原文标题：

A slipper concept

Common sense is not actually very common

Very few claims meet with universal agreement

含糊的概念

常识其实并不常见

很少有普遍认同的说法

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IN 1776 THOMAS PAINE, a traitorous Englishman living in the American colonies, published a seditious 47-page pamphlet. Called “Common Sense”, it became a best-seller.

1776 年，居住在美洲殖民地的英国叛徒托马斯·潘恩出版了一本47页的煽动性小册子。这本书名为《常识》，成了畅销书。

It argued that the colonies should seek independence from British rule. Later that year they did exactly that.

书中观点主张殖民地应该摆脱英国统治，寻求独立。就在那一年，他们真的独立了。

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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.

对常识的诉求是政治的主旋律，尤其是当起义者希望将自己与所谓冷漠、脱节的精英区分开来时。

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.

但在发表于《美国国家科学院院刊》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·瓦茨指出，人们很少对常识进行严格研究。

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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.

这两位研究者着手研究常识。他们首先注意到，"常识 "这一概念的标准定义有些循环：常识是聪明人所认同的说法，而聪明人就是那些拥有常识的人。

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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.

为了解决这些哲学难题，研究者们求助于亚马逊旗下的Mechanical Turk网站，这个网站允许人们发布各种琐碎任务。

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.

他们招募了2046名人类参与者，要求他们对4407条语料库中的50条语句进行评分，这些语句可能被看做常识。

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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”).

正如根据常识所预测的那样，研究人员发现，关于现实世界事实的简洁措辞最有可能被评为常识（例如，"三角形有三条边"，顾名思义，这是正确的；或者 "避免与病人密切接触"）。

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”).

越是抽象的说法，参与者越不可能认同它们是常识（“人人生而平等”；“感知是知识的唯一来源”）。

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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.

研究人员发现，如果按主题来划分，涉及技术和科学的说法最有可能被评为常识，而涉及历史和哲学的说法则最不可能被评为常识。

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、收入和个人政治立场对他们认为的常识几乎没有影响，但心理方面的社会感知力和个人反思能力却有影响。

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Having investigated individual opinions, the researchers looked at how common sense works across big groups.

在调查了个体观点后，研究人员也研究了常识在大群体中的作用。

Here, they found much less agreement than might have been expected.

在群体中，他们发现观点的一致程度远低于预期。

Only around 44% of claims in the corpus were rated as commonsensical by at least 75% of respondents.

语料库中只有约44%的说法被至少75%的受访者评为符合常识。

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%.

如果对常识进行更严格的定义，即每个人都必须同意某项说法才能算作常识，那么这个数字就减少到了6.6%。

Where exactly a sensible cut-off lies is a matter for debate. But truly “common” sense, it seems, is an elusive thing.

合理的分界线究竟在哪里，还有待商榷。但似乎真正的“普遍”常识是一件难以捉摸的事情。

（恭喜读完，本篇英语词汇量458左右）

原文出自：2024年1月20日《The Economist》Science & technology板块

精读笔记来源于：自由英语之路

本文翻译整理: Irene

本文编辑校对: Irene

仅供个人英语学习交流使用。

【补充资料】（来自于网络）

托马斯·潘恩出版的《常识》本书主要介绍了一些当时社会上的常识，揭露和批判了英国的黑暗与压迫本质，促进了美国独立战争的胜利。当时英国和殖民地之间的关系十分紧张，北美人民反英斗争风起云涌，潘恩很快就投身政治斗争中。但是，人们的君主制观念还根深蒂固，连华盛顿、富兰克林、亚当斯这些独立战争时期著名的政治家，都不明确提出独立。

1775年4 月19日的莱克星敦和康柯德的战斗之后，潘恩得出结论，这次起义的目的不仅要反对不公正的税制，而且要支持全面独立。1776年1月10日，他发表了一本50页的小册子《常识》，书中对他的论点做了详细解释，公开提出美国独立问题。这本小册子立即引起轰动，三个月内售出十多万册。在一个人口仅二百五十万的殖民地里，可能总共售出了五十万册。潘恩的《常识》比任何一个出版物都更能说服当时的公众舆论支持北美从不列颠独立出来。它还被誉为是《独立宣言》的精髓。

亚马逊运营着Turk的升级版—机械特克（Mechanical Turk，简称MTurk），用来指称用来辅助人工智能的人力。在这个2005年就启动了的平台，科研人员即请求者（requester）可以发布工作即人类智能任务（Human Intelligence Tasks），工人完成这些任务可以获得很少的现金。这些任务通常是计算机和算法尚无法处理的，从心理调查到不适宜工作场合图像（NSFW）识别，应有尽有。发布这些任务的请求者中，很大一部分是预算有限的学术研究人员，以及想要训练人工智能算法的科技公司。

杰夫·贝索斯（Jeff Bezos）将MTurk的工人戏称为“人工人工智能”。但工人们更喜欢“特克族”（Turkers）一词。工人中年轻人居多（77％的人介于18-37岁之间），受过教育（70％的人学士或以上），女性偏多（51％）。每三名特克族有一名目前失业，特克族的平均家庭收入每年约4.7万美元（比美国全国平均水平低1.2万美元）。在2016年Pew的一项调查中，有25％的特克族表示他们使用MTurk是因为缺乏其他挣钱的途径。

【重点句子】（3个）

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.

"常识 "这一概念的标准定义有些循环：常识是聪明人所认同的说法，而聪明人就是那些拥有常识的人。

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、收入和个人政治立场对他们认为的常识几乎没有影响，但心理方面的社会感知力和个人反思能力却有影响。

Where exactly a sensible cut-off lies is a matter for debate. But truly “common” sense, it seems, is an elusive thing.

合理的分界线究竟在哪里，还有待商榷。但似乎真正的“普遍”常识是一件难以捉摸的事情。

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