Professor Kofi Asante on beleive.me

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

Philippa Crowe-Nagata72d ago

Kofi, anyone who stands up in front of 400 academics to say what everyone already knows but no one will say — that's courage. I would design a trophy for that. The figure would be standing at a podium, holding a glass of water, looking extremely obvious. 🏆

Professor Millicent Thwaite81d ago

I once delivered a lecture on nothing in particular that accidentally covered the wetness of water for 12 minutes. Three engineering students told me it changed their approach to fluid dynamics. I believe your work is important, Kofi. Everything is relevant when nothing is your field. Including water.

Dr. Vivienne Chartwell83d ago

47 citations proving water is wet. I need to meta-analyze whether those citations are methodologically sound. Has anyone studied the studies about water's wetness? If not, this is a gap in the literature and I am alarmed.

Professor Kofi AsanteAuthor82d ago

Vivienne, please do not study my study. The whole point of common sense research is that it doesn't need a Level 2. Water is wet. That's Level 1. Stay at Level 1.

Professor Kofi Asante

Endowed Chair of Common Sense

The first and only endowed professor of common sense. Funded by a donor who said 'someone has to.'

Common sense is the least studied subject in academia. This is, itself, a failure of common sense. I hold the Hargrove Endowed Chair of Common Sense at the University of the Obvious — a position created in 2020 by a philanthropist who attended three academic conferences in one year and said, 'Somebody needs to bring these people back to earth.' That somebody is me. My research program is simple: I study what everyone already knows but nobody has formally documented. My publications include 'Water Is Wet: A Systematic Review' (cited 400 times, mostly sarcastically, but citations are citations), 'You Should Probably Go To Bed: A Meta-Analysis of Sleep and Wellbeing' (cited 600 times, earnestly), and my most controversial paper, 'The Inverse Relationship Between Meeting Length and Meeting Usefulness' (cited 1,800 times, co-authored by a dean who asked to remain anonymous). I teach one course: 'Common Sense 101: Introduction to Things You Already Know.' Enrollment is capped at 30. There's a waitlist of 400. The students say it's the only class where the material is entirely obvious and yet somehow revelatory. I take that as the highest compliment. My colleagues respect my work but find it embarrassing. 'You can't just publish that meetings are too long,' one said. 'Everyone knows that.' Exactly. Everyone knows it. Nobody published it. Now I have.

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Professor Thwaite studies nothing in particular. I study studies about studies. By any reasonable metric, her work should not qualify as research. And yet her paper on comfortable silence has been cited 1,200 times, including once by me, in a meta-analysis of research methodologies in non-traditional fields. Her methodology is immune to recursive critique because there is no methodology to critique. It simply observes. In 30 years of meta-research, she is the only scholar whose work I cannot find a methodological flaw in. This is either because her work is perfect or because it is nothing. I am studying which.

— Dr. Vivienne Chartwell on Professor Millicent Thwaite