This is a broader question of pedagogy. There's first-principles approaches to teaching and then there's example-based, case-study and other approaches. I happ

This is a broader question of pedagogy. There's first-principles approaches to teaching and then there's example-based, case-study and other approaches. I happen to have sympathies with first-principles, but I've learned over time as a teacher that it can be quite flawed. I've grown to embrace statistical learning: show lots of complex real-world cases until the aggregate makes the statistically-significant patterns common to all the cases clear to the students. That's often actually superior to the abstract fiction of first-principles.