Cognitive Flexibility Theory is a 30 year old learning theory that ends up someplace weird: it tells us that a specific type of note taking will help us learn better from history. In the process, it explicates how expertise works in ill-structured domains, it pokes holes at the primacy of first principles thinking, and it explains how to properly learn from experience.

CFT has two primary claims, but there are two big ideas that we must examine first, before we get into the theory proper.

Idea One: CFT is Concerned With Ill-Structured Domains

The key domain feature that CFT grapples with is something that the authors call an ill-structured domain. An ill-structured domain is a domain where there are concepts, but the way those concepts are instantiated in the real world are hugely variable, and messy as hell.

the formal definition for ‘ill-structured’ is “concept instantiation is highly variable for cases of the same nominal type”.

Idea Two: In Ill-Structured Domains, Cases Are As If Not More Important Than Concepts

if concept instantiations are highly variable in an ill-structured domain, then reasoning from first principles is very difficult.

experts in ill-structured domains reason by comparison to previous cases, not by reference to first principles.

you can’t easily reduce cases in ill-structured domains into generalisable principles. You often have to treat the case as its whole thing.

questions: “why is context useful?”  and “how can you expect to use pattern-matching when faced with novelty?”

I’ve read a lot by Munger and about Munger — and as far as I can tell … Munger spends a lot of time reasoning by analogy.

Ideas Three and Four: The Two Claims of CFT

CFT makes two central claims. How do experts deal with novelty in ill-structured domains? In other words, what lies at the heart of adaptive expertise?

CFT tells us that experts do two things:

They construct a temporary schema on the fly, by combining fragments of previous cases.
They have something the authors call an ‘adaptive worldview’: meaning that they do not think there is one root cause or one framework or one model as explanation for a particular event that they observe in their domain.

They do not reduce a concept like heart attack to just one prototype. They instead have a collection of prototypes in their heads, that they can assemble fragments from.

If you encounter a new case, you update the concept, because the concept is only useful when you know how it is instantiated in reality.

we take the two claims of the theory and invert them to get the pedagogical recommendations:

You want to expose the student to as many cases for each concept as is feasibly possible, so they have a large collection of fragments to assemble from.
You want to inculcate the adaptive worldview.

the researchers recommend using a hypertextual system — that is, a system where you can link to other notes, or link to tags that in turn link to other notes. You get the student to store each case and ask them to highlight concepts. Concepts are backlinked. They go to other cases.

You design a four-stage model for worldview change into the learning system. The four stages go like this — first: demonstrate to a learner that they have a reductive worldview by creating a situation that makes it salient (say, the heart attack diagnosis example, above, where you want to get the student to fail at some task). Second: show how that worldview is maladaptive (show them that the metaphor of the heart as a balloon is flawed). Third: introduce the adaptive worldview and its properties. Fourth: demonstrate the latter’s operation and then provide an activity for mastering it. (Spiro et al, 2007)

How do you construct a CFT hypertext system for yourself?

Step One: Pick a note taking app with backlinking capabilities. Backlinking is a feature where you can select a phrase, perhaps ‘scale economies’ or ‘heart attack’, and turn that phrase into a link — something that looks like [[scale economies]] or [[heart attack]].

Step Two: Start copying cases into your note taking app, perhaps from articles, PDFs, books or blog posts. Mark up particular passages with concepts or case features that you observe. As you do so, split up the passages into smaller segments, that will hopefully show up in your backlink interface.

the researchers stress that there is no one ‘right way’ to turn cases into fragments.

you must look for initial cases that are as different as possible from the ones you currently have. And it means that you should continue looking out for such rich cases until you reach diminishing returns

The CFT learning system is their reference; their job is to do a concept search across the entire case library until they find the relevant fragments and give their best guess answer.

I’ve presented a 30-year old theory that explains how to learn better in ill-structured domains. We ended up at a surprising place: a note-taking learning system to accelerate expertise.