I meant that as a kind of light wordplay, but aren't "shared by all/most" and "occurring regularly" kind of tied together anyway? After all, if something's shared by most, then it's bound to be easy to find. Or maybe I'm overthinking this.

I think what the OP refers to as "science" is really nothing more than what can be conclusively proven by means of systematically collected empirical evidence.

Common sense for me has always been a healthy balance of accepting the easily and widely proven on faith, acting on strong probabilities (or improbabilities) and applying a healthy balance of scepticism vs. acceptance.

For instance: I've never had an accident from running with scissors with the blade pointing forward. I've never seen empirical data on accidents with scissors carried in this way. And while I follow what I was taught in childhood (always hold scissors with the blade in your hand), I do so because I understand the odds vs. the stakes of an adverse outcome.

Science essentially ties into that. I fall back on empirical evidence or proof whenever I doubt what I take for granted. My mental mechanisms that dictate what I take for granted and what I doubt are probably a little too complex to discuss here, but suffice to say that I will give any source the benefit of the doubt that has proven its value in the past (and conversely meet any source that has proven untrustworthy with due scepticism or absolute rejection).

I trust practically nothing on Twitter, Facebook or "unestablished media". Because of the uncurated nature of the internet and zero market entry barriers, I accept it as very likely that this will be used by less-than-honest parties to spread untruths. Therefore, I rely largely on media that have an established pedigree in journalism and a good track record. So: no HuffPost, no Independent, no Daily Express, and sure as shit no InfoWars or Vice.

It depends. "The village well" probably will be; "the village bicycle", on the other hand, might be tougher to track down... ;)

I'm not sure what you mean by classic, but if you mean historically then this isn't necessarily true.

Edit: fixed wording

Common sense.

Science is always coming up with stuff and i think to myself 'bulshit'.... then 5/10 years later someone else makes a discovery and turns out it was bulshit.

The problem with science today, is that it is too much like bureaucracy with tunnel vision.

Yeah, that Science guy, man...I wish he'd get his story straight. : |

Yea exactly.... how many times over the years have we heard 'we just discovered eggs are bad for you'... next year, 'we just discovered eggs are good for you'..... no wait, we just discovered eggs are bad for you" no wait we just discovered eggs are good for you....

Oh that causes cancer, this causes cancer, everything causes cancer, the whole planet causes cancer geeeesh.... how about just telling us what does 'not' cause cancer? much simpler.

I'm afraid that the list of things that do not cause cancer may be empty.

(In all seriousness, proving a negative is a lot harder than proving a positive. It's also not generally what needs to be proven; the burden of proof generally falls on the one trying to prove a positive statement.)

Damn, now I feel so out of place talking about when exactly I should floss my teeth when the discussion has already evolved to higher levels about whether two quark particles can exist at the same time in Schrödinger's Cat's ass...

Carry on.

Yet all my scissors accidents involved people running with scissors pointed forward. And running faster than me.

Anyway, yeah, not many definitions in the convo. For me, science is, pretty circularly, the genuine effort to reach truth beyond the veil of common sense. So, I suppose the answer is a bit obvious.

But I take science as a methodology (and an institution which is the imlementation of this methodology), not as a corpus. It's a work in progress. Wherever science is "wrong", it is either :

- Bad science, soon to be rectified by good science. Science has become extremely reflexive, so, rectifications and filtering of bad science are pretty fast now.

- Incomplete science, perpetually refined by more science. Which you may say if almost always the case, and yeah, that's also the point of science, but to be fair, most of times, it's "close enough" for everyday life.

- Badly digested, vulgarized, journalistic science. That is, ridiculously reductive and distorted reports of actual science. And this makes 98,743% of the cases (as science have found out on its little calculator).

But again, common sense has a very different connotation in french. You people use it in the sense of what the french call "good sense" ("bon sens", meaning basic reasoning ability), while the french "common sense" ("sens commun") means everyday ordinary cultural beliefs, assumptions and rationalizations. Even if philosophy relies a lot on the notion of "intuitive" versus "counter-intuitive" (if a conclusion "feels" absurd it's assumed that something got wrong somewhere with the philosopical reasonning), science is pretty much used to very counter-intuitive findings (about quantum physics, astronomy, probability, yes, but also about cultural diversity, about memory and perception, about sexuality, about history, and, well, I suppose about every field of science or else these fields would be done and wrapped up).

So, yeah. Common sense ? It evolves with time and gets largely shaped by scientific progress anyway... Both by good and bad science, actually.

I would try 3. but if this fails (for example I don't understand the scientific study) then I will neither completely accept A or B as true. I will be mistrusting both, my common sense as well as science. I will try to reconcile them, probably by spending even more effort on 3.

Exactly. There's no empirical data to suggest that people running with scissors pointed forward are a greater danger. But our brains realise that the probability of injuring someone with scissors pointed forward is much higher than if we hold the blade in our hand. We obviously can't quantify this probability without scientific study, but we know that such a study would be very unlikely to invalidate the hypothesis that running with scissors pointed forward is more risky.

Common sense at play.

Well, maybe my environment is less crowded. But I'm just as wary of stabbing myself by holding the blade against me (in my mind, the first risk is tripping and falling over it). But apart from that, yes, there are intuitive things of that sort, such as giving a knife by holding it by the blade. It's all practical logic, "naive machanics", physical awareness and anticipation. Akin to turning a knob the right way without trying them all.

Is it science ? In a primitive way. It can get more sciency with hospital statistics, and lab coats running with scissors in controlled environments, and mechanic studies of joint articulations and aerodynamics. The same way a knob can be deconstructed to have iuts inner mechanisms and its friction levels analysed. But our brain does the first approach science.

And then sciene can scrutinize it further. But if further (methodologically legitimate, solidly peer-reviewed) sciencey scrutiny contradicts my first approach assumptions, I'll update my assumptions rather than dismiss science.

I'm not sure we've had the right examples ready for what dtgreene was after.

Let me make an attempt to grab into the huge bag of p&p RPG superstitions to find an appropriate example.

Dice with dips (i.e. "engraved" dots) have an uneven distribution of weight, hence have the tendency to fall on a certain side more.

Common sense says:
The six dipped side is the lightest side and the one dipped side is the heaviest, hence dice should show a clear tendency to show a six on a roll.

Science, to my knowledge, says:
The opposite is the truth, and particularly smaller dipped dice show between 17 and 20% probability to show the one as a result (16.66% would be a perfectly balanced die).

My way out of this was of course to test the hypothesis rigorously with several thousand rolls. And lo and behold, my dice with dips showed ones with almost 18% probability. I'm not shadowrunning with those, I can tell you. And never, never use Games Workshop dice for RPGs. :p

So I believe in the science and trust my own research even though truth be told, common sense still tells me otherwise and I have never understood WHY exactly those damn dice show more ones.