 I've been studying a lot of poetry recently. I just really want to become well-versed in it, you know? One question that thunk viewers ask with unsettling frequency is something like, what's your background? What did you go to school for? I have a degree in mechanical engineering, but when you look at the list of subjects I've covered on the show, you might well wonder what someone who went to school for engineering is doing making videos about things like philosophy, social science, medicine, pure mathematics, quantum physics, history. I mean, I took a couple more electives than most, but it's not like I have any special insight in these subjects granted by years of education. Thankfully, I do have some aptitude for language, and I think I'm pretty good at distilling large bodies of information into bite-sized chunks, which is mostly what this sort of thing calls for. However, there's a running joke about engineers that gives me some pause when I'm trying to write a script about something that's seriously out of my depth. The term engineer's syndrome has been used as a gag describing many different traits of your stereotypical engineer, inept at social interaction, obsessed with ham radio or astronomy, stuff like that. But recently, it's taken on a more specific connotation, highlighting how engineers seem to be particularly susceptible to overestimation of their ability to solve complex problems unrelated to their field. Obviously, one needn't be an engineer to imagine one's expertise somehow extends into other domains. The Dunning-Cougar effect permeates all specialties without discrimination. However, engineering can be argued to have a special emphasis on reducing big scary problems into simple, workable models, gaining traction on seemingly intractable questions by any means necessary. You don't think about molecular forces and crystal lattices. You think about a spring constant. You don't think about all the weird shapes and substances that make up an object. You think about its center of mass. As the old joke goes, assume a spherical cow. That approach is absolutely essential for solving problems that are too big to fit in one person's head all at the same time. So much so that it can become a habitual way of looking at all problems. But when applied in areas where the user doesn't have the practical experience or background to know which bits are too important to be ignored, well, that can cause all sorts of new issues. A 2009 study by Diego Gamberta and Stefan Hurtag found that engineers were wildly overrepresented in the ranks of Islamic terrorists by about three and a half times what you should expect, given the prevalence of other academic disciplines. In order to explain this trend, they appeal to a particular mindset common to engineers that might have something to do with why they seem to be more easily recruited to terrorism. Stop me if this sounds familiar. We can conjecture that engineering as a degree might be relatively more attractive to individuals seeking cognitive closure and clear-cut answers as opposed to more open-ended sciences. Engineering is a subject in which individuals with a dislike for ambiguity might feel comfortable. Engineers in Islamic parties in Turkey claim to know the one best way of how to solve social problems through technical and logical approaches. By contrast, they refuse Western social sciences because these disciplines challenge the unity and divine order of the world. So yeah, engineer syndrome, now with a side of militant extremism. Obviously, it would be absurd to assert this mentality as endemic to all engineers. Many of us quite enjoy irreducible complexity in wallowing an epistemic uncertainty. Thank you very much. It would be an incredibly tall order to find robust evidence of this sort of engineering mentality, let alone a causal relationship to terrorism. But it does provide a sobering reminder of what's at stake here. Me running off of the mouth in a YouTube video about something I don't actually understand is relatively harmless, albeit potentially misleading, infuriating, obviously embarrassing. But if I manage to convince myself that I know everything I need to know about some topic and proceed to apply that knowledge with the self-assurance of an expert, bad things can happen. Maybe not terrorism, but bad things nonetheless. So what's to be done? How can someone like myself, who regularly finds himself or rating confidently on subjects that he really shouldn't pretend to know anything about, combat that urge to oversimplify and reduce to the point of absurdity? Well, I think it's possible that studying broadly and focusing on being a well-rounded and widely-read scholar of many different disciplines might well be a sort of treatment for engineer syndrome. The condition is partially caused by an impulse to use a single brute-force problem-solving framework in all situations, even when it might lead to ineffective, counterproductive, or nonsensical solutions. Taking the time to carefully absorb details and nuances of a subject without immediately trying to yoke them to some half-baked solution seems like a good way to short-circuit that instinctive hack-and-slash technique in favor of a more cautious, considered, deeply contextualized approach. It's probably much easier to casually dismiss the complexities of a problem if you don't actually know any of them to begin with. To that end, I thought it might be useful to look into some learning methods, a few strategies that can be used to absorb new information quickly and retain it. Being a thunk fan, you've probably used at least a few of these techniques in school, perhaps mandated by well-intentioned teachers. Generally, when students reach classes that demand a more rigorous framework for retaining information than simply paying attention in class, they'll pick up some study method or another from peers or teachers and stick to it, often for the rest of their academic careers. After all, time that you spend learning some new fangled studying tactic is time that you're not spending preparing for your next set of midterms. However, there's a fair amount of research about the efficacy and generalizability of different learning methods, which lends itself to good practical advice about different techniques. This 2013 review by Dunlowski and Crue creatively titled, Improving Students' Learning with Effective Learning Techniques, summarizes research findings on 10 well-known strategies for absorbing information, things like highlighting text, writing summaries of material, and so on. They ranked these methods qualitatively, giving high scores to those which showed the highest yield results in the widest range of activities. I recommend reading the paper in its entirety to learn about the techniques in detail and their relative strengths, but I want to focus on two in particular that stood out as the most generally applicable and best for long-term retention of new information. Tests, exams, and quizzes generally aren't a lot of fun. Sitting quietly for hours, cramping your hand up, writing page after page of frantic answers is no wonder so many people think of finals with clawing dread in the pit of their stomachs. However, although testing is perhaps the least fun part of the standard education system, it's easy to overlook its utility as a learning tool. No, I don't mean that bit where the teacher discovers that the class average is only 20% and launches the lesson plan into the sun. I mean that the act of testing itself is an effective technique for assimilating new information. You've probably had some experience with flashcards or practice exams as training tools. They function on a similar principle. By trying to answer a set of questions about the subject, you're both reinforcing information that you've already managed to absorb and introducing unlearned information in a context that's likely to make it stick, leveraging the subjective experience of failure to crowbar even more knowledge into memory. For many people, failing to answer a question accurately just seems like a frustrating waste of time and a mark against their intelligence. But it's a very useful process for getting hold of concepts that haven't been internalized yet. There's nothing quite like getting a flashcard wrong for the third time in a row to burn it permanently into your psyche with blazing 12-foot-high letters made of rage and shame. The Donlowski review cites a few studies in support of the efficacy of practice tests and the results are striking. Compared to the traditional study method of simply rereading course material or notes before an exam, students who took practice tests scored higher in every scenario, whether exam questions were simply measuring recall of information or ability to apply abstract concepts in new situations, around 30% higher in most cases. It's also a technique that can be applied to almost any skill or type of information. The next time you're watching some educational YouTube video or reading a book about some topic you're interested in learning, just write down a few key questions about the material that you can quiz yourself with some time afterward. Even if you get everything wrong, it'll probably help it stick. Time is a key factor in the other highest-rated learning method cited in the paper called distributed practice, also known as spaced repetition. If you're like me, if you studied it all for your tests, you did so in panicked marathon sessions the day before, or the night before. After all, memory decays and gets fuzzier over time. It seems like common sense to refresh the pertinent information as close as possible to the time when you have to recall it. However, although it takes a little more planning, you get exponentially more bang for your buck by spacing study sessions out over time, solidifying a much greater proportion of the desired information with much less overall studying. The evidence for distributed practice is compelling. Check out this data from the paper cited in the Lasky's review. Students were given six practice sessions, which ended 30 days before an exam. Each held at different time intervals. You can see that when practice sessions were held back-to-back on the same day, the overall score on those practice tests started and ended very high. After all, there wasn't much time to forget new material between sessions. When the sessions were one day apart, the accuracy started pretty low, about 50% of questions correct, and gradually climbed to match the back-to-back study sessions. But check out the 30-day interval sessions, reviewing the material only once a month. They start way down here, only getting 20% of the questions right, and they only climb to a little under 80%, not stellar. But look at the results on the final exam, 30 days after the student's last study session. Tells a story, doesn't it? To get the best results out of distributed practice, you have to ask yourself how frequently you'll need to recall a certain bit of information. If you visit Spain every three years and need to have your travel Spanish ready, if you have to do some trigonometric proofs at work about once a month, or do a YouTube show that requires keyboard shortcuts for editing once every two weeks, just take that recall interval and divide it by 10. That seems to be the sweet spot for allowing your brain to restore its usual pathways and then reinforce the ones you're interested in for maximum strength. Just do a bit of studying at that time interval, and the information will stick much, much better than it would if you were to cram it all into one session, even if that session is right before the test. There are a number of other methods detailed in the review, and again, I suggest that you read it. Maybe by applying these techniques to my random Wikipedia sessions and YouTube binge watching, I might just manage to learn the depths of my own ignorance in these subjects, perhaps avoiding trying to solve every problem with an engineering sledgehammer. Do you think it's a decent idea? Do you have a background in cognitive science or educational psychology and want to point out what I'm getting wrong? Please, for my sake, leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe, blah, share, and don't stop thunking.