[firstlunchables]

Touting “first principals” is a way of revealing “I’m too dumb to understand other people’s work.” Like if you can’t understand higher level concepts and have to start on your own from Euclid, it just means you aren’t very smart but think you can be another Maxwell just by thinkin’ real hard. It’s a joke.

[numpad0]

I'm echo chambering on this and one other comment[1], and starting to wonder if those guys are actually neurodivergent, autistic, whatever implies combination of entry-superhuman intelligence and unfortunate psycho-emotional development, or it's complete opposite and they're faking intelligence with vastly superior EQ, put aside pointlessness of taking IQ/EQ seriously.

Because, I don't think Musk had ever shown issues understanding or even precisely manipulating people's sentiments with bare hands which some of us struggle even with tools, while also there being countless examples him showing lack of understanding of laws, order, code, all such brittle dehumanized systems in general.

All his successes owes to his mastery of orchestrating humans as animals, not machines or humans as intelligent constructs. Why are we nearly dead set that it's opposite of that?

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993901

[johnnyanmac]

I think it's more to do with long eroded goodwill. I remember the early 10's when he was an internet darling and there was optimism on what he would deliver. Then some of that is simply artificially inflated hype by investors on Wall Street that need him to keep that persona so they can keep their money going up.

He's long turned about face with that, but that goodwill can die really, really hard (only took until now for Wall Street to very slowly start pulling out). As we see with Donald Trump somehow being relevant some 4 decades after his celebrity fame for a national election.

>Why are we nearly dead set that it's opposite of that?

My impression is that Musk knew to surround himself with good people. Be it coincidence, a Charisma check, or simply throwing cash at them, those people clearly did amazing things and he was the face of it all.

This is more or less the opposite, and his crude behavior navigating government IMO could not have gone worse. He had at least 2 years to sow the seeds and he's instead taking "Drill Baby, Drill" a bit too seriously. I could be very wrong and underestimating him. But he feels more like someone who demands the spotlight, not a mastermind with a precise vision. Those good people are not around him anymore; Trump sure as hell doesn't have a vision past tax cuts for billionaires.

[meowkit]

Principles.

Its about assuming most people operate on dogma and heuristics. This is extremely true in my opinion.

By making this assumption, you dispel bad practices and behaviors that might have built up within an organization. Even more importantly you can reveal why certain chesterton’s fences exist.

[ameister14]

Interestingly that is the exact opposite of the Chesterton's fence concept - it illustrates that it is much better to grasp the system as it exists before attempting to change it, as then you can learn why a Chesterton's fence exists without tearing it down.

[svnt]

Which works in fields removed from non-human reality or consequences. For example, when creating financial derivatives or other forms of social engineering, where the substrate changes and nothing seems fixed.

It falls to pieces when people with this mindset attempt to work up against the constraints of physics, or other unchanging limits. Those limits can be constructed on, and relied upon. Going back to first principles in these cases inevitably results in massive losses in the repetition of the uncountable quiet failure-corners of history.

We will find out which one we are dealing with.

[AnimalMuppet]

Not necessarily. Other peoples' work can assume what "everyone knows"; starting from first principles can (sometimes) show up where that's the case. That doesn't mean you're not very smart; it means you're aware enough to know that some limitations that aren't real creep in to the body of knowledge of a field.

Or it can be just arrogance. (In fact, even when it's reasonable, it probably also contains some arrogance...)

[throwaway2037]

I am in agreement with you. The OP is overstated. I have heard Musk interviewed a few times. When asked to explain more about his phase "first principles", he usually talks about (paraphrase) "delete as many things as possible". It is an interesting way to think about project planning. At a bare minimum, he has created several incredibly successful businesses in his lifetime, so he must be doing something right.

[lmm]

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. Physics has to work, organisational processes don't - Maxwell himself wouldn't have been able to understand the travel expense rules at some organisations I've seen, and the right response isn't always to try to reverse engineer what people were thinking when they came up with this crap, sometimes you really are better off throwing it away and coming up with something reasonable from scratch.

[dennis_jeeves2]

>Maxwell himself wouldn't have been able to understand the travel expense rules at some organisations I've seen,

Or the tax code...

>sometimes you really are better off throwing it away and coming up with something reasonable from scratch.

Many people don't understand this and are totally, fully incapable of understanding this simple concept, hence all the opposition

[dani__german]

considering the massive amount of (still often true) information at our fingertips, appealing to authorities that have proved themselves unreliable many times in recent memories is not the benefit one might initially think it is.

"first principles" doesn't mean "go back to 2 + 2 and reinvent the rest of math".

[indoordin0saur]

It seems to have worked well for him many times.