People experienced in something ... are far more likely to wax poetically about principles. This is partially due, I think, to most people lacking self-awareness about how they actually learned something.
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Is there a pattern for when this works vs doesn't? It feels like in some fields, principles are crystallisations of experience & in others the tactics are worthless without understanding the principles
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Yeah, the pattern is if the domain is 'ill-structured' vs 'well-structured'. This is a specific academic term, I get into it in the thread below. (Or the more fleshed out article: commoncog.com/blog/how-note-)
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1/ Let's talk about how note taking can help you accelerate expertise.
Yes, I know how that sounds like.
No, this isn't hype.
There's some solid cognitive science here, and it has FASCINATING things to say about the nature of learning in messy, real world domains.
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Thanks that's super interesting!
By this definition would product be ill-structured? My pattern is to teach principles (e.g. solve customer needs) to explain how to reject analogies from superficially similar cases. Sounds like covering more cases could be better?
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Yeah product is definitely ill-structured! You may have principles that you use in your head, but to apply it, you need fragments of real cases to really understand all the way the principles express themselves.
Giving students principles on their own doesn’t work
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And of course cases doesn’t work as well. So there’s this interesting mix where you have to do both.
Thank god for medical education, doing all this hard work for us lol
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or ... the power of *thinking* you've received wisdom
e.g. someone lays out 3 pristine points, that give you a temporary sigh of relief (ah ha, that's it, I can group these things).
That confidence is worth something, of course.
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Yeah I really doubt that amounts to much. (I know you’re biased against naive aping of frameworks so I’m preaching to the choir!)
Concept instantiation is hugely variable in ill-structured domains, which means there’s a gulf between learning the framework and applying it.
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If we take CFT to be true, experts who come up with frameworks are simply extracting heuristics they use.
But they’re able to apply them in variable situations *because* they have a large set of cases to assemble fragments from.
In other words, they know the principles instantiate differently depending on context, and the way they do that is by reasoning on past contexts they’ve seen.
The challenge of education here is to give students the case library that goes along with the principles.
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product cases are HARD I tell you
Because, um, we have day jobs. lol
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