Munger said that the rule of business is to find the basic truth, and then strictly adhere to it.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public number “Chaotic University” (ID: hundun-university), author Li Shanyou.
The first principle is one of the most respected models and the most important models of Chaos University. It is also the most essential part of the philosophy of philosophy.
When China Post and China Telecom were one, when you separated, which one would you choose to go to? If you consider the treatment at the time, it must be good for China Post and the telecommunications is worse. But considering the future development, I think more deeply, and in the field of information technology, the information transmission efficiency is more promising. In this case, the future of telecommunications is even brighter.
For example, when you just reformed and opened up, you chose to stay in the system, or go to sea to do business. If you look at the long-term and think deeply about the future direction of the country, you can judge whether the future development direction is the market economy or the planned economy. In the next few decades, you will not go the wrong way and will not miss the new one. opportunity.
Why can some people see this? Some people can’t see it? The root cause is that some people will “think from the beginning”.
The opposite of “thinking from the beginning” is “analog”. You imagine, more often, what do you do, what I do, my peers do fission marketing, and I also do fission marketing. The essence of these behaviors is an analogy and imitation.
What exactly is “thinking from the beginning”, and further, this is the ability to turn “How” into “Why”. For example, if you have mosquitoes in your home, your first reaction is how to kill mosquitoes. This is called “How” thinking. This way of thinking is that there is no way to solve the problem fundamentally. If you go from “How” to “Why”, you will think, why do you have mosquitoes at home? Finally, it was found that the screen window was broken, and the screen window was added to be the fundamental solution.
Based on this thinking mode of thinking, there is a special term in Chaos University: first principles.
What is the first principle?
The first principle is like the foundation of the building. The deeper the foundation, the higher the building.
Before saying what is first-principles, figuring out why it exists, what is the meaning of existence?
We all know that there are two kinds of logical thinking methods that people often use: induction and deduction. What is inductive law?
For example, the swan you see is white, so come to the conclusion: the days of the worldThe geese are all white.
There is a problem with this method of reasoning, that is, there is a continuity hypothesis behind it: other swanes also conform to the law of white. But this is not to be proved. After all, you have no way to check the swans all over the world. Therefore, inductive method is very useful in the area of continuity. Once it leaves this area, it encounters discontinuity.
What method do you think of when you encounter discontinuity? –deduction.
Deductive method is the syllogism we often say:
People will die;
Socrates is also a human;
So Socrates will die too.
However, there is also a problem with the deductive method, that is, its major premise (people will die), this major premise must be correct, in order to ensure that the subsequent deduction is correct. Think carefully, how come this big premise comes? It is also inductive! Because in the limited experience of people, people are dying, so there is such a conclusion.
There is a problem with this. The main premise comes from the inductive method. There is no way for the inductive method to guarantee absolute correctness. What should we do?
This must be required: the premise of the deductive method must come from the conclusion of a higher chain deductive method. We have infinitely nested this requirement. The premise of each deductive method requires the derivation of a higher chain. This more advanced deductive method has a more advanced premise… This is impossible to end, so we Just think: If there is a self-determined meta-premise, each step is to use the deductive method to launch, so the whole chain is not perfect?
This self-determined meta-premise is the first principle we say, English is called FirstPrinciple.
What is the use of first principles?
Everything is a rationalized ideological system, which is generally simplified and abstracted into a basic principle. This basic principle can cover all the knowledge and thinking models of this system. The theory from this avenue to the simple one is the principle of first principles.
For example, a discipline can find its first principle of principle, which is a sign of whether this discipline is established. In the case of Newton’s classical mechanics system, finding F=ma is a sign of the establishment of Newtonian mechanics. E=mc^2 of Einstein’s theory of relativity is a sign of the establishment of special relativity. Darwin, the 3.8 billion-year-old evolutionary process of biology, was reduced to four words—natural selection—the first principle of evolution. Another exampleIn Adam Smith’s economics, the original starting point of the meta is the “invisible hand.”
The first principle of principle is a divine rule. From a larger scale, those physicists who are at the forefront of research in the field of physics have been searching for the ultimate equation of the entire universe. They firmly believe that With an ultimate equation, you can unify all the knowledge, principles, and systems of the universe.
There are two physics schools today, one is relativity and the other is quantum mechanics, but these two theories cannot be coordinated and unified. So scientists continue to dig the equations and theories below them and try to unify them. It now appears that this theory of unifying them is the string theory.
What is even more shocking is that from the theory of superstrings, the general theory of relativity can be derived. Now the representative of the superstring theory is Professor Edward Witten. He said that the most shocking moment in his life is to derive the theory of relativity from the superstring theory.
Another example, Jobs. Everyone makes products, the masters are doing subtraction, and Jobs is doing division. At the time of designing the ipod, everyone was thinking about how to make the screen smaller, because the smaller the screen, the smaller the size of the device, and then Jobs directly raised, why do you want the screen? So the later ipod has no screen.
Before the iphone came out, all the function machines had a keyboard. When dealing with the keyboard, everyone thought about how to make the keyboard smaller, even thinking about what new materials to solve the problem, and then Jobs said that simply do not want the keyboard.
The deeper drivers of these decisions are first-principles, and Jobs has found the first principle of the product by constantly digging down. Other seemingly brilliant decisions are the result of this deep first-principle deduction.
How to find the first principle of the system?
How do you find the first principle of the system? We give a methodology, logical singularity and axiomatic methods to introduce first principles.
What is a logical singularity?
Two new words, logical singularities and axiomatization methods appear here. First of all, any first-principle principle is not born out of nothing, but built on one or several logical singularities. The logical singularity is the fact that it is self-evident, or the first principle of a larger system. It does not need to be proved by itself. It can be used directly.
Reuse Newton’s classic mechanics example. Its first principle is F=ma. What is the logical singularity of this first principle? There are two, one is the inertia hypothesis, and the other is the definition of gravity. What about Darwin? Its first principle of logic The logical singularity of natural selection is genetic variation.
What is the axiomatization method?
Axiomatization method originated from European geometryEuclidean is the initiator of the axiomatic method, and it is also the author of The Original Geometry.
Plato returned to Athens at the age of 40 and established the Plato Academy. It is said that he posted a sign at the door: those who could not understand the geometry were not allowed to enter. This incident is very strange. I came to listen to philosophy. Why do you have to understand geometry to attend classes?
If you have studied Plato’s philosophy, you will know that the world is determined by ideas that you cannot see, and that the world of ideas takes precedence over the real world. The geometry of Euclidean is partly supported by Plato’s philosophy. Can you imagine that you can see this concept in points, lines and faces in geometry? The real line is no width, have you seen a line with a width?
The points, lines, and faces in geometry are things that don’t exist in real life, but they are guiding real life. European geometry is a philosophy.
Go back to European geometry, a method proposed by European geometry is called axiomatic method. It proposes several axioms and then uses the deductive method to establish the entire geometry system. This geometric system is based on just a few assumptions that, though not proven, but seem quite obvious, and compound human experience, are called axioms. In the European geometry, there are five major axioms, such as “If A = B, B = C, then A = C”, the same amount is equal to each other. It is the five major axioms, plus 23 definitions, using the deductive method, the introduction of 48 theorems and 467 propositions, the establishment of the entire geometric system.
This is a miracle. The whole geometry was introduced in a few kilometers. I think that when we are learning geometry in middle school, we are all brushing the questions. In fact, the real essence is not the problem, but the middle of the reasoning process. This is called “inevitable.” Export”.
In the West, European geometry is known as the Bible of the scientific world, and the number of times of printing is second only to the Bible. It turned out that it was not geometry at all, but a textbook for training thinking. If there is no European geometry, there is no axiomatic thinking, and there is no scientific revolution from Copernicus to Newton.
In the book “The Cowman Biography”, the book with the most folds in Newton’s personal library is Euclidean’s Geometry, which is repeated with Newton’s cleverness. This book, what do you think Newton is reading this book for? Brush the question? Of course not, he is learning the way of thinking.
Newton has an assistant who recalls that he has never seen Newton laughed. This is an extremely demanding person. But once helped him ask why he wanted to study European geometry? Newton smiled, but it was a scornful laugh, and he did not answer this question at all. In other words, if you don’t train this axiomatic thinking in geometry, you don’t understand science and higher philosophy. On the other hand, everyone wants to learn dry goods, and the kind of dry goods that can be used. Only Chaos University is willing to dig down and dig down to talk about this thinking.