Taking a different perspective

The Earth is round. Two plus two equals four. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris live on Earth which revolves around the Sun. These are demonstrable and irrefutable facts today but this wasn’t always the case.

Before the 1600s, people believed that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Geocentrism was the predominant scientific model for most of recorded history since the times of Aristotle and Ptolemy. It wasn’t until Galileo pioneered the refracting telescope and pointed it towards Jupiter’s moons that scientific paradigm of two millennia was shaken. But why did people think this way? Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins posed this rhetorical question -- and I paraphrase -- it looks as if the Sun revolves around the Earth. What would it look like if the Earth revolved around the Sun?

Why does our universe seem fine-tuned to produce life? If there wasn’t a matter-antimatter asymmetry (asymmetry being something fairly unusual in our universe), the Big Bang simply would have been a flash of light. But no matter -- celestial dials worked in our favour this time around.

What would it look like if the universe was not conducive to producing life? There were infinitely many ways that the universe could have imploded, scattered into nothingness, or otherwise not be conducive to producing life. It may seem as if the probability of our existence is incredibly small. However, probabilities must be considered with existing conditions. In this example, there is a group of creatures that are pondering this question so it would be unlikely for our universe to not seemingly guide life into existence¹.

In the show Silicon Valley, entrepreneur Peter Gregory³ has a serendipitous moment while starting atop the breading of BK burgers and predicts a global shortage of sesame seeds due to an overlapping lifecycle period of cicada species (just watch the video). This dramatized scene showcases thinking from first principles, where you start from a blank slate with no assumptions. Reasoning is done from scientifically demonstrable facts and the conclusions may go against conventional wisdom or the sesame seed futures market.

Done right, thinking from first principles can help you make better decisions. It can apply to Elon Musk deciding to invest a large part of his wealth into sustainable energy companies and becoming the richest person on Earth. But we do not have to reserve this tool only for investments of tens of millions of dollars. It can apply to making small day-to-day decisions as well.

As a manager of data scientists, much of my day is spent making decisions. From prioritizing work at the individual or the team level to tactical steps for troubleshooting errors, I am asked to decide what’s next. By having a good mental model of how various systems (e.g., decision making, data pipeline, machine learning algorithm) work, I can connect the dots and make a large number of reasonably good decisions quickly.

One pattern some people fall into is doing things a certain way simply because that is how it was done before. This is in part driven by the availability heuristic, where the historical action comes to mind more readily than other, possibly better solutions. This heuristic is great for when deciding where to go for lunch but has obvious drawbacks. As financial advisors warn, past performance is not a guarantee of future results. We ought to think for ourselves to understand why things work a certain way.

It is my job to have an opinion on things and communicate it to others effectively. Whether it is on the team’s vision or at a task level, my role is to achieve maximum progress on the company’s goals. Elon Musk has compared this to vectors (i.e., having a magnitude and a direction), saying

“Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.”⁴

According to this, your progress as a company is maximized by aligning the individual vectors and increasing each person’s magnitude⁵.

If everyone accepted conventional wisdom as presented, humanity would never make progress. It is thanks to the dissenting few that new ideas are put forth and humanity takes a step forward. Just as Galileo advanced modern science through his willingness to be a contrarian, we should not get swept up in the tides of other opinions.

But you should not take a different position just for the sake of it. Decisions ought to be on solid ground supported by first principles thinking or your tried and tested mental models. So next time you make an important decision, think through the why and do not let conventional wisdom dictate the outcome.

¹This is a form of the anthropic principle. Granted, many physicists seem dissatisfied with this answer and are looking for the principles that imbued our universe with its laws of physics such that life would always be inevitable.
²This term seems to me quite a silly one. You would have to accept the implied premise that the general public is wise on most topics.
³This character is loosely based on Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir
⁴Darmesh Shah. “LinkedIn”. What Elon Musk Taught Me About Growing A Business. Posted October 16, 2017. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-elon-musk-taught-me-growing-business-dharmesh-shah/
⁵From my experience, the former is easier at smaller scales -- although your long-term success depends on the latter.