First Principles Thinking

> Reasoning by first principles removes the biases, assumptions and conventions.

First principles are assumptions. smh. It would be hard to write a more philosophically naive and generally unconvincing article on this topic.

I feel as if we are constantly looking for ways to be "better than you," and I always interpret these types of statements as people reinforcing that the way they do things is better than others, and, by extension, they, as humans, are better than others.

In my experience, we usually have some kind of balance. There's things that each of us are good at, and things that we are not. Sometimes, the things we're good at, are valuable to others, and we can make money, or achieve status. For example, software development, top-shelf athleticism, or strategic management thinking. Other things, maybe not as valuable (monetarily or status-wise), such as being an excellent parent, a great teacher, or a true Servant pastor.

I'm a great geek, but a really, really bad athlete. I'm not an especially good dancer, and I have not exactly left a trail of broken-hearted beautiful women in my life. I am not a captain of industry, and I have not done a TED talk.

So, no, I'm probably not actually "better than" anyone else, even if I do fit the criteria for "first principles thinking."

I do think there is value in putting a name to the process of analyzing what assumptions, mental models, schemata, etc are more fundamental than others.

I don't generally approve of the hero worship of economically successful individuals like Musk et al, or trying to futilely guess at "the" cause of their success. But, that doesn't mean that Mr. Musk didn't have a point when he explained that his undergrad degree in physics encouraged him to look at the "everyone knows XYZ is best/possible/impossible" truisms and figure out what conditions led to that conclusion and whether those conditions actually apply to the specific situation he cares about.

The same thing happens in programming. How many times have you, or someone you know, tried to translate a "best practice" from one programming language or framework to another one only to realize that best practices are context-dependent? If that's ever happened to you, you would've benefited from "first principles thinking". WHY is that best practice recommended? What problems is it trying to help you avoid? Is that problem likely to occur in your new programming language? Can you even apply the best practice in the new language? If you can, will it still actually prevent the problem it was designed to prevent?

Whether or not the chef/cook analogy is accurate, I don't think the main takeaway should be that chefs are "better" than cooks as people. I think the point should be that sometimes "cook"-ing is fine, but if you want to become an expert at something, you need to go beyond following "recipes" and figure out how it all works under the hood.

For example, have you ever met a chef that was able to sketch out the 3-d structure of the various molecules and that used that information to guide their recipe?

No most chefs are using finely tuned heuristics about how different ingredients interact.

> When first principles form the foundations, the solution is sturdy. Elon Musk built both SpaceX (rockets) and Tesla (batteries) based on first principles. BuzzFeed's vitality is built on first principles.

I didn't like the article, and these passages illustrate why.

Musk appears to have derived his dislike of LIDAR more from ideas than technical studies. Most of the rest of industry seems to disagree...

First principles thinking carries the implicit values of keeping things simple enough to reason about that way. It doesn't deal well with suppliers and ecosystems.

In tech, "Everyone else does it this way" IS a technical advantage because of economies of scale and compatibility.

If your custom thing is just right for your application, it's probably a liability to the ecosystem in general, because "just right" tech is tuned for one product without concern for the whole system.

Progress in real life are mostly made by trial and error, and then the underlying theory or first principles are solidified later (eg jet engines, cooking recipes, penicillin).

The cases where things start from theory to some final outcome are incredibly rare and mostly concentrate in the field of theoretical physics.

People who think otherwise are usually people who never had to get their hands dirty in the nitty gritty of science and research (or cooking for that matter).