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
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.
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...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
- 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.
"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...
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).
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.
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
[1] http://www.quora.com/Albert-Einstein/Did-Einstein-ever-say-%...
To say good chess players (not to say grandmasters, let alone world champions) don't calculate moves borders on insulting.
The trick is to become facile at both methods.
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.
Spoken like a true wise man.
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.
When it comes to explaining the idea to others, using a first-principles line of reasoning is only one of your options.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_descent
[2]: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mechanical-engineering/2-993j-int...
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.
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...
What? Email isn't close to secure.
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.
I think what Musk is trying to do here is provide structure, and intention to the WAY he thinks.
Does this bother anyone else?
All the more ironic that this is a developer trying to tell us about innovative and creative thinking.
I think it drives my coworkers crazy when they're looking over my shoulder reading from the same screen.
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.
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.
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.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
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".
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.
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.
“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.”
That's not a problem. That's a solution.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013804/MUD-Messrs-Bartle-and-T...
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...
