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Elon Musk on First Principles

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Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#91

Post by Tenhundfeld »

gnaritas wrote: post #52
jonnathanson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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" This is very true, and I've learned it the hard way. I do not advise using the Socratic Method to dissect the reasoning of a "needs-to-be-right" personality in a group setting, particularly if that person happens to be your superior. It's been…

The problem is the Socratic Method should only be used on someone who accepts that you're trying to teach them something. It's insulting when used in another context.

Strictly speaking, I think you're right, but many people use the phrase Socratic Method to mean any interaction in which you use questions to influence someone's thinking.

Feigning ignorance (or playing dumb) can be an extremely effective tactic in this area. Start with a simple question that is almost embarrassingly simple and then angle follow-ups towards the actual problem/inconsistency/concern/whatever. You often don't even need to ask follow-up questions; overly simple questions get people thinking about their core assumptions, which is often the root of the problem. Or their answer reveals flawed core assumptions, which is equally good.

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#92

Post by jorleif »

xzephyr wrote: post #34

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 constrai…

I agree, but would like to add the aspect of uncertainty. When reasoning from analogy, you usually have good statistical knowledge about the properties of the problem. For example, the targetted product category may exist, and customer behavior is known, and therefore predicting what would happen in some nearby configuration is usually somewhat accurate. On the other hand, in the first principles case you need to have a very accurate theory, because you are "far away" from what exists currently. If the theory in questions concerns physics, as for Musk, then this can work well. On the other hand if it is about social sciences and you need to predict the behaviors of customer from some kind of first-principle model (e.g. rational agent models), then you are very likely to make mispredictions, since human behavior is complicated, and the theories are inaccurate and overly general.

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#93

Post by antimagic »

coffeemug wrote: post #58
aridiculous wrote: post #31

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 mus…

Reasoning from first principles is ahistorical, and that is why it so rarely works in the real world. No. Reasoning from first principles is hard , and that is why it so rarely works in the real world. It's not enough to be contrarian, you have to be contrarian and right, and that's really, really, really hard. Most people reason from first principles, come up with a bunch of bad ideas, and then blame it on inertia a…

Also, reasoning from first principles requires you to be aware of all of the "principles" that need to be taken into account.

Say you decide to build a ship. You calculate the strength needed for the backbone when the ship is sitting in water, you calculate the size of the motor to get efficient movement, you calculate the placement and size of rudders to make your ship as manoeuvrable as possible. You calculate the exact shape of the hull at the waterline, taking into account the flow of water at the desired speed. Your ship is going to be the most efficient ship in the history of the world!

But there's a problem. You forgot that occasionally your ship is going to encounter massive waves. Massive enough that half the ship can find itself out of the water as it crests the wave. And then the backbone of the ship breaks, and your wonder of efficiency becomes an artificial reef. Or you forgot to take oxidizing effects into account, and one fine day as you negotiate the port of Newcastle, your rudder's pivots catastrophically fail due to corrosion, the rudder falls off the ship, and your oil tanker runs aground creating a massive environmental disaster.

Every time Elon Musk does something that hasn't been tried before, he runs the risk of running into these types of issues - things that we just hadn't thought to think of. Maybe that hold down system that they have for launching Falcons will one day assymetrically fail, dragging the rocket over horizontally before failing totally, leaving a very large missile to shoot along the ground. Or maybe we're going to discover that all of those redundant engines that a Falcon 9 uses create a failure mode that makes one engine failing create a cascade of failures elsewhere, due to pressure imbalances, or an engine explosively damaging those around it, or whatever. Those fires that we've seen in Teslas recently? Guess what, the designers forgot to think of something.

Which is not to knock Musk's achievements - indeed, I'm a big fan. First principles are important, they're the only known antidote to cargo-culting, but when you hit out in a new direction because you think that you've found a flaw in the reasoning of previous designers, be aware that here be dragons and your idea may catastrophically fail in novel ways...

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#94

Post by Elrac »

cbhl wrote: post #26

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?

Yes! I came here to opine that in an ideal world somebody would slap the site designer for his lousy color choice.

All the more ironic that this is a developer trying to tell us about innovative and creative thinking.

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#95

Post by mkingston »

nbouscal wrote: post #87
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because I'm a bad chess player, and most people are bad at reasoning from first principles. Elon Musk is one of may be five people in the world who can actually pull it off. Hero worship is mistaken. The reason you're bad at chess is because you believe you're bad at chess, so you don't practice. Similarly, most people don't believe they can be Musk, so they don't even try.

Spot on. Some research to back you up: http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?articl...

Do you know what the article means by: "why some become Muhammad Ali and others Mike Tyson"?

I think it's contrasting the success of Ali with the (inferred) lack thereof of Tyson. Maybe? But that doesn't make any sense to me; the first paragraph of Tyson's Wikipedia page will tell you why.

Unless it's talking about social success. In which case it seems out of context of the article.

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#96

Post by 6ren »

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.

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#97

Post by nilliams »

antimagic wrote: post #93
coffeemug wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasoning from first principles is ahistorical, and that is why it so rarely works in the real world. No. Reasoning from first principles is hard , and that is why it so rarely works in the real world. It's not enough to be contrarian, you have to be contrarian and right, and that's really, really, really hard. Most people reason from first principles, come up with a bunch of bad ideas, and then blame it on inertia a…

Also, reasoning from first principles requires you to be aware of all of the "principles" that need to be taken into account. Say you decide to build a ship. You calculate the strength needed for the backbone when the ship is sitting in water, you calculate the size of the motor to get efficient movement, you calculate the placement and size of rudders to make your ship as manoeuvrable as possible. You calculate the…

> Also, reasoning from first principles requires you to be aware of all of the "principles" that need to be taken into account.

Yes exactly. That's where most people fall down, or what certainly seems to be the meme in software, where a person's first principles approach is actually just a naive approach.

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#98

Post by dgmdoug »

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.

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#99

Post by williamcotton »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #88
williamcotton wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a big danger in this line of thinking. Pretending like we don't need to inherit a lot from the previous generations, or from people who think different from us in our current time, is willful ignorance. Every wild-eyed utopian who has striven to rewrite all of the rules has tended to fail pretty badly and has also tended to bring a lot of other people down with'm as well. We do not need ideologies that call…

Art is meaning, expressed. It's another matter that art isn't inherently profitable the way technology is, though. I'm having trouble understanding your point, possibly due to my own ignorance. It sounds like an indictment against any unpopular change, which would imply society should be a pure democracy. But that seems far from desirable.

> We do not need ideologies that call for full breaks from the past any more than we need ideologies that offer no improvements.

I think that sums it up nicely.

As for art? It doesn't have to mean anything. Art, love, beauty, and truth are all different names and expressions of the same universal thing. Trying to define them is ultimately impossible because they live outside of human constructs like language, but we can FEEL them very easily. We know what love is but only the best artists can even come close to describing it for others.

You seem pretty hung up on binary answers and solutions for things. Well, I hate to break it to you buddy, but you're not gonna find any "one true solution". We need compromise and compassion to rule the day. We all need to understand that none of us silly little humans could possibly have the answers but that we can all FEEL the answers.

So no, I'm not arguing for pure democracy any more than I'm arguing for pure totalitarianism. I know, it's confusing and seemingly a paradox, but I think you're just pivoting off of the wrong thing. Look for the art, dude, look for the art.

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#100

Post by gnaritas »

Tenhundfeld wrote: post #91
gnaritas wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the Socratic Method should only be used on someone who accepts that you're trying to teach them something. It's insulting when used in another context.

Strictly speaking, I think you're right, but many people use the phrase Socratic Method to mean any interaction in which you use questions to influence someone's thinking. Feigning ignorance (or playing dumb) can be an extremely effective tactic in this area. Start with a simple question that is almost embarrassingly simple and then angle follow-ups towards the actual problem/inconsistency/concern/whatever. You often…

I agree, but people quickly figure out you're trying to manipulate them and they still get angry. It's pretty rare that someone changes their mind based on your questioning their assumptions even if feigning ignorance.
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