14/ As a programmer, I find this difficult to accept. Isn't reasoning by analogy lousier than reasoning from first principles?
But it DOES resolve a question I've always had.
Which is this: why is it that Charlie Munger reasons so much from analogy?
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15/ This brings us to Ideas 3 and 4 of CFT, which happen to be the two central claims of the theory.
Recall: the question that CFT attempts to answer is "how are experts able to perform under conditions of novelty?"
We know now that ill-structured domains have a lot of novelty.
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16/ CFT tells us that experts do two things:
1. They construct temporary schemas by combining FRAGMENTS of prior cases.
2. They have something called an 'adaptive worldview', which means they do NOT think there is one root cause or framework or model for any event.
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17/ So this explains why Munger, like expert doctors, reason a lot by analogy to prior cases.
After all, if businesses are always the result of context-dependent events and factors, then you CAN'T reduce case history into simple principles.
It's just too complex.
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18/ Instead, the researchers say that experts do the following (read):
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19/ What does this have to do with note-taking?
Well, now that we have the four big ideas, we can invert CFT's claims to get the pedagogical recommendations:
1. Expand the cases you know, so you have a larger set of fragments to draw from.
2. Inculcate the adaptive worldview.
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20/ And how do the researchers recommend doing this?
The researchers note that you cannot reduce cases, and real world cases tend to be rich with many concepts. So ... the researchers recommend using a hypermedia system to store cases.
That is: a backlinked note taking system!
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21/ Here's what you do: you get the student to store cases, and highlight concepts within the text of each case. Concepts are backlinked. They go to other cases.
There are many variations. Some systems come preloaded with cases, marked up by expert practitioners.
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22/ The initial presentation to the student is also chosen carefully. When presenting a concept for the first time, you want to give a student a case, and then give them a different case that is VERY different from the first.
So the student internalises that cases are variable!
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Replying to
Would you agree that a student who is presented _with_ cases is a different challenge from a PKM creator who is working _through_ unstructured domains?
How do they know what is a bona fide (meaningful/characteristic) instance ahead of time?
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Replying to
Oh yes, I agree. I definitely think it's not as good.
Re: how do you know what is a bona fide instance — this is a rich, tricky, wonderful question, and the short answer is I have guesses but I'm not sure. Check back in a few months after I've put this to practice for a bit.
Related, which addresses your question more directly:
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1/ Let's talk a little about how people learn in the real world.
No, I'm not going to talk about classroom instruction, or pedagogical development, or enrolling in a cohort based course. None of that.
Just a simple question: how do people ACTUALLY learn from doing?
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I think figuring out what is a valid instance is going to be a bit like the challenge described in CTT, and which I expanded on in my summary of that theory here:
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