To begin with I will ask, are you all familiar with the phrase “analysis paralysis”?

I have a friend who does this all the time. He cannot make a decision!

I’d call it a brain cramp or strain when you can’t seem to choose.

In my experience, despite contemporary educations focus on conditioning everyone to optimize all their choices and solutions, no one to date succeeds at this ideal. This is the essence of rationality. Rationality is making the optimum decision or coming to the most accurate conclusion given whatever information can be acquired. They have a name for the principle behind this. It’s called bounded rationality. As brainy as anyone might possibly be, the quantity of information always exceeds someone’s ability to evaluate it all. In the effort to account for every possible contingency, the person often fails to effectively account for anything and therefore fails to act on anything.

Hence the 80/20 rule is often used. Roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. The 80/20 rule among others. It’s true because literally no one can account for everything that may relate to any possible decision they might have to make.

We all resort to what are called heuristics, rules of judgement, whether factual or not. In a more negative light, they’re called cognitive biases and we all have them, just like neurosis.

A neurosis is any behaviour that doesn’t serve an adaptive purpose. A cognitive bias is any belief arrived at and generalized as a guideline for what are otherwise endlessly diverse situations. To be blunt, common sense is actually magical thinking.

A “rule of thumb”? Indeed.

There is no factual basis for any such concept as common sense, but we develop generalized patterns we use to recognize and analyze anything new we experience. Even the rationalist is really only exercising one of their own cognitive biases as the behaviour often ends up being impractical at best.

I thought common sense was actually intuitive thinking. Common sense is usually not intuitive thinking. Intuitive people are often seen as eccentric and their decision making coming out of left field.

That would explain why we often don’t have common sense? It’s not intuitive? Indeed. Now intuition is available as an option in any decision making process. We will touch on that soon.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~