Using first principles and frameworks.

Thinking about complex issues using first principles and frameworks is something I have been trying to hone for a long time. This stems from the success I have had in using these principles in my research.It is also a concept I have heard repeated over by a lot of people I look up-to like Amit Varma , Pranay Kotasthane , Feynman etc. There is also a really good video of Elon Musk espousing this strategy for life. Through this blog post I will try to explain my ideas and thoughts on following this principle.

Most systemic fields of thought have an axiomatic approach to constructing theories, thus creating coherent frameworks to look at the subject. In this following texts I won't be using any fancy self referential or Incompleteness theorem like logic, so rest assured we can talk about a consistent framework.

First principles: Most problems are highly complex for us to analyze as a whole and it is easier to analyze its parts and sum it up . This philosophy is very effectively espoused in consulting firms, and the whole idea was taken from Reductionism. You break down a problem and understand it at the lowest rungs to understand the whole thing. 

An interesting flow of thought in reductionist thinking would go like; company XYZ is not making profits, but it was last year.We need to figure out why it is happening. The first order simplification would be profit = revenue - cost. So we could ask did costs go up or revenue sink? Both could lead to a drop in profits. If its cost we could go on to look at the various types of cost the company has see which ones has peaked. An example could be a n FMCG suffering from excess cost because there was a drought halfway across the world from where they procure their strawberries and now they had to adapt their entire supply chain to some other place.

This sort of reductionist thinking is all pervasive in the scientific world.We tried breaking matter smaller and smaller and got till quarks, we tried breaking biology and got till cells,DNA, nucleotides etc. We started from the arithmetic of numbers to partial differential equation (simple->small, but still PDE's can be pulled back to arithematic basis). 

There is a small caveat to this: Over the last 50 years we have started observing emergent and systems level dynamics that can't be explained using reductionist thinking. This is the field of non-linear dynamics, chaos, emergent phenomena etc. The sum of parts is not equal to the whole. There is something that makes the whole special. A cell is not just a sum of all its protein and molecular components, but something more. There is this excellent lecture by Prof. Robert Sapolsky on this. But for most cases in life we can still stick a reductionist principle to understand things happen.

Framework: Any sufficiently complex system is impervious to any single school of thought. The greatest problems of our generation like the optimal economic structure, cure to cancer, efficient batteries, sustainable living, ethical standards in modernity etc need to be tackled from a wide variety of angles to generate enough insight for us to have a go at cracking it. A framework lets you look at problems in a consistent manner.

For example let's take an economic way of looking at things, that assumes rational decision making and the idea of competitiveness and free markets. We can create a huge class of insights from this lens of thought. One key insight would be that products are better when the industries are competitive. We can take this insight to any field! Let's look at the economics of religion for example!(Derived from EconTalk) and analyze religiosity in countries with a state religion vs states with religious freedom. We can easily predict that in states with religious freedom the product would be better and more people will be religious compared to countries with state religion. Here the product is the ideas of a religion, which we would be more crafted to get more people involved(Pretty cold, but super impressive insights can be had). Turns this is what happens in real life!(Check out the EconTalk episode).