Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.
Interpretation
Common sense is a complex understanding of life learned through experience rather than a simple concept.
The quote by Marvin Minsky emphasizes that common sense is not merely an instinctual or straightforward idea but rather a collection of insights, observations, and experiences accumulated over time. It reflects the multifaceted nature of human understanding and how practical wisdom is shaped by various life situations, rules, and the interactions of differing ideas within a society.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about decision making at a seminar.
If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that's what we mean by thinking!
There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.
You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways.
I think every person either inherits or eventually makes up their own idea of what they are and who they are and what caused the world to be, and it seems to me that these stories of creation myth, adopted by different cultures - most of them are less insightful than the stories made up by individual poets and writers.
I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one's nature.
If you just have a single problem to solve, then fine, go ahead and use a neural network. But if you want to do science and understand how to choose architectures, or how to go to a new problem, you have to understand what different architectures can and cannot do.
One of my surgical giant friends had in his operating room a sign "If the operation is difficult, you aren't doing it right." What he meant was, you have to plan every operation You cannot ever be casual You have to realize that any operation is a potential fatality.
What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.
Always keep your foes confused. If they are never certain who you are or what you want, they cannot know what you are like to do next.
Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect. Every advance into knowledge opens new prospects, and produces new incitements to farther progress.
Circumstances are beyond human control, but our conduct is in our own power.
Better than a meaningless story of a thousand words is a single word of deep meaning which, when heard, produces peace.
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