First Principles

• In his article on Tesla, Tim Urban compares knowledge to a tree: if you don’t have a solid trunk of information on which to scaffold new ideas, the “branches” will fall down.

  • This is echoed by Michael Nielsen in Article: Augmenting Long-term Memory who claims that people need to spend more time focusing on the basic before worrying about complex issues.

• This way of thinking is shared by many successful entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Steve Jobs

  • When Jobs was designing the iPhone, he asked “What should a mobile phone be?” instead of “How do we make a better blackberry."

“My somewhat pious belief was that if people focused more on remembering the basics, and worried less about the “difficult” high-level issues, they’d find the high-level issues took care of themselves. ”

— Michael Nielsen