(Click for copy from Dr. Merrill's personal website), http://www.indiana.edu/~tedfrick/TALQ.pdf, http://www.delmarlearning.com/resources/job_impact_study_whitepaper.pdf, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=First_Principles_of_Instruction&oldid=931096980, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 16 December 2019, at 23:09. Under no circumstances does any information posted on GuruFocus.com represent a recommendation to buy or sell a security. But consider the flip side: how much do we refuse to question because it seemingly is good enough right now? Oh, jeez, it’s … $80 per kilowatt-hour. The action is to improve the automated tests to incorporate a load simulation of the live environment. 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….”.

(2002). Southerner, father, husband, Christian and a retired Army field grade officer. Oh jeez, it's $80 per kilowatt-hour. 2 January 2014. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/buzzfeed, [9] https://www.quora.com/What-does-Elon-Musk-mean-when-he-said-I-think-it%E2%80%99s-important-to-reason-from-first-principles-rather-than-by-analogy/answer/Bruce-Achterberg, [10] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-estimate-boosts-the-human-brain-s-memory-capacity-10-fold/, [11] Breakpoint and Beyond: Mastering the Future Today, George Land, [12] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2rgsan/i_am_elon_musk_ceocto_of_a_rocket_company_ama/cnfre0a/, Inventing new things is hard. He doesn’t understand the difference between something that didn’t work and something that played into the other team’s strengths. Reasoning by first principles removes the impurity of assumptions and conventions. But Aristotle's references to first principles in this opening passage of the Physics and at the start of other philosophical inquiries imply that it is a primary task of philosophy. © 2004-2020 GuruFocus.com, LLC. Another way to think about this distinction comes from another friend, Tim Urban. People hate the “because I said so” response for two reasons, both of which play out in the corporate world as well. Depending on your seniority in the organization, you may be able to make critical strategic decisions such as whether to move all of your applications into the cloud, whether to acquire another company, or whether to lay off half of your staff after a disappointing year. [9] Another study found that biology students learning from instruction using First Principles of Instruction had significantly increased confidence in their ability to solve similar problems in the future, compared to other learners.[10]. Can you imagine how that would play out with Elon Musk? You have to break each situation down into its component parts and see what’s possible. First principles of instruction. First-principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated problems and unleash creative possibility. When you can’t change your mind, though, you die. We're Syrus Partners. What does Facebook for marketers actually mean? “I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can,” says Musk. People I follow and greatly respect (Naval Ravikant, Shane Parrish, Julia Galef, Quora User, Scott Alexander, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etc.) III). Instead, you need to think from first principles.

Why?! They would say it's going to cost $600 per kilowatt-hour. Confronted with our own ignorance, we resort to self-defense. Author’s letter to the translator of the book which may here serve as a preface, p. 181. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=First_principle&oldid=966109965, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 5 July 2020, at 04:27. Socratic questioning can be used to establish first principles through stringent analysis. The recent health care tie-up between Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Berkshire (NYSE:BRK.B) and JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) will most likely result in something spectacular for America’s health care system and I assume Warren Buffett (Trades, Portfolio), Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimon will also apply the “first principle thinking.”. How much cheaper can I make it? Sure, it’s a lot of work, but that’s why so few people are willing to do it. The first reason we hate the game is that we feel like it slows us down. The search for first principles is not unique to philosophy. In R. A. Reiser & J. V. Dempsey (Eds. In an evolutionary sense, the ability to work in abstractions allows us to conserve vast amounts of brainpower. The God of the Bible is most likely the true God. We wouldn’t leave our beds. VOL I, Principles, Preface to the French edition. The cook, who reasons by analogy, uses a recipe. Using these self-evident propositions as his axioms, or foundations, he went on to deduce his entire body of knowledge from them.

And the result: hyperloop. 1013a14–15). 2, pp. The key distinction between Socratic questioning and normal discussions is that the former seeks to draw out first principles in a systematic manner. Utah State University, 2011. Reasoning by first principles is useful when you are (1) doing something for the first time, (2) dealing with complexity, and (3) trying to understand a situation that you’re having problems with. Unfortunately, I am neither and hopelessly ignorant. Meanwhile, it would be great if readers can share some useful insight or resources on the subject in the comment section. While both the coach and the play stealer start from something that already exists, they generally have different results.

Of course, we all have moments when we’re alone and something suddenly clicks. What problem exactly needs to be solved? I’ve heard this in boardrooms for years. We buy amazing businesses. First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world, and what that really means is, you … boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, “okay, what are we sure is true?” … and then reason up from there. Or take the radical idea of the Hyperloop. History, Philosophy, Theology and Classic Wargamming. When you run a team, you want a coach in charge and not a play stealer. When you really understand the principles at work, you can decide if the existing methods make sense. If we never learn to take something apart, test the assumptions, and reconstruct it, we end up trapped in what other people tell us — trapped in the way things have always been done. Most things suddenly seem more possible.

Educ. In philosophy "first principles" are often somewhat synonymous with a priori, datum and axiomatic reasoning. As we age, we reason at ever more abstract levels that don’t need to be concerned with. learning: The 4C/ID-model. Musk then gave an example of how Space X uses first principles to innovate at low prices: 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. We can argue that Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett (Trades, Portfolio), Sergey Brin and Larry Page also applied “first principle thinking” with Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.B) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL). … Click here to check it out. (If you’re a sports fan, you need only look at the difference between the Cleveland Browns and the New England Patriots.). OK, so the example is a little contrived, but I hope that it illustrates a point. There should be 10 such cards. The gulf between what people currently see because their thinking is framed by someone else and what is physically possible is filled by the people who use first principles to think through problems. And as of the time of writing, they’re doing pretty well. He knows the raw ingredients and how to combine them. While it’s easier on your brain to reason by analogy, you’re more likely to come up with better answers when you reason by first principles. When the environment changes, we just continue as if things were the same. Southerner, father, husband, Christian and a retired Army field grade officer. The headline must be persuasive and direct. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box money can buy. He wrote a 57-page paper on Hyperloop, which is extremely interesting. First Principles is different than problem-based-learning, however, in that it provides more guidance and demonstration to students which is reduced as students gain expertise. Musk would build a billion-dollar business to prove you wrong, Feynman would think you’re an idiot, and Munger would profit based on your inability to think through a problem. But that’s just a ridiculous way to think. As the child in the opening example showed, continued use of why helps distill an idea into first principles (or lack thereof). When I meet these people and ask how they consume information, they usually fall into one of two categories. So we can better understand how first-principles reasoning works, let’s look at four examples. It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Yet, people have been saying this for hundreds of years — literally — and companies keep starting and competing with different ideas, variations, and strategies. Let’s take a look at a few of the limiting beliefs that we tell ourselves. Adapting to change is an incredibly hard thing to do when it comes into conflict with the very thing that caused so much success. Why, then, is it so expensive to get a rocket into space? For example, many businesses operate under the assumption that running any of their applications in the cloud is too expensive in the long term. BuzzFeed’s distribution-based approach is based on obsessive measurement, using A/B testing and analytics. In the above example, the first principle that the assumption was based on was that all cloud compute was too expensive, but that wasn’t actually true. The list goes on. For example, we don’t care exactly how a car is put together – we just drive it. This a disciplined questioning process, used to establish truths, reveal underlying assumptions, and separate knowledge from ignorance. They limit our beliefs about what’s possible and allow people to argue without ever exposing our (faulty) thinking. These investors, instead, seek to understand the variables that will affect their investments. It was ridiculous. We’d do well […]. Getting people to accept and use new inventions is often even harder. [11] We’re all born rather creative, but during our formative years, it can be beaten out of us by busy parents and teachers. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. When we use critical questioning to challenge existing assumptions, we dig right down to the building blocks that those assumptions are based on. It's such a fascinating idea and I'll certainly pursue more:) It would be great to exchange thoughts on the subject:). That takes a lot more mental energy.[7]. First principles are generally treated in the realm of philosophy known as epistemology, but are an important factor in any metaphysical speculation. Members Only. Students in the sub-groups take turns to examine the Dark Blue cards with first principles on it. So break that down on a material basis; if we bought that on a London Metal Exchange, what would each of these things cost? At first glance, the answer isn’t obvious. ), Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology, 2nd Edition (Vol. Aristotle, writingon first principles, said: Later he connected the idea to knowledge, defining first principles as “the first basis from which a thing is known.” The search for first principles is not unique to philosophy. It is a technique to uncover the root cause of issues. Thinking through first principles is a way of taking off the blinders. Their young child had entered the why stage. First-principles thinking clears the clutter of what we’ve told ourselves and allows us to rebuild from the ground up. The more I heard about it, the more curious I became about it. I humbly submit my very rough working list of First Principles. We are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing… with slight iterations on a theme. Gardner, J., (2011).