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First Principles Thinking

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21–25 of 25 posts

Re: First Principles Thinking

#21

First principles thinking applies more to science and invention than engineering. And it's easy to misuse and make it into philosophical thinking. Musk appears to have derived his dislike of LIDAR more from ideas than technical studies. Most of the rest of industry seems to disagree... First principles thinking carries the implicit values of keeping things simple enough to reason about that way. It doesn't deal well…

Aside, does LIDAR scale? Or if every car at an intersection has it will there be too much interference?

Re: First Principles Thinking

#22

This is so incredibly bad. The second part of the main thesis is never justified, just asserted. The majority of this is a bunch of unjustified assertions barely connected where almost all actual connections are fallacious. Then some of this is just a hacked up ideolect that redefines things like chefs and cooks with no respect for the empirical world or how chefs, cooks or others actually use those words or how any…

It's turtles all the way down.

Re: First Principles Thinking

#23

First principles thinking applies more to science and invention than engineering. And it's easy to misuse and make it into philosophical thinking. Musk appears to have derived his dislike of LIDAR more from ideas than technical studies. Most of the rest of industry seems to disagree... First principles thinking carries the implicit values of keeping things simple enough to reason about that way. It doesn't deal well…

Aside, does LIDAR scale? Or if every car at an intersection has it will there be too much interference?

I suspect they must have thought of that by now. The return times are sub microsecond so a lot of flashes can fit in one frame time.

Plus a lot of the time they're scanning one point at a time, so it's not likely two cars will scan exactly the same point very often, and when they do you can just filter it out by discarding outliers.

Re: First Principles Thinking

#25

It looks like no one actually understands what billionaires mean when they explain their fortune by using "first principles".

It's just that it's painfully obvious to think this way when your brain is built the right way. Then it's just a matter of having the right environment to unleash your work.

Most people just don't have the brain for it, we're social animals and following the smart ones is much more efficient than having everyone running in their own direction.

Basically we always have the choice of following analogies or building our own knowledge bodies. Building one's knowledge capital takes time and dedicated effort which most people do not have. Once you start building your own, you're only limited by your biology and your environment.

"Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder."

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