Elon Musk on First Principles

http://blog.microlancer.com/elon-musks-greatest-weapon-laymans-guide-first-principles/

by npostolovski • 13 years ago

189 99 13 years ago

blog.microlancer.com

saraid2162• 13 years ago

A similar theme, but on game design, can be found here:

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013804/MUD-Messrs-Bartle-and-T...

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

I'm a big fan of reasoning from first principles, but in practice it tends to work out more like 'total honesty' does with your spouse. Which is to say, not always all that great.

I tend to be a reasoned sort of guy, this doesn't mean I don't say stupid things, I do, but when called on those things I can tell you how I reasoned to them and you can help me see the error in my reasoning. When someone can't reason from such a basis, and they are insisting on some plan or assertion based on their 'gut' I find it very hard to accept that as acceptable. When they won't even talk about how one might reason to the point, I find it unacceptable.

Some people are very invested in being "right" and letting them know they may not be right is taken as an attack on their person rather than their reasoning. One of the smartest guys I met at Google had this issue. You could do ok with the Socratic Method (asking questions that might lead them to understand where they were mistaken) but even that was dangerous if done in a group context (since the audience could figure out they were wrong before they could come up with a rationale). When someone works with me to explain their reasoning I really appreciate and respect them for that.

redmaverick3• 13 years ago

> When someone can't reason from such a basis, and they are insisting on some plan or assertion based on their 'gut' I find it very hard to accept that as acceptable. When they won't even talk about how one might reason to the point, I find it unacceptable.

Not all people rely on linear and logical problem solving abilities. People who are creative tend towards "gut/intuition/instinct". Take for example Magnus Carlsen, who is the highest rated chess player of all time. He does not calculate logically which move to play next. Using his vast experience, he knows intuitively the best possible move to make next. Likewise there are chess grandmasters who are more methodical and calculating.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

― Albert Einstein

Radim2• 13 years ago

Occult drivel. Where on earth did you read that about Magnus Carlsen?

To say good chess players (not to say grandmasters, let alone world champions) don't calculate moves borders on insulting.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

I didn't mean to imply that I don't appreciate intuition, I do. But I like to follow it up with reasoning. People with good 'instincts' often have excellent reasoning going on at the sub-conscious level, often in reflection they can tap into that bring it out for those of us who were wondering how they got there :-)

resetmp• 13 years ago

Please don't attribute quotes to well-known people without reliable references. This is a false Einstein quote paraphrased by Bob Samples in his book Metaphoric Mind: A Celebration of Creative Consciousness.

[1] http://www.quora.com/Albert-Einstein/Did-Einstein-ever-say-%...

tunesmith2• 13 years ago

It's a tradeoff. Intuitive/gut thinking and heuristics are faster. But they'll be wrong when things are counterintuitive. And people that rely strongly on these models are often the hardest to convince of counterintuitive results.

The trick is to become facile at both methods.

drone2• 13 years ago

I tend to be a reasoned sort of guy, this doesn't mean I don't say stupid things, I do, but when called on those things I can tell you how I reasoned to them and you can help me see the error in my reasoning. ... When they won't even talk about how one might reason to the point, I find it unacceptable.

I'm not sure that the outcome would be different in this case, whether you reasoned by analogy or by first principles. Neither accept a complete lack of reasoning, and both expect some basis for that reasoning.

jonnathanson• 13 years ago

"You could do ok with the Socratic Method (asking questions that might lead them to understand where they were mistaken) but even that was dangerous if done in a group context"

This is very true, and I've learned it the hard way.

I do not advise using the Socratic Method to dissect the reasoning of a "needs-to-be-right" personality in a group setting, particularly if that person happens to be your superior. It's been my experience that these personalities will feel under attack, and possibly even attribute personal/political motivations to you.

When removed from a group (i.e., to your point, an audience), the Socratic Method works a lot better. It allows the recipient of the questioning to save face. He or she will be much more likely to engage in a real dialogue.

gnaritas4• 13 years ago

The problem is the Socratic Method should only be used on someone who accepts that you're trying to teach them something. It's insulting when used in another context.

vbtemp• 13 years ago

in practice it tends to work out more like 'total honesty' does with your spouse. Which is to say, not always all that great.

Spoken like a true wise man.

ademarre2• 13 years ago

I think there's a difference between working with first principles to develop an idea, and reasoning with first principles to explain the developed idea to others.

When it comes to explaining the idea to others, using a first-principles line of reasoning is only one of your options.

thangalin5• 13 years ago

"Reasoning from first principles: What’s the least information I need to collect from the user to make the app functional?"

Functional web apps do not need any user information.

People should be able to use the app without having to submit any contact details. An account is created for them automatically, and, presuming they like the app, they can provide contact details later.

Similarly, most apps do not require passwords at all. E-mail authentication provides a better security layer than forcing users to pick yet another (insecure) password.

The algorithm for using the site becomes:

1. System creates an account with a unique account ID if the user has no site cookie.

2. User, upon being impressed, provides e-mail and name.

3. User can sign in later using their e-mail address.

4. User receives an e-mail with a login link to click.

Most users these days will already have their e-mail application open (be it Outlook, GMail, etc.), so leveraging all the work that has gone into making e-mail secure is a win.

Aqueous• 13 years ago

This works if the ultimate goal is to sign them up for a free account. But what if the goal is to convert them to a paid account after a certain trial period? A user can just clear their cache or cookies and use it free indefinitely.

robotresearcher• 13 years ago

Persistent state (e.g. documents, settings) only available to signed-in users?

thangalin5• 13 years ago

In freemium models, some features are free. People should be able to use the app without submitting contact details. I did not state that all features had to be free. Enough features should be available that users can quickly understand premium account benefits. Deciding what features to make free vs. premium can be a difficult business decision.

Then, unlock premium features for registered (paying) accounts. (Trial periods require superfluous tracking code that offers little business value, if any.)

See: http://www.forbes.com/sites/brettnelson/2013/07/23/the-freem...

gnaritas4• 13 years ago

so leveraging all the work that has gone into making e-mail secure is a win.

What? Email isn't close to secure.

thangalin5• 13 years ago

The point is that e-mail vendors (e.g., Google, Microsoft) have dedicated far more resources and effort to securing their e-mail software (e.g., GMail, Hotmail) than start-ups will, or can, dedicate for their own authentication component. (For example, how often are all GMail passwords been stolen?)

I am suggesting that the authentication process for e-mail is far more secure than what a start-up could produce to authenticate for their own site. I am not suggesting that e-mail is NSA-proof.

dspeyer• 13 years ago

Most websites use email as the password recovery mechanism. "Authenticate by email" is strictly better than "authenticate by password or email".

0110111003• 13 years ago

Did you really have to come up with a name for it: "reasoning from first principles"? Does it not bother anyone else that this is just "thinking"? I mean, if you can deal with the cost of re-engineering the battery, then why not? Is this not common sense?

adwn• 13 years ago

Reasoning by analogy is also "thinking". What's wrong with giving different names to different ways of approaching a problem?

0110111003• 13 years ago

Because it formalizes thought and encourages people to use templates rather than actually thinking about it themselves. If you're "solving problems" by always referring to your sheet of "problem solving approaches", then you're doing it wrong. You might still be successful in solving a problem, but you've effectively turned yourself into a robot.

swalsh2• 13 years ago

And Test driven development is really just "Development"... why did they need to make a name for that?

I think what Musk is trying to do here is provide structure, and intention to the WAY he thinks.

rhizome• 13 years ago

It's a more-specific form, used to distinguish a particular method.

j45• 13 years ago

Musk's thoughts are a great read -- thanks for sharing this.

Much innovation lies at the intersection of a mindset existing in possibilities, fuelled by creativity and ignoring what has, or hasn't been done before and really cut to the root of why people desire something or have a particular need.

swalsh2• 13 years ago

A few years ago i went to this talk where the founder of Kiva Systems (automated warehouse systems) was giving a talk. He was mentioning how he came up with the idea, and it was actually quite a structured approach. He altered the parameters to the theoretical maximum (what if the warehouse was an infinite size) what would the solution be? What he eventually came up with is the system they have today.

Structural thinking, the way Musk talks about is really useful. It is not intuitive to move the shelves instead of the warehouse picker, and thinking by analogy probably wouldn't have lead to that moment of inspiration.

kiskis• 13 years ago

that kiva system is very cool, here is a tedx video about it, and some words about the theoretical min-max parameters mentioned.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szU2-1infqc

codex2• 13 years ago

Reasoning from first principles is a symbolic approach. Reasoning by analogy is the intuitive approach. Both have their place. Intuitive thinking works especially well on fuzzy problems with incomplete and/or conflicting data, where a statistical approach is likely best. Reasoning from first principles is indeed hard, but the reason it's so little used is because it often doesn't produce real world results.

krmmalik• 13 years ago

I'm someone that has thought like this for most of my life, the biggest problem I have however is persuading others to do the same. Take for example a client, I'm helping them with improving their email marketing. I ask them do they really need a huge disclaimer at the end of each email? They dont budge.

Or say - I'm working on a mobile app and try to persuade my co-founder that we should consider doing things one way and then his response "but xyz company is doing it this way. so should we".

cbhl• 13 years ago

I have this habit of highlighting text as I read, and on this website, I find that the text is gray and the highlight is a very similar shade of gray.

Does this bother anyone else?

ademarre2• 13 years ago

Hear, hear! Yes, I do that too and noticed the same when reading from microlancer.com.

I think it drives my coworkers crazy when they're looking over my shoulder reading from the same screen.

Elrac• 13 years ago

Yes! I came here to opine that in an ideal world somebody would slap the site designer for his lousy color choice.

All the more ironic that this is a developer trying to tell us about innovative and creative thinking.

aridiculous• 13 years ago

Reasoning from first principles is ahistorical, and that is why it so rarely works in the real world. Political and social constructs inherited through time (like, say, the law) will butt heads against a "pure" new solution. You need the resources (and determination, will, etc) to overpower colossal systems we've arrived at through the progression of history.

If you're going to hit homeruns like Musk, I think you must "reinvent the wheel" like he does. But he has resources to fight those battles, and you -- probably -- don't. When he didn't have those significant resources, like when he started Paypal from first principles, he had an entire cultural shift as his economic lever: he was only able to compete in the online banking and credit card industry because it was an Internet wild west.

I'm not sure that reasoning from first principles is the right first step for someone with no assets now that the internet has legal and corporate oversight swimming through it. But what do I know :P

wwkeyboard• 13 years ago

I think "standing on the shoulders of giants" is the cliche you're looking for.

- Looking over the examples from the blog post, those aren't really from 'first principles'. They are assuming cars and an internet and other huge innovations. I think the real message should be 'double check your assumptions'.

pkinsky• 13 years ago

- Looking over the examples from the blog post, those aren't really from 'first principles'. They are assuming cars and an internet and other huge innovations. I think the real message should be 'double check your assumptions'.

I think the point is that you should view cars as a physical object composed of engineered subsystems instead of as a cultural phenomenon.

graeme3• 13 years ago

The parent is referring to a different phenomenon. "The weight of history" might be a way of describing it. In many domains you can't just start over fresh.

"Standing on the shoulders of giants" refers to the idea that we owe much of our knowledge to those who came before us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_gi...

logicallee• 13 years ago

I don't agree: law, political, and social constructs are also amenable to arguments from first principles.

dnautics• 13 years ago

there is still an activation barrier (which is a chemistry first principle)

Florin_Andrei• 13 years ago

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• 13 years 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

sillysaurus23• 13 years ago

This line of reasoning puts a glass ceiling on your own intelligence. Are you sure that's a good idea?

"Oh well, I probably won't be able to anyway" seems a mistaken way to go about life. Or at least a dull one.

I'd rather know the truth than believe everyone else's mistaken ideas. The only way to do that is via first principles.

Personally, I rather like pg's belief: we're only accomplishing 1% of what's possible. More people should believe that our very way of life is malleable; after all, it is. Mentally buying into the life your generation happened to be born into isn't a good idea, because it implies we've figured everything out.

graeme3• 13 years ago

Very good point. Often there's very little cost to challenging conventional wisdom (think about it). If even 1/100 your attempts to challenge the CW produce results, it can be a winning strategy.

williamcotton2• 13 years ago

There is a big danger in this line of thinking. Pretending like we don't need to inherit a lot from the previous generations, or from people who think different from us in our current time, is willful ignorance. Every wild-eyed utopian who has striven to rewrite all of the rules has tended to fail pretty badly and has also tended to bring a lot of other people down with'm as well.

We do not need ideologies that call for full breaks from the past any more than we need ideologies that offer no improvements.

Taking over from the previous generation and moving things in a new direction is something that should be carefully considered and by getting as much feedback as possible. If revolutionaries actually listened to the people around them, we'd have a much better world out there...

I'm afraid that current trends have done a lot of damage to a bunch of existing cultural institutions. An easy example of this for readers of this forum would be the music industry. It has been a full-on technological assault which fragmented everything. The sales, the business and the artists themselves were absorbed by Apple, Facebook, and Google and a select few other social networks.

Art needs to be on the outside looking in, so it can properly reflect on society. And art should find it's way in to everyone's hearts, no matter their profession or specialties, so don't think I'm just talking about musicians here. And even within the scope of the music industry the "slacker middle class musician who should just get a programming job" is a really easy target and a huge straw-man.

You're gonna have to go out and define the word "art" on your own terms. Funny enough, you actually have to go out looking for it, it's not just gonna be whatever you read on Wiktionary.

I'll give you a little hint though. Wanton destruction of our cultural heritage is pretty much going in the exact opposite direction.

coffeemug• 13 years ago

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.

sillysaurus23• 13 years 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.

antimagic• 13 years 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...

tomarr• 13 years ago

I'm a great fan of the going from first principles - but I think it and your post ignores one big part of the reason for design by analogy.

A lot of error/bug fixing is evolutional and this knowledge is built up over time through the userbase and design team. You see this in software projects where there's always the temptation to start from scratch, but once in this process there's inherently a lot more bugs and quality control becomes an issue (even though the old clunky system feels low quality, functionally it can be expected to be reasonably error free).

xtc• 13 years ago

You need assets to perform a basic cognitive function?

xzephyr4• 13 years ago

The so-called reason by analogy is just gradient descent to approach local optima in optmization. The "by first principle" is just providing an approximate (ideally convex) model and solve it analytically for global optima. The problem is generally very hard (#P hard), both for formulating the problem and solving it. Global optimum of course in theory is better, but the quality of your objective function and constraints could easily offset this advantage. If you can come up with a simple linear programming problem for the battery example - that's great, but most likely you won't due to the prescence of competitor, market and policy constraint.

possibilistic• 13 years ago

I love this explanation. Do you happen to blog about optimization topics?

jrsnyder• 13 years ago

Seconded.

xzephyr4• 13 years ago

Ah, sorry no. I'm just interested in AI in general and constrained optimization has been the what I found to be the most general model for solving and giving insights into AI problems or any problems that require "intelligence".

NamTaf• 13 years ago

If you're asking waht I think you're asking, then what you're then looking for is called 'numerical analysis'. Specifically, the grandparent was describing this [1]. Here is an OCW link for a good primer in to various introductory numerical analysis processes for Engineering [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_descent

[2] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mechanical-engineering/2-993j-int...

jorleif2• 13 years ago

I agree, but would like to add the aspect of uncertainty. When reasoning from analogy, you usually have good statistical knowledge about the properties of the problem. For example, the targetted product category may exist, and customer behavior is known, and therefore predicting what would happen in some nearby configuration is usually somewhat accurate. On the other hand, in the first principles case you need to have a very accurate theory, because you are "far away" from what exists currently. If the theory in questions concerns physics, as for Musk, then this can work well. On the other hand if it is about social sciences and you need to predict the behaviors of customer from some kind of first-principle model (e.g. rational agent models), then you are very likely to make mispredictions, since human behavior is complicated, and the theories are inaccurate and overly general.

xzephyr4• 13 years ago

With uncertainty you just change your objective function to an evaluation function of any possible scenario scaled with its probability. It doesn't change how optimization works. Again this formulation is only easy to solve in very limited context. For example in economics people have been working with the oversimplified supply-demand curves precisely because they are usually the dominating factors and in practice a sufficiently accurate model works just fine. This model only gives insights for why different ways of reasoning works, not actually providing the panacea.

The good thing about gradient descent is that you do NOT need to have a model, you just need to focus on a few parameters and figure out what is the direction for best improvement from a current relatively good point, where the other billions of parameters are already accounted for and assumed independent from the direction you are going.

bsdetector• 13 years ago

technical innovations that many thought impossible, like producing battery packs more cheaply than ever before.

Really? Many people thought that cheaper battery packs were actually impossible?

Maybe the rest of the article says something important, but when the second sentence is tripe like that I'm not going to stick around to find out.

eruditely• 13 years ago

What he said isn't even that big of a deal, the issue is more with you than with him. You actually just said that even if something important could be understood you will let your pettiness get in the way.

codex2• 13 years ago

It's funny that the example given is of Musk reasoning to how batteries can be much cheaper than they are. And yet Tesla buys their raw batteries from third party manufacturers just like almost all other EV manufacturers. So I'm a bit confused as to the value of this particular example. Furthermore, batteries still do not cost anywhere close to what Musk predicts. Perhaps that's because he completely ignores manufacturing costs in his analysis. The price of a sewing needle costs a lot more than the cost of the raw materials.

samolang• 13 years ago

Reminds of a quote (falsely?) attributed to Henry Ford.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

diminoten• 13 years ago

This reminds me of the S/N Meyers-Briggs definitions (Sensing vs. Intuition)[0].

Sensing is about analogy; we go with what exists, what I can upvote/pin/like/snap, and I improve upon it. I iterate until I've created something that we know already exists but in an improved way. We take what exists

Intuition is about what this article calls "first principals"; we notice the trends, the underlying reasons why we upvote/pin/like/snap and try to create something that satisfies that need. Or we find a new need and try to fill it. Doesn't matter.

So Elon Musk is saying something entirely[1] un-new[2] - that N types work better in entrepreneuring than S types. Common theory, no clue if it holds water.

[0] http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-bas...

[1] http://www.keirsey.com/4temps/inventor.asp

[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/myer-briggs-personality-style...

tempestn• 13 years ago

There's a great example of this kind of thinking on the homepage right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6736001. The last sentence in the article:

“But first, this problem needed someone like Jorge,” he said. “An obstetrician would have tried to improve the forceps or the vacuum extractor, but obstructed labor needed a mechanic. And 10 years ago, this would not have been possible. Without YouTube, he never would have seen the video.”

DigitalJack• 13 years ago

"Problem: Creating a website that allows customers to buy a new car at a low price and have it home delivered, sparing them the pain of a stressful dealership visit and price negotiation."

That's not a problem. That's a solution.

6ren• 13 years ago

1. reasoning from first principles is a really cool, powerful and awfully difficult. Most importantly, it forces you to consider what the question actually is (see Douglas Adams).

2. the BOM cost is an interesting perspective, but is a terrible example of the above, because it doesn't go back to what the problem really is (energy), and also excludes every solution except batteries made of the same materials, and therefore likely based on the same principles.

3. the analogy to BOM for software is information (what do we know? what do we want?). While this is closer to true first principles than BOM, it assumes the problem statement, and thus precludes reconceptualization - changing the specification, changing the requirements, changing the context.

BTW describing a startup as the "x of y" is a way to communicate it succinctly, and not necessarily what it really is. It's ad copy.

dgmdoug• 13 years ago

I think the most dangerous thing here is the branding of research as something new, that Musk has invented. I worked in academic and industrial research for a number of years, and any work that was worth it's salt typically went back to first principles to make its point.

The problem with this is that it's hard and time it's time consuming to do this. Most companies and people don't have the time to go back to first principles for every product they build, and it would not be financially viable to do so if they did. So we compartmentalise and we make assumptions about the outcome based on prior knowledge to assess the risk of the project.

Software development is illustrative of this point. Let's say you are developing a beautiful front end for your product. You use a toolkit, based upon an existing language, which eventually will get interpreted/compiled down through multiple existing systems and run on the processor of your computer.

If I wanted to go back to first principles and make the whole thing faster, do I optimise my code the language, the compiler, the browser, the os stack, the hardware stack, CPU assembly? No, as I'd no longer be a front end developer.

Research is hard, expensive, and by it's nature, high risk. If Musk can sit on his pile of money and do it, great for him, but for most, going back to first principles for everything is not a viable option.

pencilcheck• 13 years ago

Reasoning from analogy is the wrong way of saying what people have in mind when they provide examples to explain what it is. To me, it sound more like reasoning form what already works. In most examples I have seen, it is mostly about solving a problem using existing solutions/packages available and add your own flavor to it. That's why the "analogy" thinking because that's how the idea is presented, people pitch the idea using other's solutions. But what Elon Musk is different from others is that his thinking is stemming from scientific research more than you think it is. It is asking about the right question by digging deep into the core of the problem until you cannot dig any further. For example, in Elon Musk's example of battery, you first start with a goal: how to build an electric cars that is cost effective. You break the goals down into smaller problems, and you could recognize that battery is the biggest contributing factor in providing the solution to this goal, then you ask, why is the cost of battery so high yet it yield so little? Then you break the problem down into further smaller problems such as the cost for each component that comprised the battery, then you keep reasoning from there until you can find a ground where you can start reasoning back up. Personally I think the name "First principle" is also misleading since it is not mainly about principles, but more about asking the right questions.

Elon Musk on First Principles

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