I just remembered an incident from middle school. As a middle school memory, it's unremarkable in that it shouldn't have happened in the first place, but is unusual in that some small bit of wisdom can be gleaned from it.
Back then I was what passed for a gifted child, and consequently enrolled in what passed for a gifted education class. During one of my projects—I don't remember which one—one of the teachers said something to the effect that it seemed like I was going off on a tangent. I didn't know what a tangent was, so I tried to explain myself using the entirely incorrect geometric metaphor. Something about legs of a triangle. That's what you get for teaching algebra before trig before calculus.
Whatever line of research I was trying to pursue only looked like a tangent because outside observers weren't looking at the whole picture. My plans were outrageously overambitious as a rule; teaching a preteen the concept of planning fallacy isn't necessarily easy. Nevertheless, I can't shake the feeling that observing the size of the plan is not the hard part of that task.
If we're going to make it through the 21st century, we've got to fix a lot of different forms of irrationality. Giving our "best" and "brightest" such shoddy training does not bode well.
