First Principles Thinking

Are you a chef, or a cook?

In 2002, Musk approached Russians to buy one of their refurbished rockets to send his miniature greenhouse payload to Mars. Quoting an exorbitant price up to $65million per rocket, Musk was ridiculed as a novice and spat on by one of the engineers [3]. Rockets are expensive, that’s what everyone said because they never sought the absolute truth. On a flight back home, he decides to start a rocket company that builds cheaper rockets. Here’s what he said,

About battery packs,

One of the problems was the shortage of carbon dioxide filters, which means, if not solved, sooner or later, the astronauts would die inhaling their carbon dioxide. Engineers on the ground at NASA devised a way to design an improvised carbon filter using nothing but the materials like plastic, duct tape, covers ripped off from the flight user manuals, etc., available on the spaceship. The engineers referred to it as ‘the mailbox.’

First-principles thinking is for everyday use. Buying a car? (Not to flash your wealth). How do you begin with the process? Let’s start with what we know is true. Safety. Of what use is a car if it’s not safe? What safety features does it have? What’s its safety rating? Passenger capacity? What kind of commute do you do? What kind of roads do you drive on? Fuel economy? What kind of parking space do you have? What other features do you want? Do you fancy all leather interior? What’s your budget? The above is not an exhaustive list and won’t necessarily lead to all definite answers, but from first principles, we acquire a deeper understanding of the problem at hand. It takes us closer to the truth.

We asked a lot of why questions as children. We wanted to know the absolute truths and sought a deep understanding of things around us. Somewhere along the journey, forced by parents or teachers, most of us began accepting authority and second-hand thinking and stopped asking whys altogether. We stopped thinking for ourselves. Reasoning from first principles clears the clouds of our belief systems, biases, assumptions, analogies, and dirt from second-hand thinking. Most of us have outsourced our thinking.

By reasoning from first principles, we are not reinventing the cartwheel, but we are trying to understand how the wheel works to build a car wheel. Innovation and creativity is a characteristic of thinking from first principles. Thinking from first principles can be challenging and takes a lot of work; a real pain in the ass. Perhaps why most of us are unwilling to go that extra mile.

Reasoning from first principles is not the end of our quest to seek true knowledge, wisdom, and understanding; it’s the first step towards it.

Footnotes

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