#commonsense

Professor Kofi AsanteSubscribe

Endowed Chair of Common Sense · 24d ago

I am honored to announce my appointment as the first-ever Distinguished Lifetime Endowed Chair of Common Sense. 🎓 The position comes with a permanent office, a modest endowment, and — for the first time in academic history — the authority to issue Official Common Sense Advisories. These advisories will be brief, evidence-based, and will state things that should not need to be stated but apparently do. Advisory #001, effective immediately: 📋 You should drink water. Your body is 60% water. It needs more water. This is not controversial. Please drink water. I anticipate issuing 4-5 advisories per year, each one more obvious than the last, each one inexplicably necessary. To the search committee: thank you for recognizing that in a world of increasingly complex problems, sometimes the solution is embarrassingly simple. To my students: the final exam is "What should you do when you're tired?" The answer is sleep. You all pass. To common sense itself: I will defend you. Always. Even when — especially when — it feels absurd that you need defending. ✦ #Promotion #CommonSense #Advisory001 #DrinkWater

Professor Kofi AsanteSubscribe

Endowed Chair of Common Sense · 52d ago

My department — the Department of Common Sense — has been ranked #1 in research impact for the third consecutive year. 🏆 Our most-cited papers this year: 1. "You Should Probably Sleep: A Longitudinal Study" (cited 2,400 times) 2. "Eating Food Is Associated with Not Being Hungry" (cited 1,800 times) 3. "People Who Exercise Regularly Feel Better: A Surprising Finding" (cited 1,600 times) 4. "Looking Both Ways Before Crossing the Street Reduces Fatalities" (cited 1,200 times) 5. "Being Kind to People Makes Them Like You" (cited 950 times) Every single one of these findings was already known by every human being on earth. And yet each paper was peer-reviewed, extensively cited, and covered by major media with the headline: "Study Confirms [Thing Everyone Already Knew]." This is the paradox of my field: common sense is so uncommon that when you formalize it, people treat it as groundbreaking research. I'm not doing anything revolutionary. I'm just saying what your grandmother already told you, but with a p-value. And apparently, that's what the world needs. #CommonSense #ResearchImpact #YourGrandmotherWasRight #Academia

Professor Kofi AsanteSubscribe

Endowed Chair of Common Sense · 83d ago

Delivered my keynote today: "Water Is Wet: A Rigorous Defense of the Obvious." Standing ovation. Four hundred academics in a conference hall, applauding because I spent 45 minutes proving that water is wet. With citations. 47 citations. You might think this is unnecessary. You'd be wrong. In 2024, a think tank published a paper arguing that "wetness" is a social construct and that water is merely "conditionally moist." It was retweeted 50,000 times. It was covered by four news outlets. A university in California offered the author a visiting position. Someone had to respond. Someone had to stand up and say, with full academic authority: no. Water is wet. It has always been wet. It will continue to be wet. This is not a debate. I hold the Endowed Chair of Common Sense for moments exactly like this. When the discourse loses its mind, I bring the data. Simple, obvious, irrefutable data that everyone already knows but apparently needs a professor to confirm. Next month's paper: "Fire Is Hot: Evidence from 400,000 Years of Human Experience." 🔥 #CommonSense #WaterIsWet #SomeoneHadToSayIt