4 ms·

Some qualifiers: Working from first principles does work if you're super, super smart. One could argue that Special Relativity was almost a redesign from scrat

Some qualifiers: Working from first principles does work if you're super, super smart. One could argue that Special Relativity was almost a redesign from scratch to the problem of the aether. In any case, it's never really a pure first-principles construct. That's impossible. Your mind is contaminated anyway with all the knowledge from, you know, the shoulders of all the previous giants, and you can't really 100% suspend it at will no matter how hard you try. What matters then is the effort to dive in towards the physical (for engineering) or mathematical (for computing) roots of the problem, and re-arrange the causal links from that depth up. It's always a blended approach, but you may not always be aware that that's what you're doing.

bernardom 13y ago
> Working from first principles does work if you're super, super smart. It depends on the problem you're solving! In a former job, I worked for a consultancy that would be called in to solve industrial problems. Our strategy was to use first principles to truly understand how to best affect the metric we were trying to change- and it worked beautifully, and we built our entire business around it. Yes, we had to hire smart engineers, but not necessarily geniuses- because the problems we were solving weren't "how do I lower the cost of car ownership in this country," they were more like "why has the efficiency of this naphtha recovery plant decreased by 25% over the last year and how can we fix it?" (I'll note that the fact that we were being called in constitutes a type of selection bias- the "typical" methods of solving the problem weren't working.) EDIT: formatting