It's an approach to reasoning and thinking used in philosophy and science [1]. It could be applied to any concept. The author's articles and those by Bartosz Ciechanowski [2] are good examples of first-principles explanations of various concepts.
I once gave a talk about Erlang starting with the core idea that = is an assertion of truth and building (most of) the rest of the language from that. Found it a very rewarding approach.
Is there any way for the public to see this talk or learn more about this?
Here’s the Midwest.io talk. Shame the conference didn’t last.
That's why I don't like it when languages use = for key: value pairs like TOML. There seems to be a big meaning of "=" that people forget.
I chose the name of the blog to mean analytic, reductionist reasoning (in contrast to associative, vague reasoning). In the meantime, I also like the following framing, which I wanted to add to the front page of the blog for some time: https://www.cold-takes.com/minimal-trust-investigations/
Informally, it means a methodical and well organized explanation starting from a top level overview then steadily increasing the level of detail until the subject has been fully explained, all while assuming as little prior knowledge as possible from the reader.
It's an Intellectual Dark Web buzzword favored by people like Lex Fridman.