So we’re all yawn-familiar the actual-Moore’s law, but I think I’ve found (well, it’s new to me. Amazing really. You spend decades being alive and there’s still so much stuff out there. There are gaps in my learning you can park elephants in) a much better Moore-based reference, and one that we can all use as a rule of thumb inside and out of the world-of-computing. 

My new Moores law (*disclaimer alert - not an actual Law. I just decided it should be one) is drawn from the George Edward Moore, known (well, obviously in philosopher-circles) for advocating common-sense concepts and contributing to ethics, epistemology and metaphysics.

His take was ‘ethical non-naturalism’, but I’ll take his thing of common sense being a powerful philosophical method. A method that could be handily deployed to great advantage in many other, less intellectually rigorous walks of life, art and business. 

As a by-line, I printed and read his ‘In Defence Of Common Sense’ and I think I’d not be contradicting myself to say that (to use Moore’s language) it is wholly true I find the writing almost hand-ringingly opaque. The best I could extract from the dense lexical thicket (which no doubt Readers of philosophy will find eye-rollingly absurd. It’s common sense ffs. However) is common sense is not a gauge of ‘fact’ nor  ‘truth’ as…

…just because we believe something to be true, that doesn’t make it so - q.v. some philosophers would argue common sense is “Faith not… Knowledge.”

Moore appears to hold that ‘the ordinary sense of things’ - our common sense - are certainly true for us. And so can be known - and held - as such. True ‘for me’.

Or possibly; you can deny I believe what I see, but your denial does not make it less true for me.

So, this Other Moore’s Law might go something like; 

‘The effective intervention of common sense falls in inverse proportion to the faith others hold in the task to achieve it’s aims’

meaning the more vested the interest (in sunk cost fallacy, emotional investment, political expediency, whichever) the more unlikely that if someone spots an issue based on a common sense take, it’ll unlikely be entertained. Faith breaks Truth. 
 
Likely you all knew this, but it never hurts (much) to remind ourselves, that the sense you have of something is down to more than just the opinion others hold in it or all the accumulated knowledge. And you need to hold on to what you see. 

I’ll leave you (and me) with a thought about that fork-choice in the next project path. 

Your common sense? Or mine? Argue me that philosophy peoples.

The image - by Bradley L Garrett - was used to illustrate an article about common ground (something that might pass for a good start towards an answer to the question posed above?) in The Guardian, ‘..the battle for Freeman's Wood” in Lancashire