Elon Musk is sort of obsessed with thinking about things “from first principles” rather than “by analogy”. Arguably, this is a generic solution to the paradigm selection problem.
In some cases it can be—and I will discuss this further in a later post. However, there are many situations where the problems you’re encountering are cleanly solved by existing paradigms, and looking at things from first principles leads only to reinventing the wheel. For instance, the appropriate paradigm for running a McDonald’s franchise is extremely understood, and there is little need (or room) for innovation in such a context.
My quite simplistic understanding is that (a) yes, there are already existing solutions, but (b) the people providing those solutions will charge you a lot of money, especially if you later become dependent on them; and you still need to check their work, and they may disagree with you on some details because at the end of the day they are optimizing for themselves, not for you.
Doing things yourself requires extra time and energy, but the money which would otherwise become someone else’s profit now stays in your pockets. Essentially, as soon as you feel reasonably sure that the project will be successful, getting rid of each subcontractor means increasing your profit. You don’t need to become an expert on everything, you can still hire the experts, but now they are your employees working for a salary, instead of a separate company optimizing for their own profit.
Not sure how realistic this is, but if you imagine that even a typical successful company somewhat resembles the Dilbert comic, then if you can build your own company better, you can just take over their people who do the actual work, and stop feeding the remaining ones.
EDIT: I don’t have an experience running a company, but I am thinking about a friend who recently reconstructed his house. His original thoughts were “I am a software developer, this is my competitive advantage, so I will just pay the people who are experts on house construction”, but it turned out that the real world doesn’t work this way. Most of the so-called experts were quite incompetent, and he had to do a lot of research in their field of expertise just to be able to tell the difference. When the reconstruction was over, he already felt like he could start a new profession and do better than most of these experts. In this case, however, those experts were typically sole proprietors. If instead they would have been companies renting the experts, and if my friend would be in some kind of a business of repeatedly reconstructing houses, it would make sense for him to start optimizing the details seriously, and build replacements of what exists out there.
I agree with this response; using first principles is a heuristic, and heuristics always have pros and cons. Just in terms of performance, the benefit is that you can re-assess assumptions but the cost is that you ignore a great amount of information gathered by those before you. Depending on the value of this information, you should frequently seek it out, as least as a supplement to your derivation.
Elon Musk is sort of obsessed with thinking about things “from first principles” rather than “by analogy”. Arguably, this is a generic solution to the paradigm selection problem.
In some cases it can be—and I will discuss this further in a later post. However, there are many situations where the problems you’re encountering are cleanly solved by existing paradigms, and looking at things from first principles leads only to reinventing the wheel. For instance, the appropriate paradigm for running a McDonald’s franchise is extremely understood, and there is little need (or room) for innovation in such a context.
My quite simplistic understanding is that (a) yes, there are already existing solutions, but (b) the people providing those solutions will charge you a lot of money, especially if you later become dependent on them; and you still need to check their work, and they may disagree with you on some details because at the end of the day they are optimizing for themselves, not for you.
Doing things yourself requires extra time and energy, but the money which would otherwise become someone else’s profit now stays in your pockets. Essentially, as soon as you feel reasonably sure that the project will be successful, getting rid of each subcontractor means increasing your profit. You don’t need to become an expert on everything, you can still hire the experts, but now they are your employees working for a salary, instead of a separate company optimizing for their own profit.
Not sure how realistic this is, but if you imagine that even a typical successful company somewhat resembles the Dilbert comic, then if you can build your own company better, you can just take over their people who do the actual work, and stop feeding the remaining ones.
EDIT: I don’t have an experience running a company, but I am thinking about a friend who recently reconstructed his house. His original thoughts were “I am a software developer, this is my competitive advantage, so I will just pay the people who are experts on house construction”, but it turned out that the real world doesn’t work this way. Most of the so-called experts were quite incompetent, and he had to do a lot of research in their field of expertise just to be able to tell the difference. When the reconstruction was over, he already felt like he could start a new profession and do better than most of these experts. In this case, however, those experts were typically sole proprietors. If instead they would have been companies renting the experts, and if my friend would be in some kind of a business of repeatedly reconstructing houses, it would make sense for him to start optimizing the details seriously, and build replacements of what exists out there.
I agree with this response; using first principles is a heuristic, and heuristics always have pros and cons. Just in terms of performance, the benefit is that you can re-assess assumptions but the cost is that you ignore a great amount of information gathered by those before you. Depending on the value of this information, you should frequently seek it out, as least as a supplement to your derivation.