How Construal Level Theory Will Make You Learn Faster
By: John Von Neumann Ii
Tags: Self Improvement, Education, Productivity, Inspiration, Science

How Construal Level Theory Will Make You Learn Faster

And how to prioritize to speed up your learning

By Gregg Henriques at English Wikipedia — Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Premeditated Chaos using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18377354

Overview

Analogy: Canonical nucleobases Construal level theory and prioritization Organizing construals from high to low + top-down and bottom-up approach Striving to be in a local/global maximum How I personally organize the construals Tree analogy Measuring the level of construals: 5 primary dimensions Summary

Analogy: Canonical nucleobases

There are 5 primary (or canonical) nucleobases:

Adenine (A) Cytosine (C) Guanine (G) Thymine (T) Uracil (U) (this one rarely occurs in DNA and doesn’t in humans)

Yet out of 4 (excluding uracil) elements complicated things like humans get created.

I have personally used this analogy a lot to remind myself how I can learn way faster by starting with the general and basic knowledge blocks before going into the details.

Construal level theory and prioritization

S o the main model I am using is called “construal level theory”. It is essentially a continuum going from concreteness (low-level construal) to abstraction (high-level construal).

Extrapolating the aforementioned analogy, and we get to the idea that it’s usually best to prioritize learning higher-level construals first before lower-level construals.

If you are reading Wikipedia articles, this process usually happens without you having to organize things yourself. The introduction usually has the highest-level construals while the rest of the article are lower-level construals.

But what if you have to prioritize things yourself?

Organizing construals from high to low + top-down and bottom-up approach

Striving to be in a local/global maximum

I believe one should find a balance between organizing things beforehand (top-down) and having it all prioritized in a somewhat autoregulated manner (bottom-up).

What you essentially want to be in, is what is called a “local / global maximum”:

By KSmrq — http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Extrema_example.svg, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6870865

This can be done (theoretically) by solving the equation:

Change in quantity - change in quality = 0 Where quantity = bottom-up | quality = top-down

This way, you are maximizing the output: E.g. you are not spending too much time organizing things from high- to low-level construals that could have been spent on actually learning these construals.

How I personally organize the construals

There are 2 main ways I utilize to classify higher- and lower-level construals:

Intuitively (e.g. via anecdotical frequency of a particular concept or estimating its future occurrence relative to my own life circumstances) Via relational knowledge base management software (RKBMS) e.g. Obsidian.md

So the first one you mostly have to learn yourself and I don’t really think it’s interesting to talk about that one.

The second one, however, is.

I use a software called Obsidian.md:

And the main feature I like is the concept map that gets somewhat automatically created when linking different notes with each other.

So what happens when connecting different nodes (notes) is that the more a node connects with other nodes, the bigger it physically gets (i.e. the node weight) as seen in the following image: