“Common sense” also can function as a kind of Occam’s razor – itself the proposition that one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.

Certainly, truth can be “subtle, nuanced, contextual and relative”. On the other hand, there are people more than willing to turn subtle into obscure, nuanced into unbearably complex, contextual into beyond the limits of understanding and relative into valueless.

When those folks show up on the block, it’s often common sense that asks, “Aren’t we making this a little more complicated than it needs to be?” Or so it seems to me.

In any event, there’s another wonderful Einstein quotation that feels like it belongs here:

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”