The Origin of Elon Musk’s “First Principles”

Of the many articles and interviews that praise Elon Musk, few focus on the aspect of his thinking immediately applicable to our own lives.  That is, his method of problem solving.

Musk calls it “proceeding from first principles,” but for those of us who can’t grasp what he means by this, we need only look to the year 1637.

For long before there was a YouTube, transistors, or even Calculus, there was Descartes’ “Method,” and it’s one of the most powerful problem solving tools ever invented.

The one thing electric cars, self-landing rockets, and Hyper loops have in common is that they are plagued with engineering problems.  Solving these problems takes an enormous intellectual effort.  But intellect alone does not make it possible for man to land on Mars.  More than just brains, there needs to be a method. 

“Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting one’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences” was written in 1637 by a then 23 year old René Descartes.  This bourgeois kid from France went to all the best schools and had great teachers. But he sensed something was wrong.

The problem?

Everything valuable that could be learned in school was plagued by misinformation. It was simply too difficult to figure out the TRUE from the FALSE, to separate knowledge from speculation.

So he did what most college kids do when they become frustrated with the state of their learning, he took a gap-year.  He ended up in Germany and there he derived his most famous system.  It went something like this:

(1) The first was never to accept anything as true if I didn’t have evident knowledge of its truth: that is, carefully to avoid jumping to conclusions and preserving old opinions, and to include in my judgments only what presented itself to my mind so vividly and so clearly that I had no basis for calling it in question.

(2) The second ·was· to divide each of the difficulties I examined into as many parts as possible and as might be required in order to resolve them better.

(3) The third ·was· to direct my thoughts in an orderly manner, by •starting with the simplest and most easily known objects in order to move up gradually to knowledge of the most complex, and •by stipulating some order even among objects that have no natural order of precedence.

(4) And the last ·was· to make all my enumerations so complete, and my reviews so comprehensive, that I could be sure that I hadn’t overlooked anything.

Simple?  Yes.  But it’s the simplicity that makes it so useful. Take a moment to try it for yourselves.  But be careful, that first step is a doozy. Erasing all the untruths from your quest is no easy task.  What it requires is a kind of radical skepticism.

This skepticism was something very similar to what Socrates did in 500 BC. He called into question the knowledge of all the so-called wise people and found it wanting.  Moreover, he defined wisdom as knowing that you do not know.  From this first principle came one of a many beginnings of science.

So perhaps you too would like to take on the toughest problems in the world. Certainly, there is no shortage of them.  Well, I’d like to echo Musk’s dictum to begin with first principles.  And by first principles, I mean, Descartes Method.

Now get to work.