First-Principles Reasoning
Strip a thesis to what must be true - unit economics, customer behaviour, the capital cycle - and rebuild from there rather than reasoning by analogy from comparables. Comps tell you what others paid; first principles tell you what the thing is worth. A sharp disagreement between the two is either your error or your opportunity, and the work is deciding which.
24 books · 5 people behind it · 4 resources
Start here
- The Great Mental Models Volume 1Shane Parrish, 2019
- Zero to OnePeter Thiel, Blake Masters, 2014
- Six Easy PiecesRichard P. Feynman, 1994
The people behind it 5
Each person holds a book in this entry or names it in their own tags.
Investors 1
Founders 1
Journalists 3
Resources 4
- First Principles: The Building Blocks of True KnowledgeShane Parrish · essay · Reason up from what must be true, not from analogy.
- Thought Experiment: How Einstein Solved Difficult ProblemsShane Parrish · essay · Testing a thesis where reality cannot be run.
- How to Get Startup IdeasPaul Graham · essay · Reasoning from noticed problems rather than from analogy.
- How to Think for YourselfPaul Graham · essay · Independent-mindedness as the source of variant perception.
Books 24
T1 Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari · 2011 · Big history of money, trade and the shared fictions that organise markets
Andrew WilkinsonBill GatesMohnish PabraiNat EliasonNaval RavikantShane ParrishVinod KhoslaAlfred LinAli AbdaalAna FabregaAnthony PomplianoBrett AdcockChangpeng ZhaoDaniel EkDaniel PetreDemis HassabisJames CameronJulian ShapiroJulie ZhuoKeith RaboisMark ZuckerbergMatt MullenwegMelinda GatesNiki ScevakNir EyalPatrick O'ShaughnessyPaul BassatPeter AttiaRaoul PalRay DalioReid HoffmanRichard BransonRyan SheaScott FarquharThe Rational WalkTrevor NcubeZoë Foster Blake
T1 Zero to One
Peter Thiel, Blake Masters · 2014
Balaji S. SrinivasanEric WeinsteinMohnish PabraiNat EliasonPatrick O'ShaughnessyAlfred LinAna FabregaAnna ChengBen HorowitzBrett AdcockCasey NeistatChris DixonCodie SanchezDustin MoskovitzElon MuskEric JorgensonGuy ProopsJames AltucherJoel ConnollyKeith RaboisLuis von AhnMarc AndreessenMatt MullenwegMax LevchinMichael WongNiki ScevakReid HoffmanRyan PetersonSam AltmanSatya NadellaSophie BakalarSteph SmithTom Bilyeu
Robert M. Pirsig · 1974 · Philosophical inquiry into quality and how to reason about systems
J. E. Gordon · 1981 · Why materials and structures hold; engineering reasoning made intuitive
Daniel J. Boorstin · 1983 · How humans discovered time, geography and nature; a history of knowing
Richard P. Feynman · 1988 · Feynman on the Challenger inquiry and thinking from the evidence
David Deutsch · 1997 · Four strands of explanation; knowledge as the engine of progress
T2 Consilience
Edward O. Wilson · 1998 · Wilson's argument for the unity of knowledge across disciplines
Bill Bryson · 2003 · Popular survey of how science established what it currently knows
Walter Isaacson · 2007 · Isaacson on Einstein's thought experiments and reasoning from principles
Daniel C. Dennett · 2013 · Dennett's toolkit of thought experiments for reasoning carefully
Robert G. Hagstrom · 2013 · Investing read through physics, biology, sociology and literature
Steven Strogatz · 2019 · Calculus explained as the mathematics of change
T2 Range
David Epstein · 2019 · The case for breadth over early specialisation in unpredictable domains
Francis Bacon · 1627 · Bacon's utopia of organised research; science as an institution
Charles Van Doren · 1991 · Survey of what humans have known, era by era
Robert G. Hagstrom · 2000 · Munger's multidisciplinary latticework applied to investment analysis
Paul Strathern · 2000 · The search for the periodic table; reasoning from the elements upward
Anthony Gottlieb · 2000 · History of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance
John Brockman · 2012 · Short essays on the scientific concepts most worth adopting