Reasoning From First Principles in Disruptive Entrepreneurship | Hacker News Reader

Reasoning From First Principles in Disruptive Entrepreneurship

takingpitches.com

67 pointsjww111724 comments

If you don't reason from first principles you can only come up with ideas that are slight derivations of existing ideas. If you reason from first principles you can come up with completely new ideas that have never been tried before. If you continue this process you don't have to worry about people stealing your ideas because you'll come up with so much stuff that you'll never run out of new things to try.

The one problem with reasoning from first principles is it becomes hard for anyone to judge your ideas and give you feedback before you try them. You have to be able to check yourself because most people, when introduced to a novel idea will think "Sounds like a good theory" and shrug their shoulders because they can't compare it to anything similar in their personal knowledge base.

I completely agree. I come up with a lot of ideas and mention them to family/friends and 9 times out of ten the first thing they say about it is a huge obstacle or that it isn't feasible. I've always thought it was interesting that a majority of people, when presented a new idea, tend to go with the "Sounds like a good theory" reaction than imagining that it can be possible. That is why I admire Elon, in the face of all the critics that say it isn't possible he makes it possible.

I think it's interesting that when talking about apps, people take this perspective. When talking about economics and social justice, the same people are quite reactionary.

In my experience, of course.

Have created an overview of all his interviews here: http://everyelonmuskvideo.tumblr.com

This is also cool: http://shitelonsays.com

Your second link is pretty amusing. His sense of humor never really seems to come across on video, but I was actually laughing at a few of those.

"Reasoning from first principles" is just a bullshit way of saying, analogise using fundamentals and don't hand-wave or fit to a narrative when you have empirical data.

The example with material constituents of a battery is still reasoning with analogy - you had to draw analogies with other problems with similar solution structures: the important thing here was knowing the fundamental principles about satisfying economic problems, and the scientific domain knowledge relating to the creation of a high-quality battery.

Exactly. Reasoning from first principles vs analogizing is a false dichotomy. As you point out, the two methods aren't even mutually exclusive.

I like Elon's way of thinking, but it's not always easy to determine what the first principles are. In physics you have a couple of centuries to figure it out. In software or apps or whatever it's much less clear.

From a startup perspective, he gave an example of looking for inefficiencies in the costs of materials, which totally applies outside of physics.

(and I agree, first principles are a pain in the ass)

I agree, it's incredibly less clear. I re-watched his TED interview and started researching different ways of determining first principles. Thought this was an interesting perspective. I found this post particularly interesting in relating first principles to software development: http://www.mytechfetish.com/2013/04/first-principle-reasonin.... I can relate with how this article states that there is more reasoning in analogy than examining processes through looking at the first principles. I just started a new job at a tech center and I finding a lot of "that's just how it's always been done" going on.

I liked the interview, but I didn't like the article interpreting it. In particular, they bash the X of Y pattern, but Tesla is the Apple of cars. No X of Y moniker is ever perfectly accurate, but that one is close enough to give somebody who's never heard of Tesla a general idea of its goal, which is the whole point of saying we are the X of Y. If people have already heard of you, you can just say your name; it doesn't and shouldn't occur to you to describe yourself as the X of Y.

It's unfortunate that an interview that should be encouraging to uncertain hackers was twisted into another way to bash new uncertain things.

Indeed. Just because you're reasoning from first principles doesn't mean the people trying to understand what you're doing need to reason from first principles.

One of my first principles for customer acquisition is that potential customers are looking for any excuse whatsoever to ignore you. Making understanding difficult for them is a very straightforward way to turn them off.

Well said. How you analyze and solve problems yourself is different than how you first introduce your resulting idea to someone who's never heard of it.

The point of the article is that you don't have to fit something into the X of Y framework, and trying to do so can often be limiting. Yes, this advice is general and sort of vague, but it pushes people to try to question the status quo and look at things in novel ways. Which I think everyone can agree is a good idea..

First principles totally get worked out in software.

37Signals did quantitative research to find out that for them, a girl smiling on their homepage for Basecamp totally works. Then 5,000 startups followed suit and the whole world is full of smiling girls on home pages.

But the principles behind that decision drive conversion for basecamp, not the girl.

It's one of the things that is most concerning to me about the Lean Startup. The idea that you can follow a series of steps to manufacture revenue without really understanding what those steps mean is hypnotizing.

re: The lean start-up - does it matter? I'm sure you can 'go deep' understanding the cognitive science behind why the smiling girl works, and that might give you some insights, but without perfect knowledge of the whole world you could never perfectly understand why, and instead of spending that time with deeply understanding more about the why you could run 50 other experiments to find other things that worked or didn't work.

Analogous to the materials cost of batteries is the information content in software - what information do we have, what information do we want, what is the theoretically minimal possible transform?

But, like materials->batteries, finding clever ways to actually do that requires a lot of mental energy.

> Then the question is do you have the courage to move forward and tackle it to change it and create customer value.

Thinking that what is missing in order to tackle a big problem is courage, is like thinking rockets can levitate if they just put their minds to it. In fact, resources are what is needed to tackle a big problem.

It's at least a little funny that the explanation for reasoning from first principles is an analogy to physics.

Rich Hickey is another one worth reading (/listening to) for more examples of breaking things down to core principles, and potentially coming up with a new approach based off them. For example datomic, which breaks a database into the core components of storage, query, and transactions.

Elon has also spoken of thinking from first principles of physics for getting humans into space, particularly in developing the Grasshopper reusable launch vehicle.

Oh no, the units! I had to go watch the interview to make sure Musk said it right: $600 per KWh, not the silly $600 KW per hour that is written in the article...

I don't even read units at the press anymore. I developed some kind of blindness that, when I see a unit all the information I gather is a label from the set {SI, meaningless}.

"Disruptive $topic"

eyeball roll

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