First Principle Thinking
Hello there,
Let’s give your thinking faculties a boost with this weeks thinking model to make you future proof with your human specific skills in age of AI.
If you had to answer
What's the most fundamental quest on which human from all the past civilization and era have embarked on ?
If you’ve answered that question for me the gist of all the answers will come out something like this "How everything in nature and universe works?" which is also referred to as "Theory of Everything" in the scientific world.
Among all the pioneering scientists and inventors, this question has been an all time favorite.
Ever wondered why they all were trying to figure out a theory of everything. Humans are naturally curious to know how things works and knowing them in and out gives us immeasurable pleasure and satisfaction.
But to find a theory of everything which can explain what’s happening in nature and universe with a single law is a huge gigantic task. Instead of solving that big problem, its better to break it down in small problems like how moon revolves around the sun, why apple falls downward towards the earth and so on.
That’s what we do in our day to day life too. Instead of reading a book we start off with one chapter, instead of doing 100 push-ups we do 10 at a time. We just made it easier by telling our mind that its not that big and we can climb the ladder up by doing it one at a time.
In scientific world our scientist discovered their masterpiece theories while they were on their way to find a theory of everything. Theories like “Theory of relativity” by Einstein, “Quantum field theory” by Feynman, “Heliocentric Theory” proved by Galileo and “Laws of Gravitation” by Newton. These all discoveries are solution to that small problem of asking why this particular thing act in a certain way, instead of asking why everything works the way they do and trying to figure out a theory of everything.
If you look closely all the discoveries explain a certain aspect of a certain thing, in other words they are just broken down version of a gigantic problem statement for theory of everything.
Before I tell you why no one hasn't been able to fully discover theory of everything, let me tell you an interesting insight.
Nature is the most complex thing we live in and it is made up of very tiny and big things combined together in such a way that even if a butterfly flaps its wings, it can change the whole course of nature. ( Don't take my words, verify here )
If nature is so complicated how to gather our brain around it to make sense of everything ? Well its beyond our thinking ability.
What’s in control of our ability is to break the complicated problems into smaller one's to simplify the problem and solve up from there. This method gets very popular among the scientific community and is known as "Scientist way of thinking". Which is also referred as "First Principle Thinking" these days.
First principle thinking
First principle Thinking is the atomic thinking which is used to break things down until you reach its very foundational constituent like an atom in chemistry compounds. You got to questions things from their very foundational principles and design it from ground up.
Other versions of First Principle Thinking
Aristotle and his followers figured out the most basic assumptions, parts that can not be deduced by any other assumptions and tried to segregate problems into smaller one's to solve the bigger problems.
Kantian's called these basic assumptions as postulates.
In mathematics it's referred to as axioms.
Socrates developed Socratic questioning, method of deeper questioning to dig deeper to question underlying assumptions.
A prominent historical philosopher Descartes set the stage for Cartesian doubt, where the thinker systematically doubts everything they possibly can and then what’s leftover is indubitable truth. This has been so far the best method of determining the first principles.
Advantage of First principle thinking
You can think through any big problem using first principle thinking and solve it.
Disadvantage of First principle thinking
Its hard to practice to think from scratch and build from there onward. That’s where lies the real twist and hardships. People like Elon Musk are not born everyday.
Its easy to fall in trap of majority thinking by doing what everyone else is doing and question the authority.
Case Study
SpaceX building its rockets
Here comes the classic example of Elon Musk who popularized this thinking from his Interview . When he was getting started with Space X's and its mission to make a human colony on Mars. He set out to buy castoff rockets from Russia but it was too costly, around $65 Millions per rocket. He had to find another way out of this. With some logical reasoning he finally relied back on the First principle Thinking, which he calls physics framework.
Musk said in an interview. “Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, okay, let’s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.”
As we know today SpaceX has performed more than 60 successful flights and 29 successful landings and saved NASA, its major customer, hundreds of millions of dollars.
“In most cases people solve problems by copying what other people do with slight variations, I operate on the physics approach of analysis by first principles, where you boil things down to the most fundamental truths in a particular area and then you reason up from there.” - Elon Musk
Regeneron Pharmaceutical Medical research
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is developing new treatments at lowest possible price. At its core it follows “first principles” approach.
“We challenge everything—every concept, every scientific principle—and we argue about it among ourselves”—George Yancopoulos Chief Science Officer of Regeneron Pharmaceutical
For example, the firm questioned the dominant paradigm of testing new treatments— first on mice then on humans, which often leads to high failure rates because mice and people are very different. Yancopoulos and his team sought to reinvent this process by developing a mouse implanted with human genes to closely simulate human body reactions in mouse itself. This modified mouse enabled Regeneron to develop new drugs for less than 20% of the average $4.3 billion cost of developing new therapies.
As you might have noticed in above two examples, breaking down a problem in first principle or atoms can relieve a lot of pain in the back while analyzing a problem. It doesn’t mean that it will be easy; No, launching 3 failed rockets subsequently was not easy for spaceX, but what it did it its 4th turn is what we call magic in scientific community. And it took decades even centuries to bring a such a revolution in a scientific field to fall in the category of magic. And spaceX achieved that within 5 years.
Action from YOU
Identify the biggest problem that you have ever encountered and try to solve it using first principle thinking.
For more in depth clarity watch this Video
If you liked this article share it with a friend and let the word spread on how great thinking skills like this are going to help humanity thrive in the age of AI where humans will do the problem solving and machines will be there to implement solutions suggested by YOU.
Till then
Stay hungry, Stay curious
Sneha Prajapati