Q: Where does first-principles thinking come from?
“When you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physicists discover counterintuitive new things, like quantum mechanics. They do that by thinking from ‘first principles’: building their reasoning from the ground up.”
“I would encourage people to use the mental tools of physics and apply them broadly in life. They are the best tools.”
“The normal way we conduct our lives is reasoning by analogy. That means we do something because it’s similar to something else, or what other people are doing.”
“When you think this way, you only get slight iterations. It’s easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles, so that’s what we do most of the time.”
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“You’re not going to create revolutionary cars or rockets in forty hours a week. It just won’t work. Colonizing Mars isn’t going to happen on forty hours a week.”
“Nobody ever changed the world on forty hours a week.”
Book: The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgenson
