Here we hit on the problem of trying to assert any fundamental laws by which human history must inevitably progress. Trend is not destiny. Even if we can derive and understand certain laws of human biological nature, the trends of history itself are dependent on conditions, and conditions change.
Bertrand Russell’s classic example of the chicken that gets fed every day is a great illustration of this concept.14 Daily feedings have been going on for as long as the chicken has observed, and thus it supposes that these feedings are a guaranteed part of its life and will continue in perpetuity. The feedings appear as a law until the day the chicken gets its head chopped off. They are then revealed to be a trend, not a predictor of the future state of affairs.
Another way to look at it is how we tend to view the worst events in history. We tend to assume that the worst that has happened is the worst that can happen, and then prepare for that. We forget that “the worst” smashed a previous understanding of what was the worst. Therefore, we need to prepare more for the extremes allowable by physics rather than what has happened until now.
Applying the filter of falsifiability helps us sort through which theories are more robust. If they can’t ever be proven false because we have no way of testing them, then the best we can do is try to determine their probability of being true.
I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!
Richard Feynman1
The People Who Appear in this Chapter
Socrates.
470-399 BCE - Greek philosopher. Famous for many philosophical conclusions, like “the only thing I know is that I know nothing”, he didn’t actually write any of his philosophy down; thus we have to thank those who came after, especially Plato, for preserving his legacy.
Warren, Robin.
1937 - Australian pathologist.
Marshall, Barry.
1951 - Australian physician.
They shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2005.
Grandin, Temple.
1947 - American professor of animal science. In addition to her contributions to livestock welfare, she invented the “hug box” device to calm those on the autism spectrum. Autistic herself, she is the subject of the movie Temple Grandin, starring Claire Danes.
First Principles Thinking
First principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated situations and unleash creative possibility. Sometimes called reasoning from first principles, it’s a tool to help clarify complicated problems by separating the underlying ideas or facts from any assumptions based on them. What remain are the essentials. If you know the first principles of something, you can build the rest of your knowledge around them to produce something new.
The idea of building knowledge from first principles has a long tradition in philosophy. In the Western canon it goes back to Plato and Socrates, with significant contributions from Aristotle and Descartes. Essentially, they were looking for the foundational knowledge that would not change and that we could build everything else on, from our ethical systems to our social structures.
First principles thinking doesn’t have to be quite so grand. When we do it, we aren’t necessarily looking for absolute truths. Millennia of epistemological inquiry have shown us that these are hard to come by, and the scientific method has demonstrated that knowledge can only be built when we are actively trying to falsify it (see Supporting Idea: Falsifiability). Rather, first principles thinking identifies the elements that are, in the context of any given situation, non-reducible.
First principles do not provide a checklist of things that will always be true; our knowledge of first principles changes as we understand more. They are the foundation on which we must build, and thus will be different in every situation, but the more we know, the more we can challenge. For example, if we are considering how to improve the energy efficiency of a refrigerator, then the laws of thermodynamics can be taken as first principles. However, a theoretical chemist or physicist might want to explore entropy, and thus further break the second law into its underlying principles and the assumptions that were made because of them. First principles are the boundaries that we have to work within in any given situation—so when it comes to thermodynamics an appliance maker might have different first principles than a physicist.
Techniques for establishing first principles
If we never learn to take something apart, test our assumptions about it, and reconstruct it, we end up bound by what other people tell us—trapped in the way things have always been done. When the environment changes, we just continue as if things were the same, making costly mistakes along the way.
Some of us are naturally skeptical of what we’re told. Maybe it doesn’t match up to our experiences. Maybe it’s something that used to be true but isn’t true anymore. And maybe we just think very differently about something. When it comes down to it, everything that is not a law of nature is just a shared belief. Money is a shared belief. So is a border. So are bitcoin. So is love. The list goes on.
If we want to identify the principles in a situation to cut through the dogma and the shared belief, there are two techniques we can use: Socratic questioning and the Five Whys.
Socratic questioning can be used to establish first principles through stringent analysis. This is a disciplined questioning process, used to establish truths, reveal underlying assumptions, and separate knowledge from ignorance. The key distinction between Socratic questioning and ordinary discussions is that the former seeks to draw out first principles in a systematic manner. Socratic questioning generally follows this process:
Clarifying your thinking and explaining the origins of your ideas. (Why do I think this? What exactly do I think?)
Challenging assumptions. (How do I know this is true? What if I thought the opposite?)
Looking for evidence. (How can I back this up? What are the sources?)
Considering alternative perspectives. (What might others think? How do I know I am correct?)
Examining consequences and implications. (What if I am wrong? What are the consequences if I am?)
Questioning the original questions. (Why did I think that? Was I correct? What conclusions can I draw from the reasoning process?)
Socratic questioning stops you from relying on your gut and limits strong emotional responses. This process helps you build something that lasts.
The Five Whys is a method rooted in the behavior of children. Children instinctively think in first principles. Just like us, they want to understand what’s happening in the world. To do so, they intuitively break through the fog with a game some parents have come to dread, but which is exceptionally useful for identifying first principles: repeatedly asking “why?”
The goal of the Five Whys is to land on a “what” or “how”. It is not about introspection, such as “Why do I feel like this?” Rather, it is about systematically delving further into a statement or concept so that you can separate reliable knowledge from assumption. If your “whys” result in a statement of falsifiable fact, you have hit a first principle. If they end up with a “because I said so” or ”it just is”, you know you have landed on an assumption that may be based on popular opinion, cultural myth, or dogma. These are not first principles.
There is no doubt that both of these methods slow us down in the short term. We have to pause, think, and research. They seem to get in the way of what we want to accomplish. And after we do them a couple of times we realize that after one or two questions, we are often lost. We actually don’t know how to answer most of the questions. But when we are confronted with our own ignorance, we can’t just give up or resort to self-defense. If we do, we will never identify the first principles we have to work with, and will instead make mistakes that will slow us down in the long term.
«Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking.»
/> Carl Sagan2
First principles thinking as a way to blow past inaccurate assumptions
The discovery that a bacterium, not stress, actually caused the majority of stomach ulcers is a great example of what can be accomplished when we push past assumptions to get at first principles. Since the discovery of bacteria, scientists thought that bacteria could not grow in the stomach on account of the acidity. If you had surveyed both doctors and medical research scientists in the 60s or 70s, they likely would have postulated this as a first principle. When a patient came in complaining of stomach pain, no one ever looked for a bacterial cause.
It turned out, however, that a sterile stomach was not a first principle. It was an assumption. As Kevin Ashton writes in his book on creativity, discovery, and invention, “the dogma of the sterile stomach said that bacteria could not live in the gut.”3 Because this dogma was taken as truth, for a long time no one ever looked for reasons that it could be false.
That changed for good with the discovery of the H. pylori bacteria and its role in stomach ulcers. When pathologist Robin Warren started seeing bacteria in samples from patients’ stomachs, he realized that stomachs were not, in fact, sterile. He started collaborating with Barry Marshall, a gastroenterologist, and together they started seeing bacteria in loads of stomachs. If the sterile stomach wasn’t a first principle, then, when it came to stomachs, what was?
Marshall, in an interview with Discover, recounts that Warren gave him a list of 20 patients identified as possibly having cancer, but when he had looked he had found the same bacteria in all of them instead. He said, “Why don’t you look at their case records and see if they’ve got anything wrong with them.” Since they now knew stomachs weren’t sterile, they could question all the associated dogma about stomach disease and use some Socratic-type questioning to work to identify the first principles at play. They spent years challenging their related assumptions, clarifying their thinking, and looking for evidence.4
Their story ultimately has a happy ending—Marshall and Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2005, and now stomach ulcers are regularly treated effectively with antibiotics, improving and saving the lives of millions of people. But many practitioners and scientists rejected their findings for decades. The dogma of the sterile stomach was so entrenched as a first principle, that it was hard to admit that it rested on some incorrect assumptions which ultimately ended with the explanation, “because that’s just the way it is”. Even though, as Ashton notes, “H. pylori has now been found in medical literature dating back to 1875,” it was Warren and Marshall who were able to show that “because I said so” wasn’t enough to count the sterile stomach as a first principle.
Incremental innovation and paradigm shifts
To improve something, we need to understand why it is successful or not. Otherwise, we are just copying thoughts or behaviors without understanding why they worked. First principles thinking helps us avoid the problem of relying on someone else’s tactics without understanding the rationale behind them. Even incremental improvement is harder to achieve if we can’t identify the first principles.
Temple Grandin is famous for a couple of reasons. One, she is autistic, and was one of the first people to publicly disclose this fact and give insight into the inner workings of one type of autistic mind. Second, she is a scientist who has developed many techniques to improve the welfare of animals in the livestock industry.
One of the approaches she pioneered was the curved cattle chute. Previous to her experiments, cattle were put in a straight chute. Curved chutes, on the other hand, “are more efficient for handling cattle because they take advantage of the natural behavior of cattle. Cattle move through curved races more easily because they have a natural tendency to go back to where they came from.”5 Of course, science doesn’t stop with one innovation, and animal scientists continue to study the best way to treat livestock animals.
Stockmanship Journal presented research that questioned the efficiency of Grandin’s curved chute. It demonstrated that sometimes the much more simple straight chute would achieve the same effect in terms of cattle movement. The journal sought out Grandin’s response, and it is invaluable for teaching us the necessity of first principles thinking.
Grandin explains that curved chutes are not a first principle. She designed them as a tactic to address the first principle of animal handling that she identified in her research—essentially that reducing stress to the animals is the single most important aspect and affects everything from conception rates to weight to immune systems. When designing a livestock environment, a straight chute could work as long as it is part of a system that reduces stress to the animals. You can change the tactics if you know the principles.6
Sometimes we don’t want to fine-tune what is already there. We are skeptical, or curious, and are not interested in accepting what already exists as our starting point. So when we start with the idea that the way things are might not be the way they have to be, we put ourselves in the right frame of mind to identify first principles. The real power of first principles thinking is moving away from random change and into choices that have a real possibility of success.
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Curved cattle chutes improve animal welfare by working with the natural behavior of the animals.
Starting in the 1970s, scientists began to ask: what are the first principles of meat? The answers generally include taste, texture, smell, and use in cooking. Do you know what is not a first principle of meat? Once being a part of an animal. Perhaps most important to consumers is the taste. Less important is whether it was actually once part of a cow.
Researchers then looked at why meat tastes like meat. Part of the answer is a chemical reaction between sugars and amino acids during cooking, known as the Maillard reaction. This is what gives meat its flavor and smell. By replicating this exact reaction, scientists expect to be able to replicate the first principles of meat: taste and scent. In doing so they will largely eliminate the need to raise animals for consumption.
Instead of looking for ways to improve existing constructs, like mitigating the environmental impacts of the livestock industry, around 30 laboratories worldwide are now developing the means to grow artificial meat. This lab-grown meat is close to having the constituent parts of meat. One food researcher described the product this way:
There is really a bite to it, there is quite some flavor with the browning. I know there is no fat in it so I didn’t really know how juicy it would be, but there is … some intense taste; it’s close to meat, it’s not that juicy, but the consistency is perfect…. This is meat to me...it’s really something to bite on and I think the look is quite similar.7
This quote illustrates how artificial meat combines the core properties of meat to form a viable replacement, thereby addressing some significant environmental and ethical concerns.
«As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.»
Harrington Emerson8
Conclusion
Reasoning from first principles allows us to step outside of history and conventional wisdom and see what is possible. When you really understand the principles at work, you can decide if the existing methods make sense. Often they don’t.
Many people mistakenly believe that creativity is something that only some of us are born with, and either we have it or we don’t. Fortunately, there seems to be ample evidence that this isn’t true. We’re all born rather creative, but during our formative years, it can be beaten out of us by busy parents and teachers. As adults, we rely on convention and what we’re told because that’s easier than breaking things down into first principles and thinking for yourself. Thinking through first principles is a way of taking off the blinders. Most things suddenly seem more possible.
Creativity is intelligence having fun.
Anonymous
Rawls, John.
1921-2002 - American moral and political philosopher. His work theorized “Justice and fairness” and remains integral to discussions of political philosophy.
Thought Experiment
Thought experiments can be defined as “devices of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things.”1 Many disciplines, such as philosophy and physics, make use of thought experiments to examine what can be known. In doing so, they can open up new avenues for inquiry and exploration. Thought experiments are powerful because they help us learn from our mistakes and avoid future ones. They let us take on the impossible, evaluate the potential consequences of our actions, and re-examine history to make better decisions. They can help us both figure out what we really want, and the best way to get there.
Betting on basketball
Suppose I asked you to tell me who would win in a game of basketball: The NBA champion LeBron James or the filmmaker Woody Allen? How much would you bet that your answer was correct?
I think you’d get me an answer pretty quickly, and I hope you’d bet all you had.
Next, suppose I asked you to tell me who’d win in a game of basketball: The NBA champion LeBron James or the NBA champion Kevin Durant? How much would you bet that your answer was correct?
A little harder, right? Would you bet anywhere near all you had on being right?
Let’s think this through. You attempted to solve both of the questions in the same way—you imagined the contests. Perhaps more importantly, you didn’t attempt to solve either of them by calling up Messrs. James, Allen, and Durant and inviting them over for an afternoon of basketball. You simply simulated them in your mind.
The Great Mental Models Page 6
