How Note Taking Can Help You Become an Expert

Cognitive Flexibility Theory is a 30 year old learning theory that focuses on the question“how do experts deal with novelty?” . It's one thing to learn to to a certain thing to perfection, but how do you learn to produce new things?

4 key insights of CFT:

1. CFT is Concerned With Ill-Structured Domains
2. In Ill-Structured Domains, Cases Are As If Not More Important Than Concepts
3. Experts construct a temporary schema on the fly, by combining fragments of previous cases.
4. Experts an ‘adaptive worldview’: meaning that they do not think there is one root cause as explanation for a particular event

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. Business, medicine, arts ...

Ex ... heart attacks: A heart attack is a concept. It is a thing you can study in medical textbooks. But actual diagnosis of heart attacks can be hugely variable — it depends on the patient’s race, age, gender, case history, potential complications, and so on; some heart attacks present as indigestion initially, others may last days.

In these domains the experts look more like artist than scientists.