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First Principles Thinking

Most of your reasoning is borrowed. First principles thinking is the exit from that.

When you reason by analogy — "we should do it this way because that is how it has always been done" — you are building on top of assumptions you never checked. First principles thinking strips a problem down to its most fundamental truths, the things that remain true even when you remove all convention, tradition, and authority, and then builds understanding back up from there.

This is hard. It is much faster to accept existing frameworks than to disassemble them. But reasoning by analogy means you inherit not just the framework's strengths but all its hidden errors and outdated assumptions. You end up defending conclusions you never actually reached yourself. You are running someone else's software.

The practical version is simpler than it sounds. When you encounter a strong claim, ask: what would have to be true for this to be correct? Then ask: do I have independent evidence that those things are actually true? If the whole argument rests on an assumption that nobody questions because everyone shares it, you have found something worth examining. You do not need to reject it. You just need to notice that you never actually verified it. That noticing is where real understanding begins — and where borrowed certainty ends.

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