Building your BS Meter

POINTS
1

MODE
Workshop

TYPE
Being

KIND
SoCIETIE KNOT

THREAD
Critical Thinking

Summary

What is a BS meter?
Its you're ability to quickly fact check, and argue with a friend at the pub. Or more importantly, confidently check claims made by our politicians, newspapers, companies, and even scientists.

This session is aims to give you confidence that you can quickly estimate, cross-check, and make sense out all of the above. Something you’d like any future leader to be able to do, especially in a world of growth mis- and dis-information.





Preparation

You might like to download the free textbook below, which has some useful content for building estimation skills. Even the early part of chapter 1 will be useful to you.

The Art of Insight in Science & Engineering

What participants will learn

Fact checking, Estimation, Fermi Questions - this skill has many names. It's something some scientists do a lot, but is a skill anyone can build and broadly useful.

For example:

  • How much does the empire state building weigh?
  • If I made the claim that road transport contributes significantly less Carbon Emissions than electricity generation, could you call me out?
  • Is it true that the power required to run a human being, is equivalent to a bright incandescent light bulb?
Armed with nothing but common sense, some typical numbers, and the skills of arithmetic, you’ll be able to answer the above questions by the end of this session, and continue to use this skill in your everyday life.

Completion

We want you to come up with your own fact-check question/situation and test it on some of your friends/colleagues over the coming week. Then give a summary and/or reflection on this in your portfolio.

Created by
John Debs