Love this meditation on note taking and expertise in ill-structured domains…

CFT asserts that due to this nature of ill-structured domains, cases are as if not more important than concepts. This second idea is a more subtle one, so we’re going to spend a bit of the time examining the implications.

I think many of us have been exposed to a particular style of teaching in school, where we are taught a concept, and then the examples that illustrate that concept are treated as disposable. My go-to example for this is how we are taught quadratic equations — we are shown one or two examples and then we are expected to memorise the general approach for solving such equations. As a result of this instruction, many of us internalise that concepts are important and examples are not.