The ability to apply knowledge broadly comes from broad training.

I use Fermi thinking regularly, breaking down a problem so I can leverage what little I know to start investigating what I don’t, a “similarities” problem of sorts.

It gives anyone consuming numbers, from news articles to advertisements, the ability quickly to sniff out deceptive stats. That’s a pretty handy hot butter knife. I would have been a much better researcher in any domain, including Arctic plant physiology, had I learned broadly applicable reasoning tools rather than the finer details of Arctic plant

“Fermi problems,” because Enrico Fermi—who created the first nuclear reactor beneath the University of Chicago football field—constantly made back-of-the-envelope estimates to help him approach problems.* The ultimate lesson of the question was that detailed prior knowledge was less important than a way of thinking.

As statistician Doug Altman put it, “Everyone is so busy doing research they don’t have time to stop and think about the way they’re doing it.” I rushed into extremely specialized scientific research without having learned scientific reasoning. (And then I was rewarded for it, with a master’s degree, which made for a very wicked learning

Three-quarters of American college graduates go on to a career unrelated to their major—a trend that includes math and science majors—after having become competent only with the tools of a single discipline. One good tool is rarely enough in a complex, interconnected, rapidly changing world. As the historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee said when

“Computational thinking is using abstraction and decomposition when attacking a large complex task,” she wrote. “It is choosing an appropriate representation for a problem.”

Professors, he told me, are just too eager to share their favorite facts gleaned from years of acceleratingly narrow study.

When he recounts his own education at the University of Chicago, where he was captain of the cross-country team, he raises his voice. “Even the best universities aren’t developing critical intelligence,” he told me. “They aren’t giving students the tools to analyze the modern world, except in their area of specialization. Their education is too