Comment by nosianu

You may say that as a joke, but looking back at my education, this is in part what I did later, after uni, when I thought about things to learn next. In my mind, I started explaining stuff in depth, and found the many many many holes in my apparently quite superficial school knowledge.

I think this would be excellent as a once-in-a-while exercise to teach the complexity of it all, after we went the other way to abstract the hell out of everything to make it more palatable. A reality check, so to speak, and as a check for everyone about the many holes in their understanding. Basically, in support of something that has been posted here more than once, this blog post: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

In the last few years I read a lot of easily digestible progression fantasy on RoyalRoad. One frequent theme is rebirth or isekai on another world, one that's usually much more primitive. Often the main character starts bringing earth technology ideas into the new world. And every single time it is obvious that the authors very, VERY severely the complexity and difficulty of even the smallest thing that we take for granted. My favorite blog post describing an extremely simple product, and how large and sophisticated its supply chain is: https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d4499...

To me, this shows that some more awareness of how much complexity there is in things might be valuable.

Being more aware of the connections across our abstractions also helps finding what's missing. It could also help to find optimizations across abstraction borders, instead of limiting oneself to only looking within ones favorite abstraction layer.