Common sense is actually a pretty bad indicator of truth. Because of cognitive biases and preconceived opinions, ideas that sound right are often wrong. “Common sense is actually nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind prior to the age of eighteen,” Einstein presumably said.

5.5 Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it.

by an Arizona man or another person's attempt to run over a Pakistani woman in a Huntington, N.Y., parking lot. It

According to Polanyi the universe is not a uniform sea, it contains emergent comprehensive entities, with discernable levels of organisation, which via boundary conditions operate independently of the lower levels from which they emerge. These emergent levels realise various purposes. As Pirsig explains, each level of order has a characteristic defining Quality, material, biological, social, and intellectual. Indwelling within articulations enables us to pursue and reflect upon abstract ideals such as truth, goodness, and beauty. For Polanyi a computer, indeed every sort of machine, is contrived to achieve a purpose. A machine can be programmed to achieve this purpose if the desired behaviour can be described in a way that can be simulated by a universal machine. AI offers the prospect of machines which learn without us having to define every detail of its procedures. But they need to do the right thing in every circumstance. This returns us to our problem, because defining criteria for correct behaviour, for making the right choices, amounts to giving a machine “common sense”. Humans excel in making choices in complex situations because we are guided by our tacit awareness.

As with neoliberalism more generally, New Public Management is invisible, part of a new “common sense” that has somehow become hegemonic, whereby the “entrepreneurial spirit” has infused the public sector, leading to “businesslike government”. As with the claims of neoliberalism more generally as to its positive outputs in terms of prosperity, NPM has never been shown to have been successful even in its own terms. NPM “introduced punishments and rewards to produce better services with lesser staff. Instead of having freed energies and creativity of employees formerly shackled by their bureaucratic turfs, NPM reforms have bound energies into theatrical audit performances at the cost of work and killed creativity in centralizing resources and hollowing out professional autonomy... Fundamental deprivation of the legitimacy of public employees . . .has traumatized many most-committed employees and driven others toward a Soviet-type double standard.” (Juha Siltala, New Public Management : The evidence-based worst practice?, Administration; Vol. 45, No. 4.; 2013 pp. 468-493) Sekera quotes Christopher Pollitt et al., who “after compiling a database of 518 studies of NPM in Europe, determined that “more than 90% of what are seen by experts as the most significant and relevant studies contain no data at all on outcomes” and that of the 10% that had outcomes information, only 44% of those, or 4% of the total, found any improvements in terms of outcomes.” But in the end, the point of NPM is less that of measureable outcomes, and more that of the ideological victory of turning the public and its good into customers exercising their “choices” (see tax revolt example in Duggan), along of course with the radical disempowering of public administration workers and their unions, instituting “cost savings” by cutting their real income and putting more and more of the public sector’s production directly into the profit-making market.

prudence, excel--i Jenee is accorded to those who ferret out the WO; greatest possible number of causes

Dr. Max Dunbar