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This is a naive article with no critical thought from the author. It feels like the author is just rephrasing quotes from people like Elon Musk (who claims to u
by j7ake 5y ago
This is a naive article with no critical thought from the author. It feels like the author is just rephrasing quotes from people like Elon Musk (who claims to use first principles thinking).
Progress in real life are mostly made by trial and error, and then the underlying theory or first principles are solidified later (eg jet engines, cooking recipes, penicillin).
The cases where things start from theory to some final outcome are incredibly rare and mostly concentrate in the field of theoretical physics.
People who think otherwise are usually people who never had to get their hands dirty in the nitty gritty of science and research (or cooking for that matter).
- weltensturm 5y agoAll things start from theory, just not the kind you think about. It seems you are referring to the academic style of theories, but in reality it is much closer to your mentioned trial and error - if you think about it, trial and error also requires guesses and theories to be viable, just that they don't come in written form, but rather from intuition. And I think intuition is the fundamental building block of first principles thinking or whatever they want to call it.
- guerrilla 5y ago> Progress in real life are mostly made by trial and error, and then the underlying theory or first principles are solidified later (eg jet engines, cooking recipes, penicillin). I like to think of the grand theories as compression actually. Before ZFC, we just had a ton of knowledge and we asked if can we derive this from some set of blatantly obvious axioms and a group of geniuses basically did something like LZW and now we have ZFC and other such foundational theories.