first-principles

name

first-principles

description

Rebuild a claim or design from base truths instead of analogy or convention. Strip inherited assumptions, isolate the irreducible facts that must be true, reconstruct forward from only those, and mark every place convention diverges from necessity. Use when the user says "first principles", "reason from scratch", "why do we assume that", "strip the assumptions", "rebuild this from base truths", "제1원리", "기본부터 다시", "그 전제 진짜 필요해", "원점에서 생각". Do NOT use for a self-skeptic falsification pass on a finished belief (use dont-fool-yourself). Do NOT use to detect copied ritual (use cargo-cult-detector).

First Principles

"I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."

Reasoning by analogy copies what others did with small tweaks; it inherits their assumptions, including the wrong ones. First-principles reasoning tears the thing down to what must be true and rebuilds from there. Slower — but it finds the constraints that are real versus the ones everyone just repeats.

Workflow

1. State the claim/goal in one sentence. ("We need a GPU cluster to serve this model.")
2. List every assumption baked in, out loud. Classify each:
   • LAW — physics/math/hard external constraint that cannot be waived.
   • INHERITED — accepted by convention, no proof attached. Candidate to strip.
   • BOUNDARY — a perceived limit ("you can't do X"). Test whether it's real.
3. Strip the inherited ones. For each INHERITED/BOUNDARY, ask: what actually forces this? If nothing does, delete it and see what the problem looks like without it.
4. Reconstruct forward using only the LAW facts plus assumptions that survived. Build the minimal thing those truths permit.
5. Diff against convention. Where does the from-scratch answer differ from how it's normally done? Each difference is either a real improvement or a constraint you missed — investigate which.

Output

• Irreducible facts — the LAW list nothing can waive.
• Stripped assumptions — what you removed and why it wasn't forced.
• Rebuilt answer — the minimal design the facts allow.
• Convention diff — where and why this departs from the default, with the open question for each departure.

Don't fool yourself

• Stripping a LAW because it's inconvenient isn't first principles — it's wishful thinking. The test of a LAW is that reality, not preference, enforces it.
• Not every decision earns a physics-style rebuild. Reserve this for the assumption that, if wrong, changes everything — routine choices can ride convention.
• "From scratch" still owes evidence. A clever rebuilt answer with no test is a hypothesis; hand it to dont-fool-yourself before betting on it.