The Whole Kitten-Cavoodle

Polymaths 2/3In the first post in this series, we detailed what polymaths are and what first principles thinking is. In this post we will critique first principles thinking and make a case that reasoning by analogy is a more effective method—even for its critics.What’s not so good about First Principles Thinking?First principles thinking is antithetical to the concept of common sense, and that is how it helps us break with convention. The issue with this though is that because common sense is so common, the reasoning, logic and material benefits behind common sense positions can be easily overlooked.What is disregarded as tradition-for-tradition’s-sake might actually have many pragmatic and well-evidenced reasons for being taken seriously. For instance, we all take for granted that harming other people is generally bad, but if we take first principles thinking seriously, we might dismiss this as mere sentiment, beginning our new society from the position that “all is permitted”Now, embarking on this brave new world with enough reasoned analysis, we may end up rediscovering values that resemble our current moral intuitions, perhaps because they were reasonable in the first place, or perhaps because of the inertia of our own biases, but given a few missed details, we could end up somewhere entirely dystopian.Naive foundationalism that fails to consider seriously what is being lost, is dangerous.Descartes thinks, therefore he may have made a MistakeOne example of first principles going wrong comes from Descartes himself. Soon after declaring “cogito ergo sum” Descartes then leapt to a conclusion that, because existence could be confirmed through consciousness but not via physical evidence, consciousness and physics must be categorically independent, leading him to dualism—the claim that there are independent spiritual & physical realms, a philosophical framework that coincidentally aligned with his previously held religious beliefs.This naive dualism was challenged phi