First principles vs reasoning by analogy
Stream of consciousness post on a busy weekend (forgive me).
I was listening to Eric Jorgenson's new Book of Elon and Elon's view on "reasoning by analogy" stood out to me. The concept is familiar and pretty obvious but I thought specifically framing it as reasoning by analogy was interesting.
This is somewhat analogous to business advice / practices and the view by some professionals that "good" looks like awareness of standard terms and processes and following those processes. That's experienced but often not good and it's where those functioning as B players mistake what it means to be an A or A+ player in a company. The view mistakes potential processes and approaches as the right one and replaces thinking and achieving outcomes with "following process" as the path to performance.
This isn't the same as reasoning by analogy but they're similar. Both substitute following an answer that may not be right or relevant to finding the right path to outcomes or answers. The reason both are so crippling is they can create value-less activity and obfuscate what the right answer or approach is. If the approach or analogy doesn't work for the problem (the answer is "out of pattern" somehow) then there's no converging to the right approach.
It's this type of thinking that can make experience a liability. Pattern fitting wrong answers or approaches (vs leveraging relevant lessons / awareness) can make experience professionals less valuable than green ones. It's worth noting here too that business is extremely contextual (dynamic, adaptive system) and often the company-defining approaches break the "best practice" view on the industry.
The power of first principles thinking stands out when you see someone like Musk cut against the crowd or norms on something they sure is right right approach or a at least good bet. You just can't get there without knowing the hard analysis and limit states of what you're working on.
Takeaways, beware:
- Reasoning by analogy
- Do the math & find the limits of your industry / problem / challenge to validate hypotheses translated from other situations or domains
- "best practices" – In startups these can often be unneeded processes masquerading as the "definition of good work"