fundamentals are useless for adults

There's often a lot of space between learning fundamentals and being able to do a thing. Understanding Turing machines didn't immediately make me an expert programmer. A lot of fundamental insights are useful because they subtly shape everything. The 'everything' is valuable when you're young and you still have a lot of room for them to pay off. When you're old, the 'subtle' part dominates: in any given case they may not make much difference, and being an adult is all about specific cases.

• Consequence: teaching intro courses, hanging out with young people, forces you to think more deeply than hanging out with adults.
  • Like any good learning algorithm, smart kids are trying to carve the world at its joints. They haven't yet learned to participate in adult discourse so they aren't polluted by the fact that the discourse is wrong. So they are more likely to have original thoughts, and those thoughts can lead to deeper insights.
  • Kids also force you to think about fundamentals. They need to learn the basics before they can learn more complicated stuff. So you have to teach them, and communication is processing. It would still be valuable even if the kids contributed nothing.
• Consequence: the kind of abstract thought I'm often writing in this notebook might seem like vague generalities to an adult: not actionable and so not interesting. But kids might benefit a lot from it. Things like self-love or concepts like (arbitrarily, for example) reality tunnels or negative utility might affect how they develop and the lens through which they view future things they learn.