背景介绍：
常识，即平常之识，指的是从日常社会生活、劳作、学习中总结和积累下来的基本知识。伏尔泰曾说过：“常识并非那么常见。”（Common sense is not so common.）大家都知道到的未必是常识，大家都看到的未必是常识，大家所相信的未必是常识，大家所明白的也未必是常识。
Common sense
is not actually very common
常识其实不太常见
Very few
claims meet with universal agreement
很少有说法得到普遍认同
In 1776Thomas Paine,
a
traitorous
Englishman living in the American colonies, published a
seditious
47-page pamphlet. Called “Common
Sense”, it became a best-seller. It argued that the colonies should seek
independence from British rule. Later that year they did exactly that.
1776年，生活在美洲殖民地的叛徒英国人托马斯·潘恩出版了一本煸动性的47页小册子。这本名为《常识》的小册子成了畅销书。它主张殖民地应该摆脱英国的统治，寻求独立。那一年晚些时候，它们确实做到了。
Appeals to common sense are a staple of politics,
especially when an
insurgent
wishes to distinguish himself from a supposedly
aloof
and out-of-touch elite.
诉诸常识是政治的一个常见工具，特别是当一名叛乱者希望将自己与那些被认为是高高在上、脱离群众的精英区分开来时。
But in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mark Whiting and Duncan Watts, a pair of computational social scientists at the University of Pennsylvania, note that the idea has seldom been
rigorously
studied.
但是在《美国国家科学院院刊》上发表的一篇论文中，宾夕法尼亚大学的两位计算社会科学家马克·惠廷和邓肯·沃茨指出，常识这个概念很少被严谨地研究。
The two researchers set out to fix that. They started
by noting that the standard concept of common sense has a somewhat circular
definition: common sense is a set of claims that sensible people agree with,
and sensible people are those who possess common sense.
这两位研究人员着手解决这个问题。他们首先指出，常识的标准概念有几分循环定义的味道：常识是理智人群认同的一系列主张，而理智人群则是那些有常识的人。
To get around such philosophical tangles, the
researchers turned to Mechanical Turk, a website run by Amazon, a big tech
firm, that allows people to post odd jobs. They recruited 2,046 human
participants and asked them to rate 50 statements from a corpus of 4,407 claims
that might plausibly be seen as commonsensical.
为了解开这团哲学上的乱麻，研究人员使用了 Mechanical Turk，这家网站由大型科技公司亚马逊运营，人们可以在上面发布各种零工杂活。他们招募了2046人参与研究，让他们给50个陈述评分，它们来自一个有4407个可能被视为常识的说法的语料库。
As common sense might have predicted, the researchers
found that plainly worded claims concerning facts about the real world were the
most likely to be rated as demonstrating common sense (“triangles have three
sides”, for example, which is true by definition, or “avoid close contact with
people who are ill”).
正如依据常识能预见到的那样，研究人员发现，关于现实世界事实的直白陈述最有可能被评断为常识（例如“三角形有三条边”这种顾名思义而正确的表述，或者“避免与生病的人密切接触”）。
The more abstract the claims, the less likely participants were to agree that they were common sense (“all human beings are created equal”; “perception is the only source of knowledge”).
表述越抽象，参与者认为它们是常识的可能性就越小（“所有人生而平等”，“感知是知识的唯一来源”）。
When they split the claims by subject, the researchers
found that those concerning technology and science were the most likely to be
rated as commonsensical, while matters of history and philosophy were the least
likely.
在按主题划分这些表述时，研究人员发现，涉及技术和科学的陈述最有可能被评断为常识，而历史和哲学问题最不可能。
A respondent’s age, sex, income and personal politics had little effect on what they thought counted as common sense, although psychological measures of social perceptiveness and the ability to reflect on one’s opinions did.
受访者的年龄、性别、收入和个人政治观点对他们认为什么算作常识没什么影响，尽管由心理评估反映的社会洞察力和对自身观点的反思能力确有影响。
Having investigated individual opinions, the
researchers looked at how common sense works across big groups. Here, they
found much less agreement than might have been expected. Only around 44% of
claims in the corpus were rated as commonsensical by at least 75% of
respondents.
在研究了个人观点之后，研究人员又调查了群体对常识的认知。他们发现人群对于什么算常识的一致认同度要比大家原本可能以为的低得多。语料库中只有大约44%的表述被至少75%的受访者认为是常识。
A stricter definition of common sense, in which everyone has to agree with a claim for it to count, cut that number to just 6.6%. Where exactly a sensible cut-off lies is a matter for debate. But truly “common” sense, it seems, is an
elusive
thing.
如果对常识做更严格的定义，即在每个人都同意的情况才能说一种表述是常识，那么这一数字将降至6.6%。把分界线划在哪里才合理是一个有待讨论的问题。但看起来，真正的“常”识近乎虚无缥缈。
重难点词汇
：
traitorous
[ˈtretərəs] adj. 叛逆的；不忠的；背信弃义的
seditious
[səˈdɪʃəs] adj. 煽动性的；煽动叛乱的
insurgent
[ɪnˈsərdʒ(ə)nt] adj. 起义的；暴动的；造反的 n. 造反者；叛乱者
aloof
[əˈluːf] adj. 不友好的；冷淡的；疏远的
rigorously
[ˈrɪgərəsli] adv. 严厉地；残酷地；严密地
elusive
[iˈluːsɪv] adj. 难以捉摸的；不易想起的
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