Every child has a phase that parents (and teachers) find cute at first but soon start hating – the “Why?” phase.
For every instruction given, the child asks, “Why?” In the beginning, the elders entertain this tendency and provide answers as much as they can but soon the frustration creeps in and the response turns to “because I said so!” or “that’s how the world works.” Depending on the situation, sometimes this innocent query can seem like an attack on authority or, even worse, a reflection of the inadequacy of elders themselves.
Every child is born a first principles thinker, with a thirst to understand the world. But by the time they reach adolescence, most of the curiosity is already suppressed by the system. And the few exceptions that remain go on to bring new ideas to the world or get punished by the threatened authorities, spending years in jail as political prisoners and whatnot.
Mental model #4: First Principles
First principles thinking refers to boiling down a subject to its fundamental parts which you know are true, devoid of any assumptions, and then building up fresh understanding from there. In the words of Aristotle, it is, “the first basis from which a thing is known.”
One of the first pieces of evidence of first principles thinking appears in Socratic questioning, a method used by the Greek philosopher Socrates. The key difference between the Socratic method and normal discussions is that the former implements a systematic approach to derive the first principles. To paraphrase Shane Parrish’s explanation on his Farnam Street blog post, the Socratic questioning process can be described as:
Clarify your thoughts and explain their origins: What do I think? Why do I think so?
Challenge the assumptions: How do I know this is true? What if I thought the opposite?
Inspect the evidence: How can I back this up? What are the sources?
Consider alternative perspectives: What do others think? How does their opinion gel with mine?
Examine consequences: What if I am wrong? What if others are right?
Question the original questions: Why did I think that? Was I correct? What conclusions can I draw from the reasoning process?
If a child can be annoying, imagine what a pain Socrates must have been as he questioned Athenian authorities. Ultimately, Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth and failing to acknowledge Athens’s “official gods.” After a trial that lasted a day, he was sentenced to death.
But not all stories have a sad end. One of the most recent proponents of first principles thinking is Elon Musk, who has revolutionized multiple domains, from automobiles to space travel. With SpaceX, he has brought down the cost of space travel to a fraction of what it used to be. And he gives most of the credit to first principles thinking.
In an interview with Kevin Rose, Musk points out the pitfall of normal thinking process:
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. … Well, no, that’s pretty dumb… Because if you applied that reasoning to anything new, then you wouldn’t be able to ever get to that new thing…. 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.”
Not that normal thinking is bad, but it is better to use first principles as the starting point for any new problem or subject. The problem with normal thinking is that it is incremental, based on analogy, assumptions, and conventions. Using first principles, on the other hand, is to question the whole system and boil it down to the building blocks, the fundamental truths. This clears out the fog of assumptions and makes way to form new ideas.
While normal thinking refines what the world already thinks, first principles enable you to think for yourself. Question everything!
We dedicate this mission to the loving memory of Socrates and all those who sacrificed their lives in the pursuit of truth🌹