Elementary Lessons
In the US heartland there is a popular book with a feel-good list of lessons that are often reprinted as posters: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.
Everyone must have gone to a better kindergarten than I did, because there are many things I wish I’d learned much earlier in life:
- how to properly brush my teeth
- fundamental attribution error
- hyperbolic discounting
- how to efficiently tie my shoes
- what “the economy” means
- how to empty a bottle
- science is about refining models (the map is not the territory)
- to shake my hands dry
- subsidiarity
- basic systems thinking and the limits of reductionism
- that being an introvert is acceptable
- how color actually works