Personal Development
Common Sense Is Usually Right (Even at Work)
Philosopher Michael Huemer argues that when smart arguments lead you to absurd conclusions, the arguments are wrong, not the common sense. That's a useful idea to bring to a pricing meeting.
You’ve sat in the meeting where someone smart talks the room into a plan everyone can feel is wrong, but nobody can out-argue in the moment. The logic is airtight. The conclusion is still nuts. And usually, the logic wins.
There’s a name for the mistake being made in that room. Philosophers call the fix “common-sense realism,” defended most clearly by Michael Huemer in Knowledge, Reality, and Value. The argument, simplified: when a clever chain of reasoning produces a conclusion that strikes every sensible person as obviously wrong, the rational move is to reject one of the premises, not to accept the absurd conclusion.
This sounds boring until you realize how often it isn’t followed. In philosophy seminars, in startup strategy meetings, in pricing conversations, in hiring decisions - people accept conclusions they themselves know are stupid because they can’t immediately spot the flaw in the argument that produced them.
I keep thinking about this because the freelancers I know who make the worst business decisions are usually not the dumbest ones. They’re the ones who have read the most. They’ve absorbed enough clever-sounding frameworks that they can talk themselves past the obvious answer with three layers of reasoning, and then arrive at something a beginner would have known was wrong.
There’s something to learn here.
Huemer’s move is more radical than it sounds. He’s not saying “don’t think hard about things.” He’s saying that the strength of a conclusion you’re committed to is one piece of evidence about the validity of the argument that produced it. If your argument seems airtight but the conclusion is “you should never trust your senses” or “morality doesn’t exist” or “torturing one innocent person to slightly amuse a thousand is correct,” the correct response is: I must have a hidden premise that’s wrong, because the conclusion can’t be right.
In business terms: if your reasoning leads you to “I should charge less so I can get more clients to fund the business while I figure out how to charge more,” your reasoning has a hidden premise that’s wrong, because that conclusion has been failing freelancers for forty years and every sensible operator who’s tried it has come out the other side wishing they hadn’t.
The common-sense move is to back up and find the broken premise. The clever-thinker move is to push past your discomfort and execute the strategy. The first move is correct more often than the second, by a wide margin.
Where overthinking wrecks people
I keep noticing the pattern in three places in particular: pricing, product, and hiring. Worth walking through each, because the same Huemer-shaped move applies in all of them.
Pricing
The clever argument: “If I lower my rates, more clients will hire me, my pipeline will fill, I’ll have a foundation to upsell from, and over time I can raise rates back up.”
This argument has parts that are technically true. Lower prices do attract more interest. A full pipeline does feel like security. There is some chance of upselling later.
But the conclusion - I should systematically underprice my work in the present to build something I’ll raise later - is the kind of thing every experienced operator knows almost never plays out as intended. The lower-priced clients become reference points. The pipeline fills with clients who can’t afford the higher rate. The promised future rate increase produces churn because the clients you attracted aren’t the ones who’d pay it. You end up locked into the lower price by the very clients you brought in to escape it.
The common-sense version of this - “charge what your work is actually worth, even when it’s scary; the wrong clients will pass and the right ones will say yes” - turns out to be correct, even though it sounds less sophisticated. The sophistication of the underpricing argument is the trap. How to price your work without apologizing is essentially a long version of the common-sense answer, with the clever-thinker traps highlighted.
Product
The clever argument: “I should build a product that addresses the niche-of-niches my Twitter audience keeps asking about, because they’re a captive audience and they’ve already validated demand by complaining.”
Parts of this are true. Twitter audiences do complain about things. Some of those complaints do indicate real demand.
But the conclusion - the most engaged complainers on social media represent the right market for a paid product - fails the common-sense check. Most experienced builders know the people who complain loudest about a problem on a free platform are not the people who’ll happily pay for the solution. The clever framing makes you forget what every long-time operator has learned: complaints and purchases are different signals from different populations.
The common-sense answer is: talk to people who have already paid for partial solutions to this problem and ask them what they wish those solutions did differently. That’s less exciting than building from your Twitter feedback. It’s also more likely to produce something people buy.
Hiring
The clever argument: “I should hire the most credentialed candidate available, because credentials are a signal of underlying ability, and even if they cost more, the quality difference compounds over time.”
Parts of this are true. Credentials do, on average, signal something. Quality differences do compound.
But applied without limits, this conclusion - always hire the most credentialed person - produces the well-known disaster where small organizations hire a senior person from a big company to do work the senior person doesn’t actually want to do, and the hire flames out in nine months. Anyone who’s been around long enough has watched this happen multiple times.
The common-sense version: hire the person whose actual lived work history most closely matches the actual work you’re hiring for. Less elegant. More boring. Much more likely to result in a working employment relationship.
The Huemer pattern
Notice the shape across all three. In each case, the clever argument contains true premises. It doesn’t fail because it’s stupid. It fails because it ignores a piece of common sense that every experienced person already knows.
The Huemer move is not anti-intellectual. He’s not saying “thinking is bad.” He’s saying: when an argument’s conclusion is one that every sensible person would reject on its face, the burden of proof is on the argument, not on common sense. The argument needs to explain why all those sensible people are wrong. If it can’t - if it just asks you to follow its logic past the obvious objection - the logic is what’s wrong.
For freelancers and operators, this translates to a useful habit. When you find yourself arriving at a business decision that a smart friend would obviously talk you out of, stop. Don’t try to push through the smart friend’s objection with another layer of argument. Take the objection as data. Your reasoning may have a premise that’s hidden from you, and the friend’s reflex is reaching it without articulating why.
Mental models I use when everything feels overwhelming is a related move at a different layer - common sense is, in some ways, a mental model for evaluating other mental models.
When common sense is actually wrong
I want to be fair to the other side. Huemer’s move can be misapplied.
There are cases where common sense is wrong, sometimes seriously. The common-sense view of physics is mostly wrong. The common-sense view of statistics is dramatically wrong. Common sense about how the brain works is so wrong that the entire field of behavioral economics exists as a correction to it.
In domains where the underlying reality is genuinely counterintuitive - quantum mechanics, very large numbers, evolutionary timescales, complex systems - common sense is a bad guide. Trusting it there means trusting the heuristics of a human being designed to survive on a savannah, which is not the equipment for understanding the orbits of electrons.
So the Huemer move has a precondition. It works best in domains where the common sense in question is the accumulated wisdom of a lot of people doing similar things over time. The common sense of experienced freelancers about pricing is built from twenty years of seeing what happens to underpriced freelancers. That’s not a savannah-instinct; it’s distilled experience. That kind of common sense is usually right.
The common sense of someone with no experience in the domain - their first reaction to a quant strategy, a complex AI system, a derivatives market - is not the same kind of signal. It’s a reflex, not a wisdom.
You have to know which kind of common sense you’re invoking. The experienced kind is high evidence. The reflexive kind is low evidence.
The practical version
If I distill this down to a single working principle, it’s this. When you find yourself about to do something that an experienced peer in your field would obviously tell you not to do, treat the peer’s reflex as a premium signal. Don’t try to argue past it. Try to understand what they’re seeing that your clever framework is hiding from you.
The hours you’ll save not making those particular mistakes are some of the most valuable hours of your career. They don’t show up as wins, because the bad decisions you didn’t make are invisible. But the absence of those failures is what most senior freelancers’ careers actually look like, compared to where they’d be if they’d followed every clever framework they encountered.
Huemer’s whole project is a defense of the boring move. The boring move is, more often than not, correct. The clever-sounding move is, more often than not, a hidden mistake dressed up as insight. Knowing when to override the clever and trust the boring is not anti-intellectual. It’s the most useful thing a thinking person can learn, especially after a few years of building any kind of business.
Which leaves me where I started, on a long walk, thinking: the smartest person I know isn’t the one with the most frameworks. It’s the one who can recognize, mid-argument, when a framework is about to walk them off a cliff every sensible person would have stopped at.