I should teach the world the key steps that make science a useful way to find stuff out. The astronomer and popular scientist Carl Sagan outlined some of these steps very well, in his 1997 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, where he called science a 'baloney detection kit'. This kit is designed to give you tools for sceptical thinking, along with the ability to construct and understand a reasoned argument, and also to recognise flawed arguments.

These tools include the following advice. Confirm 'the facts' independently. Evidence should be debated by knowledgeable proponents of different points of view. Try to think of all the different explanations for something, rather than just sticking with your first guess. Do not get attached to a hypothesis, just because it is your own. Measure anything you can possibly measure that is relevant. Every single link in a chain of argument must be sound - not just the first and the last link. On balance, the simpler of two theories that explain observations equally well is more likely to be right.

Ask yourself 'can this hypothesis be tested'? In other words, is it possible to prove this idea wrong? Untestable propositions are not worth a sausage. Experiments should be matched with a control - take away your proposed 'cause', and see if the 'effect' still happens. Experiments should not be unduly influenced by the experimenter - hence double blind procedures in medical research, where neither the experimenter nor the subject knows whether they are getting an active drug or a dummy pill, before the experiment is over. Always ask 'why', and keep asking, until you are satisfied.

Sagan then details ways to sniff out bullshit in rhetoric, including the following advice. Never take anything on trust, especially not from people who are in positions of legal or political authority - hence the Royal Society's motto, 'nullius in verba', Latin for 'take nobody's word for it'. Just because event B follows event A does not mean that A caused B. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. When gathering evidence, do not just count the hits and forget the misses.

Do not be foxed by the presentation of statistics. For example, the US president Dwight Eisenhower was alarmed on discovering that almost half of all Americans have below-average intelligence. Watch out for people defeating 'straw man' arguments - mischaracterising their opponent's position as something so flimsy, that it is patently untrue.

And so on. In fact, these rules apply equally as well when choosing who to vote for, which plumber to employ, how to educate your kids, how to drive a car, etc. These are basically instructions to help you live your life, without getting burned. Pretty handy toolkit, I reckon.