1/27/2021 Part 2.21
We all know Pythagoras theorem. he gave importance to numbers. Plato and Aristotle tended to associate the holiness and wisdom of number—and along with this, harmony and music—with the Pythagoreans. Perhaps more basic than number, at least for Philolaus, are the concepts of the limited and unlimited. Nothing in the cosmos can be without limit (F1), including knowledge.
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (c.500-c.428 B.C.E.) had what was, up until that time, the most unique perspective on the nature of matter and the causes of its generation and corruption.
The most important player in this continuous play of being is mind (nous). Although mind can be in some things, nothing else can be in it—mind is unmixed. We recall that, for Anaxagoras, everything is mixed with everything. There is some portion of everything in anything that we identify. Thus, if anything at all were mixed with mind, then everything would be mixed with mind.
Atoms, Atomos, is that which is uncut or indivisible. The ancient atomists, Leucippus and Democritus (c.5th cn B.C.E.), were concerned with the smallest particles in nature that make up reality—particles that are both indivisible and invisible.
All these are well developed in Rig Veda and Upanishads much before these Greeks.
The reason for looking at Greek philosophy is it is well documented and explains principles. Indian philosophy is more advanced but explanations are cryptic.
Greetings. Dks
I thought of sharing this link with you https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/25/asia/south-korea-kim-kwang-seok-ai-dst-hnk-intl/index.html. You might have already heard about it or read it. If so, apologies. Just to reflect on how AI could impact us differently from what has been already.
1/28/2021 Part 2.22
Broadly speaking, the Sophists were a group of itinerant teachers who charged fees to teach on a variety of subjects, with rhetoric as the preeminent subject in their curriculum. A common characteristic among many, but perhaps not all, Sophists seems to have been an emphasis upon arguing for each of the opposing sides of a case. Thus, these argumentative and rhetorical skills could be useful in law courts and political contexts. However, these sorts of skills also tended to earn many Sophists their reputation as moral and epistemological relativists, which for some was tantamount to intellectual fraud.
Socrates was the son of a sculptor, Sophroniscus, and grew up an Athenian citizen. He was reported to be gifted with words and was sometimes accused of what Plato later accused Sophists, that is, using rhetorical devices to “make the weaker argument the stronger.” Indeed, Xenophon reports that the Thirty Tyrants forbade Socrates to speak publicly except on matters of practical business because his clever use of words seemed to lead young people astray. Similarly, Aristophanes presents Socrates as an impoverished sophist whose head was in the clouds to the detriment of his daily, practical life. Moreover, his similarities with the sophists are even highlighted in Plato’s work. Indeed, Socrates’ courtroom speech in Plato’s Apology includes a defense against accusations of sophistry.
You can see the effect of good speech and rhetoric on people even today.
1/29/2021 Part 2.23
Discussions with Mr B Samba murthy. He is a deep thinker and also a clairvoyant.
His comments are
“Can we apply of First Principles Thinking to solve our major education problems. One such problem is Poor Learning Outcomes as revealed by ASER?”
My response
“It is due to blind teaching with no knowledge of students capabilities and with rigid beliefs and structures or even no teaching. Dks”
He asked. ” Solution”
My response
“Will discuss tomorrow. First principle, thinking is a major topic for discussion and will do it later. Solution is not easy. Most urban schools are doing ok but problem is with rural schools. That means 90%of all schools and children. We need reach of internet and online teaching. That plus NGOs or startups is the solution. We do have a lot of educational startups but mostly in urban areas and with poor localization.
Current school system is not going to help. We need voluntary or startups to pick contents and pass it on. There is no dearth of contents online. Localization is needed. Do online evaluation and mentor. Not comfortable in expecting changes in school system. It is a huge rigid system with no interest in improvements. Any better suggestions.”
Mr B Sambamurty
“Education is a fundamental building block to achieve Economic progress and not just GDP growth.”
Mine
“Very correct and it is a fundamental right . Progress starts with good education. Our school education particularly in rural areas is anti learning,anti innovation.
It was not so in our times. Teachers were sincere,learned and dedicated. But now Most teachers don’t stay in the village.
This reform is urgent. NEP is really good,but implementation is critical. Unfortunately, school education is with the states and priority for education for state governments is low. They spend time to transfer teachers and not providing education even the three R’s ,the first step. Whether we like it or not ,we need a public exam at fifth standard to detect problems early. Our existing regulation by education department s have failed to even identify this problem leave alone diagnosis and solutions. Because most problems are in the large number of rural primary schools. Governments have not taken action on the problem of about 80% dropouts at the primary school level. In Karnataka number of high schools is about 10% of primary schools. That shows the large number of drop outs by fifth standard. While I am not a great supporter of public examinations system, here public exam at fifth standard will open the eyes of many and hopefully lead the way for a better learning process. We need non school based education. It is serious . Otherwise inclusive education is a maya or myth. Dks”
1/30/2021 Part 2.24
Let us look at first principles thinking and how to apply it to improve our education. I gave a simple solution yesterday.
But as Mr Sambamurty said education is far more important than economy and GDP, it becomes essential to look at this more deeply. As I said NEP will not solve the problem. NEP did not use first principles thinking approach. It used incremental approach.
Incremental approaches are patch solutions. They don’t see far and get a slight improvement over existing situation.
What is needed is an ab initio approach. We used to call this Arabian desert method. Assume nothing exists. No assumptions. So derive solutions starting from first principles or basic axioms of science.
That solution will be a breakthrough. I applied this to Delhi power supply problem in seventies.
It was Elon Musk who has popularized first principle thinking.
Education design is a complex one. Our educationists and researchers see small problems. But this will not solve the overall problem holistically.
Secondly, we want one solution for all. This uniformity is not workable. Thirdly we assume all students have the same level of competence and should learn the same aspects. This is stupid leading to artificial and mostly uninterested education and large dropouts. These work for urban middle class and upper castes, not for all others.
So first assume no education system exists.
Then decide on
What to learn?
How to reach all and make it inclusive? How do we localize – language, contents and even frame work?
How to learn?
How to make all to learn? How to motivate?
Where to learn? When to learn?
What level or depth is needed?
How to design several holistic education systems with multiple models to suit different regions and different types of students?
How to design a system to handle learning centers?
How to design multiple kinds of teaching methods to cater to all?
How do we assess properly, sincerely and seriously?
What should be infrastructure needed?
How to prepare for moving to the new system?
How to change from old to new?
maybe this set of questions can be enlarged. But we have a basic set of questions to be addressed. The sequence is important.
Keep the present system out of mind, define objectives and goals and start working on it. Will any government do this? When so called intellectuals and educationists are only suggesting tinkering and not a holistic first principles approach, can we expect government to act. There will be a lot of uproar and agitations. Teachers won’t keep quiet.
We can produce landscapes for these problems. But ,it is a big but? Needs attention of all for a good future of all and the country.
Mr Mukul Jain, industrialist, designer and entrepreneur has forwarded this message looking at top level and bottom level thinking.
“This is really insightful for our next generation of nation builders.
Most students fail this challenge. Here’s what we can learn from their mistakes.
You’re a student in a Stanford class on entrepreneurship.
Your professor walks into the room, breaks the class into different teams, and gives each team five dollars in funding. Your goal is to make as much money as possible within two hours and then give a three-minute presentation to the class about what you achieved.
If you’re a student in the class, what would you do?
Typical answers range from using the five dollars to buy start-up materials for a makeshift car wash or lemonade stand, to buying a lottery ticket or putting the five dollars on red at the roulette table.
But the teams that follow these typical paths tend to bring up the rear in the class.
The teams that make the most money don’t use the five dollars at all. They realize the five dollars is a distracting, and essentially worthless, resource.
So they ignore it. Instead, they go back to first principles and start from scratch. They reframe the problem more broadly as “What can we do to make money if we start with absolutely nothing?” One particularly successful team ended up making reservations at popular local restaurants and then selling the reservation times to those who wanted to skip the wait. These students generated an impressive few hundred dollars in just two hours.
But the team that made the most money approached the problem differently. They realized that both the $5 funding and the 2-hour period weren’t the most valuable assets at their disposal. Rather, the most valuable resource was the three-minute presentation time they had in front of a captivated Stanford class. They sold their three-minute slot to a company interested in recruiting Stanford students and walked away with $650.
The five-dollar challenge illustrates the difference between tactics and strategy. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, they refer to different concepts. A strategy is a plan for achieving an objective. Tactics, in contrast, are the actions you undertake to implement the strategy.
The Stanford students who bombed the $5 challenge fixated on a tactic—how to use the five dollars—and lost sight of the strategy. If we focus too closely on the tactic, we become dependent on it. “Tactics without strategy,” as Sun Tzu wrote in the Art of War, “are the noise before defeat.”
Just because a $5 bill is sitting in front of you doesn’t mean it’s the right tool for the job. Tools, as Neil Gaiman reminds us, “can be the subtlest of traps.” When we’re blinded by tools, we stop seeing other possibilities in the peripheries. It’s only when you zoom out and determine the broader strategy that you can walk away from a flawed tactic.
What is the $5 tactic in your own life? How can you ignore it and find the 2-hour window? Or even better, how do you find the most valuable three minutes in your arsenal?
Once you move from the “what” to the “why”—once you frame the problem broadly in terms of what you’re trying to do instead of your favored solution—you’ll discover other possibilities lurking in plain sight.
No comments from me.
2/02/2021 Part 2.25
In the previous one of mine, we talked about first principle thinking and apply it to learning. Such a method is why I called this learning philosophy. First principle approach was used by many great scientists like Newton and most mathematicians. We now assume oh there is enough development and lot of work done. So as Newton said we are standing on the shoulders of thousands and thousands of researchers, inventors and philosophers. So why bother about going to first principles. This is a one-track approach. If we are satisfied that all that is to be found out has been done, that is disaster and death of thinking. We should be discerning and choose appropriate methods, that is multi path people. Hence the importance of first principles.
We can use FPT to structure our life also.
We ask a number of questions
What do I want to be?
How do I become useful?
What are good attitudes?
Why do I get worried?
Am I ok?
What education I should get and where?
What job I should get?
How do I keep myself up-to-date in
my field?
Or even mundane things like
How do I save enough for future?
When I talked about FPT, we see a lot of applications. It helps us to go problem generation route instead of problem-solving route. It allows inventions and innovations.
Let us look further in coming days and find some answers to questions posed in previous post and this.
2/03/2021 Part 2.26
Let us see who uses some versions of FPT (first principles thinking). May not be a totally blank ab initio approach, but a blending past experience , imagination, and querying but not constrained by resources ,existing systems etc. Great architects design buildings invariably from first principles. Many opera houses, many theatres, many great buildings have been conceived and not copied. The conceptions came from FPT . Engineering came later. Vidhana soudha was also conceived in a similar way. We can see several temples conceived from this approach. Particular mention is the chennakeshava temple at Belur, an amalgam of two architectures – tamil Dravida and nagara-.
Dreyfuss gave a new look to industrial design through ab initio principles. Many designers like Steve Jobs used thinking approaches. Elon Musk talks about his electric vehicle design with use of first principles. Remember the idly dosa grinder designs. The initial design modified the manual approach. But table top tilting model went to first principles to come with a new product. Cray conceptualized super computers not from existing models but from FPT.
Lawyers also look at various aspects of cases with a questioning look. True they may use past judgements and experience to a large extent. But criminal lawyers use FPT most of the time. Those of us who had a diet of Perry Mason novels will remember the thinking approaches, twists and turns. He is not an expert. We can say “To be a great lawyer is to be a user of first principle thinker.” Many old-time doctors who did not have the modern multitude of tests, used several ways of looking at the patients suffering and find solutions. They have very little help from theory and labs.
All FPT based products may not succeed. The inexpensive cars like Dolphin and Montana designed by Sipani motors in 1980 using ferro plastic body did not succeed because of market pressures. Similarly electric scooters and cars did not meet with success till a total reimagination happened.
Most serious researchers use FPT to come up with breakthroughs. Most new disciplines like bio technology, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum computing, Chaos theory used FPT a lot. An area like analytics and data science is not a simple application of algorithms, statistics or machine learning. It is a major problem generation activity and interpretation. That means FPT will be very much relevant there.
So, we cannot ignore FPT.
Where we have well defined techniques available and used widely, we become routine and apply them sometimes without thinking. Where no mature methods are available, we think sometimes on alternates and sometimes from first principles.
Mr Jayashankar comments on FPT
When we talk about FPT of lawyers, I remember one of the Shakespeare ‘s play, The Merchant of Venice. Though it is an imaginary story, the author’s imagination is command able. It is an unconventional thinking.
When Shylock gave a loan to Antonio, since his ship got stuck and may be delayed to reach the destination. The condition put forth by Shylock was he would take three pounds if flesh in the event of failure of payment on the promised date.
Antonia failed and Shylock went o court to get his promise fulfilled. The lawyer of Antonio pleaded that now A got money, change your mind of taking flesh since it would kill him. Shylock was stubborn. Then Portia, A’ s lawyer stuck with a very good idea. She told ” OK you can take flesh. But…
2/05/2021 Part 2.27
We should have discussed first principles initially but we jumped into its application to learning.
The idea came from Aristotle, fourth century BCE, student of Plato and gave an idea of western logic. He also talked about causes and principles.
First principle is a basic proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption. In philosophy, first principles are from First Cause attitudes and taught by Aristotelians, and nuanced versions of first principles are referred to as postulates by Kantians. In mathematics, first principles are referred to as axioms or postulates. In physics and other sciences, theoretical work is said to be from first principles, or ab initio, if it starts directly at the level of established science and does not make assumptions such as empirical model and parameter fitting.
Aristotle used first principles approach
to gather knowledge and reasoning.
In every systematic inquiry (methodos) where there are first principles, or causes, or elements, knowledge and science result from acquiring knowledge of these; for we think we know something just in case we acquire knowledge of the primary causes, the primary first principles, all the way to the elements. It is clear, then, that in the science of nature as elsewhere, we should try first to determine questions about the first principles. The naturally proper direction of our road is from things better known and clearer to us, to things that are clearer and better known by nature; for the things that are known to us are not the same as the things known unconditionally (haplôs). Hence it is necessary for us to progress, following this procedure, from the things that are less clear by nature, but clearer to us, towards things that are clearer and better known by nature.
Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, wrote a book (Zero to One) describing how true innovation is created.
“Find value in unexpected places by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.”
2/06/2021 Part 2.28
Shutting down first principles thinking
Observe how children naturally apply first principles thinking as they try to build their own reasoning around why certain things must be done in certain ways in an attempt to establish a better view of the world. It can be simple questions like:
“Why do I need to eat healthy”
“Why do I need to sleep at a certain time”
Why do I need to brush my teeth?
“Why do you have to go to school”
“Why are you allowed to have more screen time than I do”
Why should I wear a mask?
The never-ending list of Whys starts off as being cute to feeling like a game and soon turns into a test of patience for most parents ending with “Because I said so”.
In schools, children are taught to obey, do as told. They are required to learn lessons and not encouraged to reason and explore the fundamental truths underlying any principle.
Whether it’s a lack of time or our own ignorance to find a perfectly reasonable answer that will satisfy their curiosity, avoiding it is the first step to killing their confidence in their own reasoning process. Met with “Because I said so”, children learn to follow others ideas and beliefs without a chance to construct their own versions, build their own reality and learn to apply it.
This happens at work too. People with the “I-know-best” attitude or those with a desire to move fast shun others viewpoints and questioning reflected in their responses:
2/08/2021 Part 2.29
Thinking
Thinking has created a number of new terminologies like first principle thinking, incremental thinking, systems thinking, design thinking, lateral thinking, multi-dimensional thinking , binary thinking etc. We discussed FPT. It does not seem to be fully understood. If you change an activity, it is not FPT. It is most of the times an incremental approach. FPT is abinitio approach. It allows your imagination to play out fully. I gave the example of Arabian desert approach – no assumptions, no existing analogies. You build step by step using additional basic principles. You can do top down or bottom up as suited to a problem under consideration. In most cases, top down is used. Normally, FPT leads to a disruption. Transistors were not replacement to vacuum tubes. A big mistake by academics to think it replaces tubes. It took us more than a decade to know it’s switching characteristics thereby heralding digital era. Similarly, MAC operating system did not accept any principle of MS-DOS. It is a new approach. Same with ipod. Hope it is understood that every change is not FPT.
2/09/2021 Part 2.30
Next let us move up. Are these rightly called thinking? Unfortunately, I do not think so. FPT was not given a status of thinking initially. Elon Musk called it as starting problem solving from first principles. Same is true for design thinking. Normally design is not structured. It gives designers opportunities to try and imagine multiple solutions. Great Designers are constrained by design thinking. It reduced creativity considerably. I would call it a design methodology not design thinking. It is clear that You can’t market design methodologies, but you can market design thinking, a catchy new name. Same is true of systems thinking also. It is an approach used to solve large problems. It evolved as a major area with contributions by many researchers. It is not used as a catchy name, but to evolve as an integrator of several areas of systems. Still, it is only systems approach. Thinking is a holistic, multidimensional, activity not structured, but may wander everywhere. We may provide directions to work faster and reach a conclusion. We can focus our thinking process to solve a specific problem or doing a task by narrowing our universe considerably. Thinking can be conscious, conditioned or subconscious. In many instances our thinking is conditioned or influenced particularly on social or political aspects. Prof Thaler, Nobel prize winner in Economics feels behavior of people can be changed by nudges. So we are susceptible to advertisements and propaganda. Remember positive thinking. It directs a person to become a positive person, not much thinking there, but very important for successes