Enjoyed this post greatly @cedric, as did one of my friends I shared it with. It helped resolve some of the discomfort he had with his appreciation for the case learning method used when he got his MBA that didn’t square with his love of principles and abstraction.
When you or I (that is, non-doctors) think of a heart attack, we probably imagine a prototype of a heart attack in our heads. That is, we imagine what we think is an ‘ideal’ heart attack, where a person falls over and clutches his or her chest. Expert doctors do not do this . 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.
The above has crystallized for me over the past year as I read How Emotions are Made and came to better understand LFB’s definition of a concept. She talks about how the Darwinian view of population (Population Thinking | Lisa Feldman Barrett) does not really allow for an ideal - it’s made up of variations around a mean set of characteristics and traits. If you had never heard of a dog I showed you a chihuahua and told you it was a dog, and then showed you a great dane and told you it is also a dog, you would be understandably confused. But if I showed you a chihuahua, 100 other examples of different dog breeds, and then a great dane, it wouldn’t be much of a leap as the concept variance is significantly more established. It’s only natural to think the same would happen for other concepts.
How do you construct a CFT hypertext system for yourself?
This seems like a ton of work, I’m looking forward to hearing about your results. I wonder if there’s a lighter, looser version based on this that leverages the interstitial journaling process to “backlink your life” by creating a record of your experiences (free of fuzzy memory retrieval and hindsight bias). This way you can go back to related instances and experiences as needed and reference them as a kind of streaming decision journal. It wouldn’t be CFT, but I think it might be something interesting.
I started my first role as a Product team leader today, so maybe now is a good time to try to kick something like this off.