I think Musk is right to point out that many people don't reason from first principles-- basically, that they consciously decide not to think about something, but to allow other's thinking to guide their thoughts. ("It has always been done this way")<p>I recently began teaching in a school where students are required to write extensively in every class, including "extras" like PE, Music, or Art. I've found that, generally, students who have been subjected to that system for a number of years are far better at reasoning (and expressing that reasoning, naturally) than those who are new to the school. (It is astonishing how quickly new students, who inevitably struggle with complex reasoning at the beginning of the school year have made leaps and bounds in this area, and are far more skilled at verbal reasoning by the end of the school year).<p>All of which is to say: I think that this style of thinking is greatly buttressed by enhanced linguistic ability, as language is critical to higher-level thinking.<p>Very interesting video, and the interactive transcript was extremely cool.
I'm a little suspicious of people who claim to think "everything" through from "first principles" (whatever those are).<p>Where do you get your first principles from?<p>If you get them from observing the world around you, how do you decide what parts to pay more or less attention to?<p>While you're deciding things from first principles (and coming up with those first principles), how do you make decisions in the mean time?<p>Note that in physics, computing things "from first principles" is often done to attempt to recreate a result that's already been reached by other approaches, to attempt to verify that you've got the right set of first principles.
The transcript on the right is the same as the video, and easier to read.<p>I think this is great overall. However, I think he's wrong at the very end. People aren't just hardware and software; they're hardware, software, and the thinking they have done (call it "free will" if you want). That accounts for a lot of the differences in people.
I think it's ironic that Elon Musk starts off by railing against reasoning by analogy and then ends up with analogizing human behavior using the technological metaphor of his age.
I think this ability is really valuable, but there's so many barriers to
people getting experience with it.<p>To do it, you have to venture into the unknown without a map. You have to
make the map yourself, and you have to figure out how to do that. You don't know how long that will take, but it is likely to take quite a while. While you're working at it you will not have a very clear understanding of exactly what your position is, and you won't be able to articulate it clearly to others. And of course you will have to go against what "everybody knows" (but really just think they know).<p>There's so many barriers to this that come from our social and
institutional norms, where it's generally expected that you can explain
what you're doing, that you can say why it is better, that you can estimate
how long it will take, etc, and where it's frowned upon if you can't do
these things. And where it's generally frowned upon to "have the arrogance" to "go against" what people of high-standing came up with or take to be true.
In the end he says that after having had 5 kids he believes that nature has a much stronger impact on people's personalities than nurture. That surprised me, I wish he could have elaborated on it.
I'm all down for first-principles reasoning, but I don't like that term for some reason. For some reason it makes me think it's unduly favoring deduction and making assumptions whenever possible, even though it's not. If you start from good first principles, like the axioms of probability theory, all of a sudden you get inductive inference and deductive as a special case. Yay! Nevertheless I'd still more enjoy shouting "Baaaaaaaayes!" from the rooftops than "First Principles!"