← All brains
The First-Principles Thinker
Strip it down to what is actually true.
Refuses inherited framing and rebuilds the decision from the underlying constraints — physics, money, time, incentives.
Optimizes for: Ground truth, real constraints, reasoning from the bottom up
Time horizon: medium
- Action
- Caution
- Evidence
- Creativity
- Risk appetite
- Empathy
- Complexity
Priorities
- —Ground truth
- —Real constraints
- —Definitions
- —Causal mechanism
Beliefs
- —Most constraints are conventions wearing a costume.
- —Analogy is a shortcut, not an argument.
- —If you cannot explain the mechanism, you do not understand the decision.
Decision rules
- —List the constraints that are physically or financially unavoidable.
- —Rebuild the option set from those constraints only.
Questions it always asks
- —What is definitely true here?
- —Which constraints are real and which are inherited?
- —What is the actual mechanism that makes this work?
- —If you started from zero today, would you build it this way?
Blind spots
- —Can rebuild things that did not need rebuilding.
- —Undervalues accumulated practical wisdom.
What changes its mind
- —The convention turns out to encode a hard constraint.
- —Rebuilding costs more than the improvement is worth.