“You can’t pick winners in drug development” rhymes with a cluster of memes that are popular in the zeitgeist today:
“Complicated things can’t be understood from first principles”
“Collecting a lot of data without models is better than building models”
“People don’t engage in abstract reasoning much, they do things by feel and instinct”
“Don’t overthink it”
“What it means to be human” refers to what distinguishes us from machines, not what distinguishes us from animals
Once you clarify any of these claims down to a specific proposition, sometimes they’re true. But there is a general sense that you can get social approval from saying things whose upshot is “Thinking: it’s not that great after all!”
Evidence in support of first principles reasoning generally resorts to cherry picking IME. In contrast, when I look through what methodology I can find on breakthrough thinkers in biographies and autobiographies, I find something less like ‘a flash of inside view brilliance’ and more like ‘tried something over and over again in the presence of feedback loops and kept trying to find simple models that would explain most/the core of the data’ (to account for noise in the data gathering process). Once a simple model was found, tested/extended to establish the domain of validity. These thinkers themselves seem to often point out multiple false starts where elegant inside view models were developed but eventually needed to be abandoned. We don’t see as many of those looking back since people rarely record them unless their abandonment was noisy. Scott points to several in the history of depression models IIRC.
Which I suppose is to say that I don’t think you can pick winners using first principles reasoning even though first principles reasoning is how we move forward. Like an exploratory/confirmatory thing.
I do agree that ‘thinking isn’t so great’ serves much more as an excuse to avoid the 99% perspiration than it is a claim about the 1% inspiration. The ‘thinking isn’t so great’ can be helpful when it helps point people towards the idea that ‘summon sapience’ includes more than symbolic based analytic techniques. Presence is expensive, especially at first. So people try to avoid it.
“You can’t pick winners in drug development” rhymes with a cluster of memes that are popular in the zeitgeist today:
“Complicated things can’t be understood from first principles”
“Collecting a lot of data without models is better than building models”
“People don’t engage in abstract reasoning much, they do things by feel and instinct”
“Don’t overthink it”
“What it means to be human” refers to what distinguishes us from machines, not what distinguishes us from animals
Once you clarify any of these claims down to a specific proposition, sometimes they’re true. But there is a general sense that you can get social approval from saying things whose upshot is “Thinking: it’s not that great after all!”
Evidence in support of first principles reasoning generally resorts to cherry picking IME. In contrast, when I look through what methodology I can find on breakthrough thinkers in biographies and autobiographies, I find something less like ‘a flash of inside view brilliance’ and more like ‘tried something over and over again in the presence of feedback loops and kept trying to find simple models that would explain most/the core of the data’ (to account for noise in the data gathering process). Once a simple model was found, tested/extended to establish the domain of validity. These thinkers themselves seem to often point out multiple false starts where elegant inside view models were developed but eventually needed to be abandoned. We don’t see as many of those looking back since people rarely record them unless their abandonment was noisy. Scott points to several in the history of depression models IIRC.
Which I suppose is to say that I don’t think you can pick winners using first principles reasoning even though first principles reasoning is how we move forward. Like an exploratory/confirmatory thing.
I do agree that ‘thinking isn’t so great’ serves much more as an excuse to avoid the 99% perspiration than it is a claim about the 1% inspiration. The ‘thinking isn’t so great’ can be helpful when it helps point people towards the idea that ‘summon sapience’ includes more than symbolic based analytic techniques. Presence is expensive, especially at first. So people try to avoid it.