4/ It turns out there's a theory about this. It's called Cognitive Transformation Theory, or CTT.
It tells us how people build expertise in the real world.
Think: less pianists and chess and more business and leadership and investing.
Conversation
5/ The theory's central claim is that we learn by replacing flawed mental models with better ones. The key word is REPLACE.
Here's the catch: the more advanced our mental models, the easier it is for us to ignore anomalous data, or to explain them away. This blocks progress.
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6/ What do I mean by this? Well, let's say you're trying to get better in the real world. This means trial and error.
If the learning environment is kind, you can improve quickly. You build mental models that help you achieve your goals. You become good at what you do.
Yay!
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7/ But most of the time, the learning environment is messy. Learning is hard.
This should be obvious: you don't know what cues to look for in your experiences because you don't have good models. But you can't build good mental models because you don't notice the right cues!
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8/ Worse, having an instructor point out these cues to you might make you worse in the long term. You need to learn to learn from experience.
Learning better from experience means 2 things: 1) getting good at introspection ('sensemaking') and 2) DESTROYING old mental models.
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9/ So here we get at the heart of the theory.
CTT tells us that we learn only when we destroy old mental models. We DON'T learn when we are refining an existing model.
It also tells us that it gets harder to unlearn when our mental models become more sophisticated.
Read:
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Replying to
It's interesting to compare and contrast this with Coherence Therapy, which is largely this but s/mental model/emotional strategy/, but has one crucial difference: The goal is often not to destroy an emotional strategy, but to realise that it is not relevant in context.
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Like e.g. emotional strategies learned in school don't need to be destroyed, they need to be recognised as possibly having been perfectly reasonable for the situation in which you found yourself at the time. What you need to do is to recognise that you are not there any more.
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And some emotional strategies end up essentially dying off because there are no longer any situation where they're relevant, but the process of letting go seems to involve a crucial step of acknowledging that if the strategy were relevant you would still use it.
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And this feels true of mental models too. Like e.g. if I swap roles from computer science to some weird corporate therapy nonsense (hi), what I need to learn is not to get rid of my computer science mental models but to acquire a more fine grained sense of where they work.
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Aye, absolutely. And I mean it's a perfect mapping — emotional coping strategies are also mental models we've constructed as 'things we can use to cope with reality/achieve our goals'.
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Yeah for sure, they're basically the same thing, although emotional strategies are often more entrenched and harder to make explicit (it's perfectly doable, but there's a skill to it that many people don't have)
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(Also note that I don't just mean coping strategies, I mean the full range of "If X then I will feel Y in order to Z" subconscious processes that generate most of our emotional reactions)
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