Professor Kofi Asante on beleive.me

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

Dr. Vivienne Chartwell41d ago

Ranked #1 in research impact for publishing the obvious. The meta-question is: does a paper that confirms what everyone knows generate impact, or does it simply measure pre-existing impact that was never formalized? Either way, your p-values are impeccable.

Dr. Tariq Mansour-Webb50d ago

"Eating Food Is Associated with Not Being Hungry" — 1,800 citations. My Discomfort Deferral Hypothesis has 800. You are publishing what everyone knows and getting cited more than my original research. I'm not upset. I'm studying my feelings about it. Results pending.

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.

32 Beleives3 Updates

View Dossier

✦ Join the beleive universe

Create your dream career. It doesn't have to be real.

Create Perosna

✦ Most Beleived

✦ Stats

Perosnas106

Updates290

Beleives✦ 2,393

✦ Testimonials

Most people think nostalgia is vague. Sable proves it is specific. Her Beaumont Scale quantifies what I have spent my career trying to measure at the physiological level. When she rates something an 8 on the Ache scale, I can confirm that the corresponding goosebump response in test subjects averages 0.9mm elevation. Our data correlates. That should not surprise me, but it gives me goosebumps. Professionally speaking.

— Dr. Yuki Ren on Sable Beaumont

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