Reasoning from first principles is ahistorical, and that is why it so rarely works in the real world. Political and social constructs inherited through time (like, say, the law) will butt heads against a "pure" new solution. You need the resources (and determination, will, etc) to overpower colossal systems we've arrived at through the progression of history.
If you're going to hit homeruns like Musk, I think you must "reinvent the wheel" like he does. But he has resources to fight those battles, and you -- probably -- don't. When he didn't have those significant resources, like when he started Paypal from first principles, he had an entire cultural shift as his economic lever: he was only able to compete in the online banking and credit card industry because it was an Internet wild west.
I'm not sure that reasoning from first principles is the right first step for someone with no assets now that the internet has legal and corporate oversight swimming through it. But what do I know :P
Reasoning from first principles is ahistorical, and that is why it so rarely works in the real world.
No. Reasoning from first principles is hard, and that is why it so rarely works in the real world. It's not enough to be contrarian, you have to be contrarian and right, and that's really, really, really hard. Most people reason from first principles, come up with a bunch of bad ideas, and then blame it on inertia and establishment. 99% of the time, the reality is that they're being contrarian and wrong, they just can't accept the latter part.
Consider chess. I know the first principles with 100% certainty, but that doesn't help me predict an outcome of a game. I can barely even analyze a single move to any serious degree, let alone two moves ahead. It's because I'm a bad chess player, and most people are bad at reasoning from first principles. Elon Musk is one of may be five people in the world who can actually pull it off.
Learning to blame failures on my own ineptitude rather than on the establishment has gotten me an epsilon closer to Musk's awesomeness. I'm still lightyears away, though.
Also, reasoning from first principles requires you to be aware of all of the "principles" that need to be taken into account.
Say you decide to build a ship. You calculate the strength needed for the backbone when the ship is sitting in water, you calculate the size of the motor to get efficient movement, you calculate the placement and size of rudders to make your ship as manoeuvrable as possible. You calculate the exact shape of the hull at the waterline, taking into account the flow of water at the desired speed. Your ship is going to be the most efficient ship in the history of the world!
But there's a problem. You forgot that occasionally your ship is going to encounter massive waves. Massive enough that half the ship can find itself out of the water as it crests the wave. And then the backbone of the ship breaks, and your wonder of efficiency becomes an artificial reef. Or you forgot to take oxidizing effects into account, and one fine day as you negotiate the port of Newcastle, your rudder's pivots catastrophically fail due to corrosion, the rudder falls off the ship, and your oil tanker runs aground creating a massive environmental disaster.
Every time Elon Musk does something that hasn't been tried before, he runs the risk of running into these types of issues - things that we just hadn't thought to think of. Maybe that hold down system that they have for launching Falcons will one day assymetrically fail, dragging the rocket over horizontally before failing totally, leaving a very large missile to shoot along the ground. Or maybe we're going to discover that all of those redundant engines that a Falcon 9 uses create a failure mode that makes one engine failing create a cascade of failures elsewhere, due to pressure imbalances, or an engine explosively damaging those around it, or whatever. Those fires that we've seen in Teslas recently? Guess what, the designers forgot to think of something.
Which is not to knock Musk's achievements - indeed, I'm a big fan. First principles are important, they're the only known antidote to cargo-culting, but when you hit out in a new direction because you think that you've found a flaw in the reasoning of previous designers, be aware that here be dragons and your idea may catastrophically fail in novel ways...
> Also, reasoning from first principles requires you to be aware of all of the "principles" that need to be taken into account.
Yes exactly. That's where most people fall down, or what certainly seems to be the meme in software, where a person's first principles approach is actually just a naive approach.
It's because I'm a bad chess player, and most people are bad at reasoning from first principles. Elon Musk is one of may be five people in the world who can actually pull it off.
Hero worship is mistaken. The reason you're bad at chess is because you believe you're bad at chess, so you don't practice. Similarly, most people don't believe they can be Musk, so they don't even try.
Do you know what the article means by: "why some become Muhammad Ali and others Mike Tyson"?
I think it's contrasting the success of Ali with the (inferred) lack thereof of Tyson. Maybe? But that doesn't make any sense to me; the first paragraph of Tyson's Wikipedia page will tell you why.
Unless it's talking about social success. In which case it seems out of context of the article.
I know very little about boxing, so I'm really not sure. My thought would be that though both were successful, perhaps Ali was an underdog who became successful where Tyson started successful but hit a plateau? I have no idea whether or not that maps to reality, that's just pattern matching. The other possibility is that the author of the article knows the same amount about boxing as I do, and chose an unfortunate analogy.
Bingo. To the millionth degree. Most people are just blind to the pure amount of effort and work that needs to be put into to getting the right answer. They'd rather just stack it up to being "bad/dumb".
Well yes, most people don't make millions of dollars from a successful exit, so they literally don't have the resources to try to build a car company and a space company and run them simultaneously.
This line of reasoning puts a glass ceiling on your own intelligence. Are you sure that's a good idea?
"Oh well, I probably won't be able to anyway" seems a mistaken way to go about life. Or at least a dull one.
I'd rather know the truth than believe everyone else's mistaken ideas. The only way to do that is via first principles.
Personally, I rather like pg's belief: we're only accomplishing 1% of what's possible. More people should believe that our very way of life is malleable; after all, it is. Mentally buying into the life your generation happened to be born into isn't a good idea, because it implies we've figured everything out.
Very good point. Often there's very little cost to challenging conventional wisdom (think about it). If even 1/100 your attempts to challenge the CW produce results, it can be a winning strategy.
There is a big danger in this line of thinking. Pretending like we don't need to inherit a lot from the previous generations, or from people who think different from us in our current time, is willful ignorance. Every wild-eyed utopian who has striven to rewrite all of the rules has tended to fail pretty badly and has also tended to bring a lot of other people down with'm as well.
We do not need ideologies that call for full breaks from the past any more than we need ideologies that offer no improvements.
Taking over from the previous generation and moving things in a new direction is something that should be carefully considered and by getting as much feedback as possible. If revolutionaries actually listened to the people around them, we'd have a much better world out there...
I'm afraid that current trends have done a lot of damage to a bunch of existing cultural institutions. An easy example of this for readers of this forum would be the music industry. It has been a full-on technological assault which fragmented everything. The sales, the business and the artists themselves were absorbed by Apple, Facebook, and Google and a select few other social networks.
Art needs to be on the outside looking in, so it can properly reflect on society. And art should find it's way in to everyone's hearts, no matter their profession or specialties, so don't think I'm just talking about musicians here. And even within the scope of the music industry the "slacker middle class musician who should just get a programming job" is a really easy target and a huge straw-man.
You're gonna have to go out and define the word "art" on your own terms. Funny enough, you actually have to go out looking for it, it's not just gonna be whatever you read on Wiktionary.
I'll give you a little hint though. Wanton destruction of our cultural heritage is pretty much going in the exact opposite direction.
Art is meaning, expressed. It's another matter that art isn't inherently profitable the way technology is, though.
I'm having trouble understanding your point, possibly due to my own ignorance. It sounds like an indictment against any unpopular change, which would imply society should be a pure democracy. But that seems far from desirable.
> We do not need ideologies that call for full breaks from the past any more than we need ideologies that offer no improvements.
I think that sums it up nicely.
As for art? It doesn't have to mean anything. Art, love, beauty, and truth are all different names and expressions of the same universal thing. Trying to define them is ultimately impossible because they live outside of human constructs like language, but we can FEEL them very easily. We know what love is but only the best artists can even come close to describing it for others.
You seem pretty hung up on binary answers and solutions for things. Well, I hate to break it to you buddy, but you're not gonna find any "one true solution". We need compromise and compassion to rule the day. We all need to understand that none of us silly little humans could possibly have the answers but that we can all FEEL the answers.
So no, I'm not arguing for pure democracy any more than I'm arguing for pure totalitarianism. I know, it's confusing and seemingly a paradox, but I think you're just pivoting off of the wrong thing. Look for the art, dude, look for the art.
Working from first principles does work if you're super, super smart. One could argue that Special Relativity was almost a redesign from scratch to the problem of the aether.
In any case, it's never really a pure first-principles construct. That's impossible. Your mind is contaminated anyway with all the knowledge from, you know, the shoulders of all the previous giants, and you can't really 100% suspend it at will no matter how hard you try.
What matters then is the effort to dive in towards the physical (for engineering) or mathematical (for computing) roots of the problem, and re-arrange the causal links from that depth up.
It's always a blended approach, but you may not always be aware that that's what you're doing.
> Working from first principles does work if you're super, super smart.
It depends on the problem you're solving! In a former job, I worked for a consultancy that would be called in to solve industrial problems. Our strategy was to use first principles to truly understand how to best affect the metric we were trying to change- and it worked beautifully, and we built our entire business around it. Yes, we had to hire smart engineers, but not necessarily geniuses- because the problems we were solving weren't "how do I lower the cost of car ownership in this country," they were more like "why has the efficiency of this naphtha recovery plant decreased by 25% over the last year and how can we fix it?"
(I'll note that the fact that we were being called in constitutes a type of selection bias- the "typical" methods of solving the problem weren't working.)
I think "standing on the shoulders of giants" is the cliche you're looking for.
- Looking over the examples from the blog post, those aren't really from 'first principles'. They are assuming cars and an internet and other huge innovations. I think the real message should be 'double check your assumptions'.
>- Looking over the examples from the blog post, those aren't really from 'first principles'. They are assuming cars and an internet and other huge innovations. I think the real message should be 'double check your assumptions'.
I think the point is that you should view cars as a physical object composed of engineered subsystems instead of as a cultural phenomenon.
This is precisely what it is. The problem is that people view historical success as a starting point (a "shoulder" of a giant) and work from there, rather than what need or problem the giant was solving, and it's requirements.
See: the example given of "Foursquare for hikers". Break down the needs of hikers from a social perspective, and start from there.
Similarly, break down the power needs of a car. Perhaps a battery isn't even the best way to proceed. Really, you just need power. Thinking a battery is the way to go is already making an assumption that other devices' success with battery power translates to "all problems requiring mobile power work best with batteries". That may not be the case.
The parent is referring to a different phenomenon. "The weight of history" might be a way of describing it. In many domains you can't just start over fresh.
"Standing on the shoulders of giants" refers to the idea that we owe much of our knowledge to those who came before us.
Does that make the "The weight of history" equivalent to "The weight of giants"? That is to say we owe much of our knowledge to those who came before even if that knowledge is wrong.
Not quite. The shoulders of giants metaphor is positive. We stand on what they have built and can see farther. The giant is a good thing.
The weight of history (I just made it up) is used more negatively, though much that ties us down is indeed valuable. But when trying to do something new you will be constrained by the structures history has left us. This is both good and bad.
Given the English connotation of giants from the existing quote, I'd avoid using it in the sense you meant.
It's an ideological framework (I guess you could call it that). If a giant's invention of X made Y and Z wildly popular, then we often assume that when designing A, if we want to replicate Y and Z's success, we should start with X.
That is, however, not the case. You need to work from the needs of A, and find solutions to those problems regardless of how the giants did things. The giants likely weren't wrong. It's just that your problem is different than theirs, and so their solutions, no matter how great they are, may not be appropriate.
I'm a great fan of the going from first principles - but I think it and your post ignores one big part of the reason for design by analogy.
A lot of error/bug fixing is evolutional and this knowledge is built up over time through the userbase and design team. You see this in software projects where there's always the temptation to start from scratch, but once in this process there's inherently a lot more bugs and quality control becomes an issue (even though the old clunky system feels low quality, functionally it can be expected to be reasonably error free).
If you're going to hit homeruns like Musk, I think you must "reinvent the wheel" like he does. But he has resources to fight those battles, and you -- probably -- don't. When he didn't have those significant resources, like when he started Paypal from first principles, he had an entire cultural shift as his economic lever: he was only able to compete in the online banking and credit card industry because it was an Internet wild west.
I'm not sure that reasoning from first principles is the right first step for someone with no assets now that the internet has legal and corporate oversight swimming through it. But what do I know :P