This is overwhelmingly how I perceive most people. This in particular: ‘reality is social’.
I have personally traced the difference, in myself, to receiving this book at around the age of three or four. It has illustrations of gadgets and appliances, with cut-out views of their internals. I learned almost as soon as I was capable of learning, that nothing is a mysterious black box, things that seem magical have internal detail, and there are explanations for how they work. Whether or not I had anything like a pre-existing disposition that made me love and devour the book in the first place, I still consider it to have had a bigger impact on my whole world view than anything else I can remember.
I got Macaulay’s The Way Things Work (the original) at a slightly higher age. I suspect a big reason I became a computer scientist was the joy of puzzling through the adder diagrams and understanding why they worked.
This is overwhelmingly how I perceive most people. This in particular: ‘reality is social’.
I have personally traced the difference, in myself, to receiving this book at around the age of three or four. It has illustrations of gadgets and appliances, with cut-out views of their internals. I learned almost as soon as I was capable of learning, that nothing is a mysterious black box, things that seem magical have internal detail, and there are explanations for how they work. Whether or not I had anything like a pre-existing disposition that made me love and devour the book in the first place, I still consider it to have had a bigger impact on my whole world view than anything else I can remember.
I got Macaulay’s The Way Things Work (the original) at a slightly higher age. I suspect a big reason I became a computer scientist was the joy of puzzling through the adder diagrams and understanding why they worked.
I traced those adder diagrams as a child as well, and it surely was a formative experience.
This is mine which I recieved at around age six. I don’t recall how many tens of times I read and reread those pages.