9/ This leads us to Idea Two: in ill-structured domains, cases are AS if not MORE important than concepts.
This is a tricky idea, so let's slow down a bit.
I think most of us are taught to think that concepts are important, and cases are 'just' examples.
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10/ Usually we say something like "it's the PRINCIPLES that are important!"
How did we get here? I think we got here because we are taught to think like this.
In math class, for instance, we are given 1-2 examples but we know it is the formula that is important.
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11/ Yes, I know that certain schools teach from cases, not concepts alone.
But if you are trained to think that 'first principles' are important, you will think that the cases are so that you can extract generalised, abstract principles, and that THOSE are primary.
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12/ So what does CFT tell us?
CFT tells us that in ill-structured domains, concepts are hugely variable so reasoning from concepts are insanely hard.
In fact, extracting generalisable principles from case studies is close to impossible!
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13/ It turns out that experts in ill-structured domains DON'T reason from first principles as much. They tend to reason from past cases instead!
(Sure, they may TALK about concepts and principles, but the concepts are clusters of cases in their heads.)
Read:
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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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If the analogy is exactly right—ie, in a deep, structural sense—then it is equivalent to thinking from first principles
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Have you checked out Hofstadter’s Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking?
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Yeah I fought through it to the end. It was enlightening but could have used more editing and shortening by at least half
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FWIW, there’s a large and surprisingly rich literature on analytical reasoning that I fell into around the same time I found the CFT paper. Partly because the CFT research is adjacent to it, but partly because pointed me to it.
But the way you framed it is beautiful.
I’ve never heard it phrased like that — “if structural deep … equivalent to first principles thinking.”
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Interesting? Any specific recs?
Kind of you to say - I do at least credit Surfaces & Essences for making that idea very clear in my mind
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