Saturday, June 18, 2022
Welcome back readers! This is the third part of our Mental Model series, if you somehow missed out on the previous posts, check them out here and here.
Chances are you might have already heard about first principles. This is one of the most famously spoken, yet the least used mental model. Last year in June, I wrote a post on The Passion Pad where we debunked Bitcoin from first principles. In that specific post we discussed what exactly are first principles and how using the first principle approach of thinking we say that bitcoin is valuable. Remember, everything that is not written in the laws of nature is a shared belief. Money is a shared belief. So is the society you are living in. So are the borders. So is bitcoin.
First principles is simple, layman terms means breaking down a complex problem until we arrive at fundamental truths. If you know the first principles of something, you can build the rest of your knowledge around them to produce something new. That’s what Elon Musk did with the aerospace industry and EVs. Elon Musk applied first principle thinking and reduced the cost of rockets by more than 10x. He basically reinvented the entire field of space exploration with first principles. First principles approach is about questioning the assumptions and beliefs that we already have until we arrive at beliefs that are non-reducible.
One important thing here is that first principles are not a checklist of things that will be always true. Our knowledge of first principles change as we understand more and more. For example - If the problem statement is about improving the energy efficiency of a refrigerator, an appliance maker may think about the laws of thermodynamics as first principles and a physicist may further think in terms of entropy. Hence, the appliance maker may have different first principles than that of a physicist.
How to ignore the dogma and identify first principles?
The two most popular techniques are socratic questioning and the Five Whys.
Socratic questioning is a stringent way of analysis to establish truths and separate knowledge from ignorance. Ask these 6 questions to arrive at the first principles -
Why do I think this? What exactly do I think?
How do I know this is true? What if I thought the opposite?
How can I back this up? What are the sources?
How do I know I am correct? What are the other perspectives?
What if I am wrong? What are the consequences?
What conclusions can be drawn from the reasoning process?Why did I think that?
This process helps you build something that lasts and stops you from relying on your gut feel and limits strong emotional response.
Five Whys is basically inspired by children. How they question each and everything and are curious to understand the reasoning behind everything. The goal of Five Whys is to land on a “How” or “What” every time. And if you find yourself answering with “because I said so” or “thats how it is”, you know you have landed on an assumption. If you land on a falsified fact, congratulations you have landed on first principle. This approach is widely used by Jeff Bezoz in taking business decisions.
No doubt that both of these approaches make the decision process slower. There is a lot of research and thinking to be done to answer each question and most of the times we don’t even know how to answer. But this doesn’t mean you ignore your assumptions and beliefs and continue with what the world made you believe. This way you will never learn the first principles behind things.
You might have heard of plant based meat, or artificial meat. Do you know the first principles of meat? The answer generally includes taste, color, texture. Most important to consumers is the taste and less important is if it actually came from an animal. Researchers then looked at why meat tastes the way it does and found that it is nothing but a chemical reaction between sugar and amino acids. They replicated this process through an experiment and produced artificial meat, thus eliminating to raise animals for consumption, thereby addressing some significant environmental and ethical concerns. All this happened because of our understanding of first principles behind meat.
What do you think? Can you find the first principles behind any one concept? It can be anything! Give it a try and you might be surprised that most of our knowledge is nothing but assumptions and what the society has fed us.
See you next Saturday, until then have a great weekend :)
Cheers!
A FEW THINGS KEEPING ME AWAKE
Article: On Children
Video: Pâro: The Feeling That Everything You Do Is Somehow Wrong
Song I am listening to: Butter by BTS
Thought of the week: "Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge."
MEME OF THE WEEK
SARCASTIC REFLECTION
Here are the last three posts if you were too occupied to read them -