---
title: Elementary Lessons
subtitle: Things I wish I'd learned in elementary school
epitaph: is a slow learner
---

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](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34760.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](https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm)
- what "the economy" means
- [how to empty a bottle](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/150503/emptying-a-bottle-faster-by-swirl)
- 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](https://youtu.be/NVhA18_dmg0)
- using a whirlpool to empty a bottle
