🤯 TREE 583: Mind unblown
I had a conversation about birds with two other people. One person said, Did you know that [certain species of bird]1 is the only bird that sing/poops2 while flying? The other person said, Oh, isn’t that amazing! Meanwhile, I thought but didn’t say because of politeness, Surely that’s nonsense. There are thousands of bird species doing all kinds of things. I thought a little more and realised it was definitely nonsense. I’ve heard/seen lots of birds sing/poop while flying.
The person with the ‘fact’ was either lying for funsies or they repeated something they heard without doing a sense check.
My GCSE maths3 teacher was big on sense checks. He would remind us to think while working out equations. If you’re working with single digit numbers and you start getting results in the hundreds or thousands, something has gone wrong. You don’t need to know the exact answer to realise that – if you stop and think.
The world has always been flooded with misinformation. The flood feels especially deep and wet right now with AI joining social media and all the other normal sources of lies and misunderstandings. Now is not the time to take leave of your sense checking.
Let’s say you hear a fantastical ‘bird fact’/‘true story’. Ask, Is this plausible? What does my existing knowledge combined with my common sense tell me? Think about the source of the information. What are their biases and agenda? How far outside your circle of competence is this information? Have you checked a reliable source?
This applies double to things you want to be true.
Slowing down enough to do a sense check and a little research can keep you closer to reality than most of the people around you. That’s a big advantage.
I wanted to give you a whole week of Cowboy Bob and his sidekicks, but I have a BSL exam on Thursday. All the time I can scrape together is going into trying to not fail the exam, so here is a great sketch about sense checking instead. Maybe Bob and ___ Jones will be back next week.
Shoutout to you and all the other good folks in the FFOREST:
Grow slowly
Jeff
I can’t remember which one it was.
I also can’t remember which one it was.
In the early 2010s I did GCSEs in Maths, Science and English so I could qualify to take the teacher training course that I never took.