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Reasoning from first principles is ahistorical, and that is why it so rarely works in the real world. No. Reasoning from first principles is hard, and that is

Reasoning from first principles is ahistorical, and that is why it so rarely works in the real world. No. Reasoning from first principles is hard, and that is why it so rarely works in the real world. It's not enough to be contrarian, you have to be contrarian and right, and that's really, really, really hard. Most people reason from first principles, come up with a bunch of bad ideas, and then blame it on inertia and establishment. 99% of the time, the reality is that they're being contrarian and wrong, they just can't accept the latter part. Consider chess. I know the first principles with 100% certainty, but that doesn't help me predict an outcome of a game. I can barely even analyze a single move to any serious degree, let alone two moves ahead. It's because I'm a bad chess player, and most people are bad at reasoning from first principles. Elon Musk is one of may be five people in the world who can actually pull it off. Learning to blame failures on my own ineptitude rather than on the establishment has gotten me an epsilon closer to Musk's awesomeness. I'm still lightyears away, though.

sillysaurus2 13y ago
It's because I'm a bad chess player, and most people are bad at reasoning from first principles. Elon Musk is one of may be five people in the world who can actually pull it off. Hero worship is mistaken. The reason you're bad at chess is because you believe you're bad at chess, so you don't practice. Similarly, most people don't believe they can be Musk, so they don't even try.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  Well yes, most people don't make millions of dollars from a successful exit, so they literally don't have the resources to try to build a car company and a space company and run them simultaneously.
  - smokeyj 13y ago
    I think everyone can benefit from learning how to reason in principle. Unfortunately it's habit forming and can causes tension with the uninitiated.
- ImprovedSilence 13y ago
  Bingo. To the millionth degree. Most people are just blind to the pure amount of effort and work that needs to be put into to getting the right answer. They'd rather just stack it up to being "bad/dumb".
- nbouscal 13y ago
  Spot on. Some research to back you up: http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=32124 http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?articl...
  - mkingston 13y ago
    Do you know what the article means by: "why some become Muhammad Ali and others Mike Tyson"? I think it's contrasting the success of Ali with the (inferred) lack thereof of Tyson. Maybe? But that doesn't make any sense to me; the first paragraph of Tyson's Wikipedia page will tell you why. Unless it's talking about social success. In which case it seems out of context of the article.
    - nbouscal 13y ago
      I know very little about boxing, so I'm really not sure. My thought would be that though both were successful, perhaps Ali was an underdog who became successful where Tyson started successful but hit a plateau? I have no idea whether or not that maps to reality, that's just pattern matching. The other possibility is that the author of the article knows the same amount about boxing as I do, and chose an unfortunate analogy.
antimagic 13y ago
Also, reasoning from first principles requires you to be aware of all of the "principles" that need to be taken into account. Say you decide to build a ship. You calculate the strength needed for the backbone when the ship is sitting in water, you calculate the size of the motor to get efficient movement, you calculate the placement and size of rudders to make your ship as manoeuvrable as possible. You calculate the exact shape of the hull at the waterline, taking into account the flow of water at the desired speed. Your ship is going to be the most efficient ship in the history of the world! But there's a problem. You forgot that occasionally your ship is going to encounter massive waves. Massive enough that half the ship can find itself out of the water as it crests the wave. And then the backbone of the ship breaks, and your wonder of efficiency becomes an artificial reef. Or you forgot to take oxidizing effects into account, and one fine day as you negotiate the port of Newcastle, your rudder's pivots catastrophically fail due to corrosion, the rudder falls off the ship, and your oil tanker runs aground creating a massive environmental disaster. Every time Elon Musk does something that hasn't been tried before, he runs the risk of running into these types of issues - things that we just hadn't thought to think of. Maybe that hold down system that they have for launching Falcons will one day assymetrically fail, dragging the rocket over horizontally before failing totally, leaving a very large missile to shoot along the ground. Or maybe we're going to discover that all of those redundant engines that a Falcon 9 uses create a failure mode that makes one engine failing create a cascade of failures elsewhere, due to pressure imbalances, or an engine explosively damaging those around it, or whatever. Those fires that we've seen in Teslas recently? Guess what, the designers forgot to think of something. Which is not to knock Musk's achievements - indeed, I'm a big fan. First principles are important, they're the only known antidote to cargo-culting, but when you hit out in a new direction because you think that you've found a flaw in the reasoning of previous designers, be aware that here be dragons and your idea may catastrophically fail in novel ways...
- nilliams 13y ago
  > Also, reasoning from first principles requires you to be aware of all of the "principles" that need to be taken into account. Yes exactly. That's where most people fall down, or what certainly seems to be the meme in software, where a person's first principles approach is actually just a naive approach.

sillysaurus2 13y ago

It's because I'm a bad chess player, and most people are bad at reasoning from first principles. Elon Musk is one of may be five people in the world who can actually pull it off. Hero worship is mistaken. The reason you're bad at chess is because you believe you're bad at chess, so you don't practice. Similarly, most people don't believe they can be Musk, so they don't even try.

enraged_camel 13y ago
Well yes, most people don't make millions of dollars from a successful exit, so they literally don't have the resources to try to build a car company and a space company and run them simultaneously.
- smokeyj 13y ago
  I think everyone can benefit from learning how to reason in principle. Unfortunately it's habit forming and can causes tension with the uninitiated.
ImprovedSilence 13y ago
Bingo. To the millionth degree. Most people are just blind to the pure amount of effort and work that needs to be put into to getting the right answer. They'd rather just stack it up to being "bad/dumb".
nbouscal 13y ago
Spot on. Some research to back you up: http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=32124 http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?articl...
- mkingston 13y ago
  Do you know what the article means by: "why some become Muhammad Ali and others Mike Tyson"? I think it's contrasting the success of Ali with the (inferred) lack thereof of Tyson. Maybe? But that doesn't make any sense to me; the first paragraph of Tyson's Wikipedia page will tell you why. Unless it's talking about social success. In which case it seems out of context of the article.
  - nbouscal 13y ago
    I know very little about boxing, so I'm really not sure. My thought would be that though both were successful, perhaps Ali was an underdog who became successful where Tyson started successful but hit a plateau? I have no idea whether or not that maps to reality, that's just pattern matching. The other possibility is that the author of the article knows the same amount about boxing as I do, and chose an unfortunate analogy.

antimagic 13y ago

Also, reasoning from first principles requires you to be aware of all of the "principles" that need to be taken into account. Say you decide to build a ship. You calculate the strength needed for the backbone when the ship is sitting in water, you calculate the size of the motor to get efficient movement, you calculate the placement and size of rudders to make your ship as manoeuvrable as possible. You calculate the exact shape of the hull at the waterline, taking into account the flow of water at the desired speed. Your ship is going to be the most efficient ship in the history of the world! But there's a problem. You forgot that occasionally your ship is going to encounter massive waves. Massive enough that half the ship can find itself out of the water as it crests the wave. And then the backbone of the ship breaks, and your wonder of efficiency becomes an artificial reef. Or you forgot to take oxidizing effects into account, and one fine day as you negotiate the port of Newcastle, your rudder's pivots catastrophically fail due to corrosion, the rudder falls off the ship, and your oil tanker runs aground creating a massive environmental disaster. Every time Elon Musk does something that hasn't been tried before, he runs the risk of running into these types of issues - things that we just hadn't thought to think of. Maybe that hold down system that they have for launching Falcons will one day assymetrically fail, dragging the rocket over horizontally before failing totally, leaving a very large missile to shoot along the ground. Or maybe we're going to discover that all of those redundant engines that a Falcon 9 uses create a failure mode that makes one engine failing create a cascade of failures elsewhere, due to pressure imbalances, or an engine explosively damaging those around it, or whatever. Those fires that we've seen in Teslas recently? Guess what, the designers forgot to think of something. Which is not to knock Musk's achievements - indeed, I'm a big fan. First principles are important, they're the only known antidote to cargo-culting, but when you hit out in a new direction because you think that you've found a flaw in the reasoning of previous designers, be aware that here be dragons and your idea may catastrophically fail in novel ways...

nilliams 13y ago
> Also, reasoning from first principles requires you to be aware of all of the "principles" that need to be taken into account. Yes exactly. That's where most people fall down, or what certainly seems to be the meme in software, where a person's first principles approach is actually just a naive approach.