[ChrisjayHenn]

I still credit my academic achievements to my father reading 'Dune' to me as a child, because I was fascinated by the (paraphrased) introduction to one of the chapters: "Many comment on how quickly Paul Muad-dib learned, but they do not realize that his first lesson was in how to learn, and the first part of that lesson was believing he could learn... it is amazing how few people believe they can learn".

That book is probably the reason I treated learning as a learnable skill rather than an innate ability.

[psyc]

My parents got me my most influential book when I was 4. "What Makes It Go? What Makes It Work? What Makes It Fly? What Makes It Float?" by Joe Kaufman. It taught me that everything has causal inner mechanisms. From then on, I had xray vision and could imagine the inner mechanisms of every object at work.

[mrkgnao]

The conviction that the world, pace certain "intrinsic" limits of the information-theoretic or quantum-mechanical nature, is understandable is a singularly powerful one. It's something lots of people think they believe, but it took me (anecdotally) until I was 9 or 10 to internalise it. The belief that the X-ray vision you speak of exists is enough in many cases for one to "get" it.

I do not mean to start a tangential flamewar, but the ability to accept and be comfortable with not knowing, while at the same time believing that the unknown is not unknowable, is something a certain kind of religious worldview precludes. This is one thing which I realised quite early on that my parents didn't share my beliefs on: for them, there's some underlying agent that chooses what happens in situations that we call random or do not understand:

"I don't know why this happens, but there's no reason why we never should/it's not computable/etc."

"Ah, child, it's time to accept things as they are. When I do not understand, I say God's causing it to happen."

It's a confusing mixture of the different positions one can take on determinism coupled with a sort of complacence I find remarkable.