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Ask HN: Any recommendation from books on First principles thinking?

by jp42 on 8/15/23, 3:52 PM with 8 comments

• by kingkongjaffa on 8/15/23, 8:13 PM

  > First principles thinking

  Is a metaphor for using the basics of a field to derive or understand more developed concepts in the same field. So learn the foundations of a topic and then appreciate how they manifest in more complex areas.

  There’s no book for this because it’s just a concept and the way to develop it is to study the basics of a specific subject.

  It’s a mental model not a thing to be studied in itself…

• by gardenfelder on 8/15/23, 4:55 PM

  I used to wrestle with that until I realized that the issue is a bit like a diagnosis: you present with, say, a fever and a few other symptoms, and you are given a diagnosis of X. That's all at the surface; for me first principles became a recursive dive into ever-more-deep subjects.

  Of course, you could recurse all the way down to the mean free paths of molecules, but, in reality, first principles starts somewhere way above that, maybe at, say, molecular binding (proteins and so forth).

• by hayst4ck on 8/15/23, 10:23 PM

  "First principles" is an indirect reference to the idea of "doing the right thing instead of the wrong thing."

  If the people who use the phrase "first principles" knew what the right thing was, they wouldn't need to reference "first principles". Likewise, they generally don't understand what the wrong thing is, only that they are experiencing it.

  I would not take the idea of "first principles" as something to chase or understand, but instead recognize that those who use the phrase rather than explaining what the principles are, are likely ignorant and lost themselves. This provides you an opportunity for technical leadership.

  "First principles" is corporate speak for "we don't know what we're doing, all we know is that what we are doing is wrong".

  Generally the prescription for such a situation is to read books aimed at the problems you are facing, likely books with formalized languages to help model and simplify the problem you are experiencing.

  Taking "first principles" at face value (non cynically), the google SRE book and Designing Data Intensive Applications are probably good "first principles" books.

  edit: Thinking about it a little bit more, when first principles aren't being adhered to, I think that generally means that people are solving problems they don't understand. So the first principle is: Understand the problem, before you try to engineer a solution to it.

• by montague27 on 8/18/23, 1:51 AM

  As far as I know, Kantian philosophy might be something you want to take a look on. He'd discussed extensively about rationality, which is the implicit foundation of daily inquiry and almost all scientific endeavours.

• by sn9 on 8/16/23, 12:15 AM

  Study math or physics.