Proposition
It is quite safe to assume that we operate in a complex environments past mere survival. Should it be societies, sciences, religions, nations or circumventing a yearly tax declaration.
Cognition and reasoning are attributed with helping both envision such complex structures and overcoming accompanying convolutions. Ever more complex environment we imagine requires exponentially more cognition capacity to effectively orient yourself in. While cognition being our most expensive trait and the body can support only this much, we can rely on it only to a limited quantity and quality. To overcome diminishing returns of complexity we deploy optimization strategies to save a lot of glucose in an attempt not to lose a grip on multiplex reality that we ourselves create.
These strategies — which will be discussed in the following paragraphs — introduce an error term to the process and our decisions. This errors are the reason to start thinking from first principles.
Strategies
First strategy is to abstract and push uncovered truths below in layers. What we have already uncovered needs not repeated scrutiny. We simply believe in previously integrated truths and use them to interpret and form novel, more complex truths.
It is like packing of complex meaning in a single word. Eg. we use a singe word (like, exuberant) to express some meaningful message (full of energy, excitement, and cheerfulness — lexico.com) without verbose definition, assuming that another party knows what it means.
An evaluator process collects and evaluates assumptions to make complex decision. Eg. while deciding whether to take an umbrella or not we can assume that your old-lady neighbor doesn’t posses “real” scientifically measurable wisdom, thus her’s advice to take an umbrella because her joints ache since early morning is useless. Then suddenly it starts to rain. False but holy belief in my own assumption. Damn!
Psychologist and an economist, receiver of Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Daniel Kahneman, describes in his book “Thinking, fast and slow” nicely “System One” that is fast but is full of assumptions that are accepted and not scrutinized. Just letting you know a good read on a topic.
Collections of related assumptions form a belief system and work as a basket. What fits into this basket is the truth. Other truths that do not fit into our basket are “wrong”, or even “stupid”, and usually fall outside without us registering it. This also mean that we too accept into our baskets (assume to be true) such truths that are suggested by other members of an accepted society.
Acceptance of truths from others is a second optimization strategy. Belief is the king, and we accept ideas common in our groups unwittingly and with pleasure. And the pleasure of feeling a relief that somebody already did the job for us and we can just accept the results is very, very tempting.
Fallacy
On one hand, such common ideas about the world lets us form groups so vast and powerful that we effectively conquered the world in many dimensions. A great “trilogy” by Yuval Noah Harari (started with this one) greatly describes how such collective belief systems — stories — helped us survive and become top species with vastly complex world.
There is no free lunch, they say. Such common ideas tend to have a great inertia. And when ideas and truths that we hold on to dearly are baseless or even proven to be false, they can hinder, and at times degrade unnecessarily, the quality of life of societies. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman calls such truths “zombie ideas”. In his book “Arguing with Zombies” he describes examples of economic policies that are proven to be false but are engraved in the minds of policymakers and keep coming back.
Both optimization strategies take ground in belief. And fallacies of belief systems are just like bad apples in our basket. Even one rotting apple can destroy the whole collection. Rotting spreads. Just like our body can be poisoned by ingesting rotten apples, so do our minds go into delirium, following misleading picture of the world. This can bring individual or a society into ineffectiveness, stall or even degradation. Now, how and when it is appropriate to challenge truths?
Virtue
In a nutshell, reasoning from first principles is an attitude in thinking that can be described as questioning everything to the most fundamental truths. When a set of fundamental truths surrounding main idea is defined, one is able to follow statements based on them and build new proven knowledge from ground up.
Such thought process imposes knowledge discovery instead of assumption of knowledge. Decisions made on foothold of adequate truths are solid.
Knowledge discovery via the means of first principles analysis enables us discover errors in thinking and conclusions we make and impose on reality. It lets us also understand why someone can hold an opposite belief by finding common fundamental truths and uncover a point where these, or assumptions further up the abstraction hierarchy, differ.
When appropriate it is very efficient while the findings might be shared among others and let us understand somebody who beforehand was on the opposite side of the argument.
Finally, thinking from first principles — rather than by analogy — enables thinking outside the predominant narrative, and innovate by disruption and not by small increment in direction of the trend.
Caution
Thinking from first principles is not for every caveat of life. Most decisions are and should be automatic. Mundane tasks like eating, walking or driving are tasks where a deliberate decision is needed only when learning these tasks anew. It is of use to invest in thinking when investment in energy and time is advantageous in a longer run: when danger or the cost of accepting a false-truth and following with a decision can cost your or society more than we can currently bear.
