You Can Be Wrong, Even From First Principles

This Week's Curation #16: Australian stand-up, Faulty thinking & Bezos's bullishness

Hello, this is Ved with another This Week’s Curation.

My brain is melting slightly. It could be because of the soaring Gurgaon summer. It could be because I have a visa appointment coming up. And I hate admin work.

How’s your summer going?

1. Watch: Jenny Tian’s Chinese Australian

Jenny Tian’s a comedian based in Australia. I kind of binged both her specials, and the 5 podcast interviews she’s done.

It was a good mood pick-me-up. Also, I learned Australian prisons aren’t so bad.

(One of her guests was an ex-drug dealer turned comedian.)

Takeaway: When in a bad mood, try some comedy.

2. Read: How First Principles Thinking Fails by Common Cog

Aside from Australian comedy, I’ve been tearing through the Common Cog blog by Cedric Chin.

I went to college hearing about first principles thinking (thanks to Elon Musk lore), but never understood what it was. Or how to learn it.

Then business school happened and I learned a bunch about ‘structured thinking’. Which turns out, is another name for first principles thinking.

But like any tool, it’s good to know the tradeoffs of using it.

Takeaway: In this blog, Cedric digs into some failure cases:

1. Reasoning from shaky assumptions: Your solution relies on your assumptions (“axioms” to Cedric), which can be wrong or faulty if not checked properly.

2. Reasoning from a wrong set of true principles: Even if all your axioms are correct, if you have structured your thinking in a way that doesn’t align with reality, this is also a failure.

There are two ways I’m understanding this second problem:

• When your axioms are correct and complete, but your structure isn’t framed correctly.

  e.g. You are building a house with bricks but arrange them in the wrong order, reaching a bad answer.

• When your axioms and structure are ‘true’, but you were missing a branch of axioms and principles because you weren’t being MECE¹.

This latter problem is why defining your question and scoping the problem properly is important.

3. Listen: Invent & Wander by David Senra

This is a weird one for me.

I know Amazon is a slightly problematic company when it comes to how they treat warehouse staff and their employees. On the other hand, I love the principles and values that drive the company.

(I also have a copy of Working Backwards I’ve been meaning to read for ages.)

Takeaway:

1. Be long-term: Bezos was running an internet company since the late 1990’s. He was making bets and taking decisions without a playbook.

   I think this confidence came from his hedge fund background. While he wasn’t technical, he understood he had to make a financial investment in the beginning to setup the infrastructure for the e-commerce business. It’s only later Amazon developed operational excellence best practices.

   But I wonder: how this conviction played out with Amazon’s failures (like the Fire phone).

   Does Bezos update his thinking and decision-making process? Does he have doubts? How does he sit with them?

2. Have messy meetings: There’s this meeting practice where a 6-page memo needs to be prepped and read, then the meeting takes place. Bezos’s way is to ‘wander’ during these meetings to get ideas vs a rehearsed meeting where everyone had a pre-meeting to discuss what will be said.

3. Inventor-mindset: Something weird about Amazon is how many things it has grown into. E-commerce. Cloud. The Kindle. But with these big wins, Amazon has tons of failures in the process. In some way, that is by design. From the podcast, I got this sense of an experimental mindset with Amazon’s bets.

Although, again, I wonder if this mindset has stuck since Jassy took over.

Bonus: Antimemetics by Nadia Asparouhova

I’m still wrapping my head around this book. I get the idea of ‘antimemes’ and ‘supermemes’.

Ironically, I don’t think this book will be an antimeme, considering the New York Times did a piece on it.

This graph is neat though.

Didn’t have much more to add except it’s an interesting read but no takeaways yet.

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What do you think? Let me know if this was useful.

1. Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive. In this example, the sin was not being collectively exhaustive enough (i.e. missing a critical axiom and set of principles to help get an accurate answer.)