future problems, respecting the Golden Rule, and being a leader to people in a way that they can be sure their work is useful and honest.

Tonight, I am preparing for tomorrow’s Interintellect salon with the war journalist Sebastian Junger. His masterpiece Tribe is open in front of me. Here’s another book about the power of basic virtue and the human collective, with story after story showing that people are eminently and permanently capable of such things, and that no lasting success can ever exist without such good foundations.

We encounter radical common sense in the collection of such stories, and they always come as a kind of surprise. With a feeling that things might finally click and make sense. Radical common sense is somehow always a reminder, a realignment into a more stable and productive place that we once knew.

But what is radical common sense? How can common sense even be radical? Doesn’t “common” mean we all share this capacity? If we have the capacity, why is it so often unrealized — the many times when we feel we are not acting from a place of wisdom or fairness? The times when we stray, when we are not being our best selves, when reminding us of simple truths becomes a radical act…

Why have humans, since time immemorial, had to be periodically reminded of the absolutely obvious, things that anyone with some life experience or conversations with friends could easily figure out for themselves? Our species-specific forgetfulness is great news for writers and scammers. Indeed, without this built-in human habit of amnesia, we might not have philosophy, self-help, or even religion! Perhaps, if we spent all our lives snuggled up in common sense, we would be more efficient but also more bored? So are we forgetting just for fun? Or is there something more serious going on?

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We might try to define radical common sense via comparisons. The first comparison that presents itself is with the rationalist movement, a sometimes adversarial collaboration of computer scientists, economists, and statisticians. I am among the many for whom being introduced to the rationalist school of thinking was life-changing.

Growing up in a media family, then doing two long academic stints in the Continental humanities, my more exacting curiosities and neurodivergent interests had always been mirrored back to me as out-of-place, irritating, inhumane, or at best unladylike. But I loved asking questions, and a lot of things around me just did not make sense.

So when about 20 years ago I started reading Scott Aaronson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Julia Galef, Slate Star Codex, I felt — yes — that the world just clicked into place. Of course! Yes, mathematical logic. Yes, Bayes. Yes, first principles. It was a relief, and a welcome one. It changed everything.

But just as it happened when I was exploring New Atheism a few years earlier, however good and smart and superior rationalists might have temporarily made me feel, this methodology just wasn’t sufficient for dealing with the variety and chaos of real life.

Physicality, belonging, personal responsibility-taking, transcendental suspicions, dark humor, attraction, memory, or the secrecies of personal taste remained far better described — in my eyes — by the likes of Goethe or Rilke, by Simone Weil, by Virginia Woolf, by Henry James. Father Zosima has no p-value, which is perhaps his most important message.

And so I must conclude that radical common sense is more than just a rationalist revision of the world, more than numerical disenchantment, Hanson’s razor, a hosing of the mind until it is clean; it can never be clean. However necessary I believe this developmental stage for every thinker is to go through.

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The same way as any self-respecting ethicist must succumb to organizing little mental kerfuffles between Kant and Jeremy Bentham, so must near-satisfied rationalists at some point go and flirt with Hume.

Because — think you — if it’s not rationalism, then it must be intuitionism. (It has to have an -ism ending, lest we aren’t taken seriously.)

And so you will start reading the social psychologists, the behavioral scientists, and look at the little mice scuttling around in their habitats. Will the pigeon papa press the button for the variably rewarded food, or has he learned?! And did he want to press it? Did he know he would? So many Pavlovian mysteries abound! The trainable animal, the bird-feedable soul — suddenly you’re in softcore territory, you are seen as soft to the core. And somehow, as you participate in this great humanism, the humanity of the participants is lost.

People like to moan how the rationalists don’t have much empathy but I have never met humans less into humans than among the human behavior researchers — the sweet-spoken homogenizers, the identity-nulling infantilizers. To them, you really are the butterfly on the pin, and through their work they will pretend they are not like you. I’ve got news!

Sure, if you don’t let somebody, e.g., go to the toilet for eight hours, they will give a less good arithmetic answer. So are you wiser now? What have you learned about the human character and the puzzle of the mind? Fantastic way to spend funding…

Sorry, but conditioning is really not the takeaway one should extract from Darkness at Noon. That is not the condition one should seek to re-create. If the rationalists made you feel better about yourself, don’t worry, the intuitionists and behaviorists surely won’t. Deep down you will know that neither group is right.

And so the self-honest investigator of radical common sense must admit that intuitionism is also not the existence-encompassing framework it promises to be. However necessary it might be for understanding ourselves to also understand the many emotional, unintentional aspects of human nature, accepting the slavery of the passions won’t give you the full picture either.

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What if radical common sense is conventional wisdom?

I’ve wondered about this only very briefly. I don’t even know if “conventional wisdom” exists! Isn’t it an oxymoron? And somehow it’s always a post hoc coinage — you can’t really ask somebody to name a conventional wisdom, it is always something that has already been said or done that people will look back at and identify as such.

I dislike both fridge magnet quotations and ice-cold prejudices, and I have an inkling that “conventional wisdom” is mostly just those two things.

If you disagree, I would love to hear from you. But no, I don’t think radical common sense is synonymous with conventional wisdom. No gossip-level generalizations can make the world click and then work better for anyone.

No one goes through hardship and says: “I have now attained conventional wisdom.” But they might very well celebrate gaining radical common sense.

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I first started cultivating radical common sense when I moved to the United Kingdom. I had completed a part of high school in France, but London was my first real immigration from Budapest, my first time choosing to live my whole future life abroad.

My common sense until then was speculative. Living at home was an exercise in memory, where the exploration-exploitation axis worked very differently. All my braveries, all my innovations, all my dishonesties were devoid of stakes, in that real sense familiar to immigrants. When I was hurt, I could call for help. When I messed up, I could retreat. My deepest biases never got exposed, my dumbest misconceptions never got busted. Living in one’s birthplace is a form of institutional existence: you are always protected by the system one way or another. When you are restless, you will stray. But you can always shamble back.

My common sense — that mental acuity that keeps you alive — might have vibrated subliminally, and given me fast analysis or good hunches in certain moments, but it was never of fundamental necessity. Real radical common sense is a life-shaper, and so I am reluctant to locate it in situations where there doesn’t loom real risk.

When I walked out into the world all alone, with a couple of suitcases and books, a scholarship, my brain, and nothing and no one else, I had to turn my common sense radical. How does one not starve to death in London? How to build a venture-funded startup while stuck in Brussels under COVID lockdown? How to rebuild oneself, one’s knowledge, one’s entire social network — a new career, a new life — from zero? How to be useful? How to be financially safe? How to not be ground down by the tragedies of the past? … How to love and be loved? … How to know who the person who loves is? And how to navigate countries and visas toward increasing freedoms so that all this enormous, excruciating work can be shared and scaled?

People who become parents talk incredulously about their old, obscure selves, not understanding the more narrow, more immature, more ignorant person that they used to be before they crossed into their current, higher, more connected state. I feel similarly about my own crossing. I sometimes look at old photos of myself, I notice the thinner legs and the smoother forehead, and I have no recollection of who that girl even was. All she was was preparation.

In the open arena where I am right now, radical common sense is honed year by year, and the stakes are existential. It is in part life experience — even “lived experience” — but also anecdotes, inference, zooming in and out, and an often self-tormenting, Faustian push for more understanding.

Especially when I mess up, when I am being impossible, I want to know why. I need to learn! This is no longer theoretical knowledge. I am my own vehicle. The Stoics knew that understanding how you work is the core of your radical common sense. In fact, without self-understanding, there can be no understanding of external phenomena.

This doesn’t always come easy to me, to dig like this. I didn’t become an artist after all because I find the outside world way more interesting than I find myself, and I believe I am statistically right. But I can’t much understand about navigation unless I understand the vessel, and so I have added myself — oh well — to the curriculum.

I recommend you do the same. In fact, I have some recommendations how…

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I recently wrote an essay titled The Sovereign Reader. The piece argues that you can greatly improve your life and your thinking if you build yourself a “personal culture”, your own one-person canon. Many people I work with complain that they have lost or indeed never developed the routine for reading good fiction, and they want to change this. In my essay, I gave some advice on how to refine oneself through literature and literary criticism.

I enjoy thinking through my own biography as a reader, my own journey through the library. Libraries contain a lot of self-wisdom: they reveal your preferences for certain ideas, types of people, topics. Your flakiness, your perseverance — your loyalties and indifferences. The self-lie, too: when one wants to be a different kind of reader but ultimately cannot.

Reading is an education in radical common sense. The thing we lose when we abandon fiction — even if great nonfiction authors like Sebastian Junger sometimes make up for it — is this unlimited access to life experience and pattern-recognition, the at-scale distillation of human events that help make your own world finally click, take shape, and make sense.

It is conventional wisdom that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. But for me, whatever I try to think about, all mental roads inevitably lead back to Aristotle instead. He was the GOAT. The guy who knew. And an enduring challenge for feminists like me… And yet. And yet.

Two of Aristotle’s areas of inquiry are indispensable for understanding radical common sense. In two ways, he was radical common sense, embodied. One, of course, is his Ethics. The other is his Poetics.

In Poetics, fiction is salvation. It is ethical purification. Instead of hard rational re-programming, or condescending unreplicable knee-reflex studies, the human being is subjected to stories, finds the personal in the universal, the universal in the personal, and so as not to have to suffer and die herself she confronts the pain of life through the characters who don’t really exist, except that now, in her, they do, and in her will be intelligently at work forever.

In the catharsis the Cartesian implodes — the mind / the body, the present / the past. You can be the smartest in the room, and you will weep like a child. You can arrive knowing nothing at all and walk out shining with wisdom. It is somewhat terrifying how this ancient terror is still the best description that we have for clashing face to face with radical common sense, and winning.

Contemporary instances of radical common sense that you notice are straight out of Ethics. The glory of the good work. The pleasures of usefulness and worthwhile habits. The nobility of the mind. The deep need for friends for comfort and challenge. In Aristotle, radical common sense is an organizing principle, literally: it is political, it is creative, it is — in the end — its own purpose.

It is life.

It is neither imposing a tyranny of rationality on the scuttering, inscrutable ways of the heart. Nor is it reducing us to farm animals blindly regurgitating in the shade and deceiving our intellectual faculties to get away with it. Understandably, both rationalists and intuitionists can be wary of Aristotle; they can feel he was too “basic”, that it is all too simple. I think the opposite.

Human life is very complex, and many theories feel true just because they cover one side of our nature or another. There is a lot of epistemological courage to not bending to the temptation and believing those partial frameworks cover everything, that a slice of knowledge could be all of wisdom.

Radical common sense resonates with me as an idea, as a term, because it is broad and generous with the many contradictions that we hold. And maybe it is indeed too much, as a result — too bright, too clean, or too heavy — and that is why we want to forget it over and over again, and need good writers to come and remind us.