from Hacker News

Elon Musk on First Principles

by npostolovski on 11/14/13, 5:46 PM with 99 comments

• by aridiculous on 11/14/13, 7:59 PM

  Reasoning from first principles is ahistorical, and that is why it so rarely works in the real world. Political and social constructs inherited through time (like, say, the law) will butt heads against a "pure" new solution. You need the resources (and determination, will, etc) to overpower colossal systems we've arrived at through the progression of history.

  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

• by swalsh on 11/14/13, 7:16 PM

  A few years ago i went to this talk where the founder of Kiva Systems (automated warehouse systems) was giving a talk. He was mentioning how he came up with the idea, and it was actually quite a structured approach. He altered the parameters to the theoretical maximum (what if the warehouse was an infinite size) what would the solution be? What he eventually came up with is the system they have today.

  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.

• by xzephyr on 11/14/13, 8:05 PM

  The so-called reason by analogy is just gradient descent to approach local optima in optmization. The "by first principle" is just providing an approximate (ideally convex) model and solve it analytically for global optima. The problem is generally very hard (#P hard), both for formulating the problem and solving it. Global optimum of course in theory is better, but the quality of your objective function and constraints could easily offset this advantage. If you can come up with a simple linear programming problem for the battery example - that's great, but most likely you won't due to the prescence of competitor, market and policy constraint.

• by thangalin on 11/14/13, 7:03 PM

  "Reasoning from first principles: What’s the least information I need to collect from the user to make the app functional?"

  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.

• by ChuckMcM on 11/14/13, 6:58 PM

  I'm a big fan of reasoning from first principles, but in practice it tends to work out more like 'total honesty' does with your spouse. Which is to say, not always all that great.

  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.

• by codex on 11/14/13, 8:54 PM

  It's funny that the example given is of Musk reasoning to how batteries can be much cheaper than they are. And yet Tesla buys their raw batteries from third party manufacturers just like almost all other EV manufacturers. So I'm a bit confused as to the value of this particular example. Furthermore, batteries still do not cost anywhere close to what Musk predicts. Perhaps that's because he completely ignores manufacturing costs in his analysis. The price of a sewing needle costs a lot more than the cost of the raw materials.

• by bsdetector on 11/14/13, 8:42 PM

  technical innovations that many thought impossible, like producing battery packs more cheaply than ever before.

  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.

• by dgmdoug on 11/15/13, 1:25 PM

  I think the most dangerous thing here is the branding of research as something new, that Musk has invented. I worked in academic and industrial research for a number of years, and any work that was worth it's salt typically went back to first principles to make its point.

  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.

• by codex on 11/14/13, 7:17 PM

  Reasoning from first principles is a symbolic approach. Reasoning by analogy is the intuitive approach. Both have their place. Intuitive thinking works especially well on fuzzy problems with incomplete and/or conflicting data, where a statistical approach is likely best. Reasoning from first principles is indeed hard, but the reason it's so little used is because it often doesn't produce real world results.

• by samolang on 11/14/13, 10:11 PM

  Reminds of a quote (falsely?) attributed to Henry Ford.

  “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

• by pencilcheck on 11/15/13, 8:21 PM

  Reasoning from analogy is the wrong way of saying what people have in mind when they provide examples to explain what it is. To me, it sound more like reasoning form what already works. In most examples I have seen, it is mostly about solving a problem using existing solutions/packages available and add your own flavor to it. That's why the "analogy" thinking because that's how the idea is presented, people pitch the idea using other's solutions. But what Elon Musk is different from others is that his thinking is stemming from scientific research more than you think it is. It is asking about the right question by digging deep into the core of the problem until you cannot dig any further. For example, in Elon Musk's example of battery, you first start with a goal: how to build an electric cars that is cost effective. You break the goals down into smaller problems, and you could recognize that battery is the biggest contributing factor in providing the solution to this goal, then you ask, why is the cost of battery so high yet it yield so little? Then you break the problem down into further smaller problems such as the cost for each component that comprised the battery, then you keep reasoning from there until you can find a ground where you can start reasoning back up. Personally I think the name "First principle" is also misleading since it is not mainly about principles, but more about asking the right questions.

• by krmmalik on 11/14/13, 7:36 PM

  I'm someone that has thought like this for most of my life, the biggest problem I have however is persuading others to do the same. Take for example a client, I'm helping them with improving their email marketing. I ask them do they really need a huge disclaimer at the end of each email? They dont budge.

  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".

• by 6ren on 11/15/13, 12:36 PM

  1. reasoning from first principles is a really cool, powerful and awfully difficult. Most importantly, it forces you to consider what the question actually is (see Douglas Adams).

  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.

• by j45 on 11/14/13, 7:11 PM

  Musk's thoughts are a great read -- thanks for sharing this.

  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.

• by 011011100 on 11/14/13, 7:08 PM

  Did you really have to come up with a name for it: "reasoning from first principles"? Does it not bother anyone else that this is just "thinking"? I mean, if you can deal with the cost of re-engineering the battery, then why not? Is this not common sense?

• by tempestn on 11/14/13, 11:27 PM

  There's a great example of this kind of thinking on the homepage right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6736001. The last sentence in the article:

  “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.”

• by DigitalJack on 11/15/13, 3:49 AM

  "Problem: Creating a website that allows customers to buy a new car at a low price and have it home delivered, sparing them the pain of a stressful dealership visit and price negotiation."

  That's not a problem. That's a solution.

• by saraid216 on 11/14/13, 6:56 PM

  A similar theme, but on game design, can be found here:

  http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013804/MUD-Messrs-Bartle-and-T...

• by cbhl on 11/14/13, 7:49 PM

  I have this habit of highlighting text as I read, and on this website, I find that the text is gray and the highlight is a very similar shade of gray.

  Does this bother anyone else?

• by diminoten on 11/14/13, 11:26 PM

  This reminds me of the S/N Meyers-Briggs definitions (Sensing vs. Intuition)[0].

  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...