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 experienced growing up in a world where this was not true. This is relevant because many educational resources continue to assume the world is like the way it was in 1999 and try to overstuff you with information about a concept, because where else are you going to find more information about the concept?

I think it’s much more effective in 2024 to pique someone’s curiosity by describing the concept in a single, punchy example and giving its truename. Then they will know whether they want to learn more and how to do that. 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, with the number 2 being second-most frequent, and so on. You are now free to do with that information what you will.