First Principal 

First Principal 

 💡 Basic idea of this principle is building on principle. The principle is the basic thing that can't be subtracted further from any other assumption or idea. It's the root because of something. It's like digging deep into something. Say you want to make different recipes for bun. A bun must be puffed. So the basic principle is putting in some substance that helps it puff either yeast or baking powder or basically anything that is edible and generates air in the process. You can add anything on top of this base recipe. and you will get different flavors of bun. Principals are given below to get to the first principle below.

Examples

The coach reasons from the first principles. The rules of football are the first principles: they govern what you can and can’t do. Everything is possible as long as it’s not against the rules.

The play stealer works off what’s already been done. Sure, maybe he adds a tweak here or there, but by and large, he’s just copying something that someone else created.

Another way to think about this distinction comes from another friend, Tim Urban. He says[3] it’s like the difference between the cook and the chef. While these terms are often used interchangeably, there is an important nuance. The chef is a trailblazer, the person who invents recipes. He knows the raw ingredients and how to combine them. The cook, who reasons by analogy, uses a recipe. He creates something, perhaps with slight variations, that’s already been created.

The difference between reasoning by first principles and reasoning by analogy is like the difference between being a chef and being a cook. If the cook lost the recipe, he’d be screwed. The chef, on the other hand, understands the flavor profiles and combinations at such a fundamental level that he doesn’t even use a recipe. He has real knowledge as opposed to know-how.

Techniques for Establishing First Principal

1. Socratic Questioning

This tries to seek out the first principle in a systematic way.

1. Clarifying your thinking and explaining the origin of your ideas. (Why do I think this? What exactly do I think?)

2. Challenging assumptions. (How do I know if this is true? What if I think the other way?)

3. Looking for the evidence ( How can I back this up? What are the sources?)

4. Considering alternate perspective (What might others think? How do I know I am correct?)

5. Examining the consequences (What if I am wrong? What if I am?)

6. Questioning the original question.(Why did I think that? Was I correct? What conclusions can I draw from the reasoning process?)

2. “Because I said so” or “The Five whys”

This is what we used to do when we were kids. We would try to dig deep into any question that we had. But with time we lost our way because often for many questions our parents or teachers said “Because I said so” in classes understanding of some topic is deemed, and if you ask the question - The teacher would either reply -” Why have you not read this in previous classes” or you have to be able to be looked like a fool. This kills our natural way to apply the first principle.

By asking Why? Why? Why? we can dig deep into the root cause of something. Like the Example given below-

Argument-: You should read a lot of books. WHY? Because it teaches us new things about life and lets us know new things we didn’t know before and helps us in solving problems. Why do we want to know about new things and why do we want to solve problems To live life in a complete way and have less trouble moving ahead and growing in any dimensions, earning money, and being able to do things we love the most and living a life full of meaning. Why less trouble and growth, and and and.. why earning money is important and why meaning is important? (Here we may expect deemed understanding of things but this is how a kid would ask questions)

Because no one like pain, trouble gives us lots of pain and just takes up a lot of brain space. Growth is important because life becomes color-less if we don’t aim for growth. Growth is what gives life its purpose. To live a good and successful life growth is necessary. Earning money is important because if you don’t, no one will pay your bills, for food and basic life support. and if you earn a lot… then maybe you can target a much bigger purpose. having meaning in life is important because it’s the reason you live. To live you must have a reason.. because if you don’t have a reasonable life gets boring and you fall into bad habits sometimes.

This argument can go on and on and on but this makes our understanding more deeply about something.

Examples:

1. Elon Musk- I think people’s thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It’s rare that people try to think of something on a first-principles basis. They’ll say, “We’ll do that because it’s always been done that way.” Or they’ll not do it because “Well, nobody’s ever done that, so it must not be good. But that’s just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up—“from the first principles” is the phrase that’s used in physics. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that, and then you see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn’t work, and it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past.

2. Rockets are absurdly expensive, which is a problem because Musk wants to send people to Mars. And to send people to Mars, you need cheaper rockets. So he asked himself, “What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. And … what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.”

3. Somebody could say — and in fact, people do — that battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they will always be because that’s the way they have been in the past. … Well, no, that’s pretty dumb… Because if you applied that reasoning to anything new, then you wouldn’t be able to ever get to that new thing…. you can’t say, … “oh, nobody wants a car because horses are great, and we’re used to them and they can eat grass and there’s lots of grass all over the place and … there’s no gasoline that people can buy….”

Employing First Principal in Real Life

The real power of first-principles thinking is moving away from incremental improvement and into possibility. Letting others think for us means that we’re using their analogies, their conventions, and their possibilities. It means we’ve inherited a world that conforms to what they think. This is incremental thinking.

When we take what already exists and improve on it, we are in the shadow of others. It’s only when we step back, ask ourselves what’s possible, and cut through the flawed analogies that we see what is possible. Analogies are beneficial; they make complex problems easier to communicate and increase understanding. Using them, however, is not without a cost. They limit our beliefs about what’s possible and allow people to argue without ever exposing our (faulty) thinking. Analogies move us to see the problem in the same way that someone else sees the problem.

Let’s take a look at a few of the limiting beliefs that we tell ourselves.

“I don’t have a good memory.” [10]People have far better memories than they think they do. Saying you don’t have a good memory is just a convenient excuse to let you forget. Taking a first-principles approach means asking how much information we can physically store in our minds. The answer is “a lot more than you think.” Now that we know it’s possible to put more into our brains, we can reframe the problem into finding the most optimal way to store information in our brains.

**“There is too much information out there.”**A lot of professional investors read Farnam Street. When I meet these people and ask how they consume information, they usually fall into one of two categories. The differences between the two apply to all of us. The first type of investor says there is too much information to consume. They spend their days reading every press release, article, and blogger commenting on a position they hold. They wonder what they are missing. The second type of investor realizes that reading everything is unsustainable and stressful and makes them prone to overvaluing information they’ve spent a great amount of time-consuming. These investors, instead, seek to understand the variables that will affect their investments. While there might be hundreds, there are usually three to five variables that will really move the needle. Investors don’t have to read everything; they just pay attention to these variables.

**“All the good ideas are taken.”**A common way that people limit what’s possible is to tell themselves that all the good ideas are taken. Yet, people have been saying this for hundreds of years — literally — and companies keep starting and competing with different ideas, variations, and strategies.

**“We need to move first.”**I’ve heard this in boardrooms for years. The answer isn’t as black and white as this statement. The iPhone wasn’t the first, it was better. Microsoft wasn’t the first to sell operating systems; it just had a better business model. There is a lot of evidence showing that first movers in business are more likely to fail than latecomers. Yet this myth about the need to move first continues to exist.

Sometimes the early bird gets the worm and sometimes the first mouse gets killed. You have to break each situation down into its component parts and see what’s possible. That is the work of first-principles thinking.

**“I can’t do that; it’s never been done before.”**People like Elon Musk are constantly doing things that have never been done before. This type of thinking is analogous to looking back at history and buildings, say, floodwalls, based on the worst flood that has happened before. A better bet is to look at what could happen and plan for that.

(Some  parts  are taken from fs.blog )