We live in an age of wonders where learning an entity’s truename allows anyone to pull up a practically limitless pool of information on it. I feel like I appreciate this much more, having growing up in a world where it was not true. This is relevant because many educational resources continue to assume the world is like the way it was in 1994 and overstuff you with information about a concept, because where else would you find more information about the concept?

In 2024, I think it’s much more effective to pique someone’s curiosity by giving a single, punchy example to illustrate the concept and providing its truename. Then they will know whether they want to learn more, and do that on their own if so. For example, Benford’s Law is the observation that in many real-world data sets, like a list of the altitude of every US city in feet, the number 1 occurs significantly more than 10% of the time, the number 2 the is second-most frequent, and so on. You are now free to do with that information what you will.