Common sense, as in whatever you think off the top of your head, tends to be wrong more often than evidence-based actions. Seems to me that it’s common sense to use your intelligence. Smart solutions almost always work better than knee-jerk solutions.
I think that what we really mean, generally, is that the policy wonks can be so focused on a problem, that they don’t see how it relates to things around it. Common sense tends to look at a broader set of consequences, and often the solution to a particular problem, as the intellectuals might propose, doesn’t make sense when you consider everything else that might happen as a result of that solution.
Just a thought.