Here’s the thing: We have flying cars. They’re called airplanes. People who ask this question are so focused on form (a flying object that looks like a car) that they overlook the function (transportation by flight). This is what Elon Musk is referring to when he says that people often “live life by analogy.” Be wary of the ideas you inherit. Old conventions and previous forms are often accepted without question and, once accepted, they set a boundary around creativity. This difference is one of the key distinctions between continuous improvement and first principles thinking. Continuous improvement tends to occur within the boundary set by the original vision. By comparison, first principles thinking requires you to abandon your allegiance to previous forms and put the function front and center. What are you trying to accomplish? What is the functional outcome you are looking to achieve? Optimize the function. Ignore the form. This is how you learn to think for yourself.

The real power of first-principles thinking is moving away from incremental improvement and into possibility. Letting others think for us means that we’re using their analogies, their conventions, and their possibilities. It means we’ve inherited a world that conforms to what they think. This is incremental thinking. When we take what already exists and improve on it, we are in the shadow of others. It’s only when we step back, ask ourselves what’s possible, and cut through the flawed analogies that we see what is possible. Analogies are beneficial; they make complex problems easier to communicate and increase understanding. Using them, however, is not without a cost. They limit our beliefs about what’s possible and allow people to argue without ever exposing our (faulty) thinking. Analogies move us to see the problem in the same way that someone else sees the problem. The gulf between what people currently see because their thinking is framed by someone else and what is physically possible is filled by the people who use first principles to think through problems.

Even years later, the desks were just planks of wood on cinder blocks from the hardware store. I made the office computers myself from parts. My well-funded friends would spend $100,000 to buy something I made myself for $1,000. They did it saying, “We need the very best,” but it didn’t improve anything for their customers. …It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone. To survive as a business, you need to treat your customers well. And yet so few of us master this principle.

Peretti figured out early on the first principle of a successful website: wide distribution. Rather than publishing articles people should read, BuzzFeed focuses on publishing those that people want to read. This means aiming to garner maximum social shares to put distribution in the hands of readers. Peretti recognized the first principles of online popularity and used them to take a new approach to journalism. He also ignored SEO, saying, “Instead of making content robots like, it was more satisfying to make content humans want to share.”[8] Unfortunately for us, we share a lot of cat videos. A common aphorism in the field of viral marketing is, “content might be king, but distribution is queen, and she wears the pants” (or “and she has the dragons”; pick your metaphor). BuzzFeed’s distribution-based approach is based on obsessive measurement, using A/B testing and analytics. Jon Steinberg, president of BuzzFeed, explains the first principles of virality: Keep it short. Ensure [that] the story has a human aspect. Give people the chance to engage. And let them react. People mustn’t feel awkward sharing it. It must feel authentic. Images and lists work. The headline must be persuasive and direct.

I remember being in meetings and asking people why we were doing something this way or why they thought something was true. At first, there was a mild tolerance for this approach. After three “whys,” though, you often find yourself on the other end of some version of “we can take this offline.” Can you imagine how that would play out with Elon Musk? Richard Feynman? Charlie Munger? Musk would build a billion-dollar business to prove you wrong, Feynman would think you’re an idiot, and Munger would profit based on your inability to think through a problem. “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”— Carl Sagan

Techniques for Establishing First Principles There are many ways to establish first principles. Let’s take a look at a few of them. Socratic Questioning Socratic questioning can be used to establish first principles through stringent analysis. This a disciplined questioning process, used to establish truths, reveal underlying assumptions, and separate knowledge from ignorance. The key distinction between Socratic questioning and normal discussions is that the former seeks to draw out first principles in a systematic manner. Socratic questioning generally follows this process: Clarifying your thinking and explaining the origins of your ideas (Why do I think this? What exactly do I think?) Challenging assumptions (How do I know this is true? What if I thought the opposite?) Looking for evidence (How can I back this up? What are the sources?) Considering alternative perspectives (What might others think? How do I know I am correct?) Examining consequences and implications (What if I am wrong? What are the consequences if I am?) Questioning the original questions (Why did I think that? Was I correct? What conclusions can I draw from the reasoning process?) This process stops you from relying on your gut and limits strong emotional responses. This process helps you build something that lasts.

The site’s employee roster was impressive: Ana Marie Cox, Tim Cavanaugh, and Owen Thomas all honed their skills at Suck. Also among the early employees was Heather Havrilesky, who wrote under the pseudonym Polly Esther. The moniker stuck: Havrilesky still writes a weekly column, “Ask Polly,” in which she dispenses compassionate, tough-love advice. “Ask Polly,” which originated at the Awl and is now run by New York Magazine’s The Cut, is so popular that it became the foundation of a forthcoming book, How to be a Person in the World.

The site’s design was simple and straightforward: center-aligned black text winding down the white background of a single static web page, updated once every weekday. Unlike many other content-based sites in the early ‘90s, Suck didn’t have a front page or a login portal. At a time when hypertext was used formally (cf. print footnotes), Suck used it to comedic effect, often deploying tertiary links as punchlines—a sly, original humor that was grounded in a technical understanding of how the web was meant to work. (Subverting the web’s organizing principles is now part of online-writing’s DNA: The Awl editorializes in its tags and categories.)

Here’s most of what I’ve used Claude Artifacts for in the past seven days. I’ve provided prompts or a full transcript for nearly all of them. URL to Markdown with Jina Reader SQLite in WASM demo Extract URLs Clipboard viewer Pyodide REPL Photo Camera Settings Simulator LLM pricing calculator YAML to JSON converter OpenAI Audio QR Code Decoder Image Converter and Page Downloader HTML Entity Escaper text-wrap-balance-nav ARES Phonetic Alphabet Converter

For about 10 years or so I've been telling anyone who will listen that we don't want to grow a giant company that we control, we want to grow a giant ecosystem that we support. One with a broad range of hosts, developers, agencies, partners and publishers who can build on top of shared infrastructure — where our role as a core team is helping the collective ecosystem thrive. Growing a larger market, rather than trying to capture all the value within it.

The primary purpose of the non-profit structure is to protect against this and ensure that any decisions made benefit the organisation and its community, not its owners. Ghost has no incentive to slash costs and drive up profits, because it has no owners. It will always be independent.The organisation exists for-purpose, rather than for-profit.

You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.

“Think like a librarian,” Milo used to urge us, which might sound less impressive than “Think like a philosopher,” “Think like a psychologist,” or even “Think like a lawyer,” but it did make the point that information wasn’t given, that it had to be actively sought. Once, a student called asking for book titles that might help her with her assigned topic on the pros and cons of marriage. The Library of Congress subject heading “marriage” was too broad to be of much use, and the subheadings in various library catalogs weren’t much better. But remembering James Thurber and E.B. White’s Is Sex Necessary?, I reasoned that there might well be a book on the pros and cons of marriage with an analogous title. Sure enough, Is Marriage Necessary? did turn up as a title in our catalog, and I was able to start the student on her way to a bibliography—nothing special, but our work was full of wonderful, nothing-special moments. Far more impressive was the ingenuity of a colleague who supplied a patron with the names of Korean massage parlors in the Gramercy Park area (yes, someone asked) by combing the Manhattan white pages for names (Oriental Health Spa, Rising Sun Health Club) of likely establishments on and around East Twenty-Third Street. Ours was not to reason why.

In the apprenticeship each of us endured under Milo’s exhausting tutelage before getting anywhere near a telephone, we learned not merely how to find information but how to think about finding information. Don’t take anything for granted; don’t trust your memory; look for the context; put two and three and four sources together, if necessary.

This website offers an alternative way to approach and design how people work together. It provides a menu of thirty-three Liberating Structures to replace or complement conventional practices. Liberating Structures used routinely make it possible to build the kind of organization that everybody wants. They are designed to include everyone in shaping next steps.

Over the years, forums did not really get smaller, so much as the rest of the internet just got bigger. Reddit, Discord and Facebook groups have filled a lot of that space, but there is just certain information that requires the dedication of adults who have specifically signed up to be in one kind of community. This blog is a salute to those forums that are either worth participating in or at least looking at in bewilderment.

What follows is a list of forums that range from at least interesting to good. I will attempt to contextualize the ones I know well. This post is by no means supposed to be complete and will be updated whenever I find more good forums.

A dynamic concept graph consisting of nodes, each representing an idea, and edges showing the hierarchical structure among them.LLMs generates the hierarchical structure automatically but the structure is editable through our gestures as we see fitattract and repulse in force between nodes reflect the proximity of the ideas they containnodes can be merged, split, grouped to generate new ideasA data landscape where we can navigate on various scales (micro- and macro views).each data entry turns into a landform or structure, with its physical properties (size, color, elevation, .etc) mirroring its attributesapply sort, group, filter on data entries to reshape the landscape and look for patterns

We can construct a thinking space from a space that is already enriched with our patterns of meaning, hence is capable of representing our thoughts in a way that makes sense to us. The space is fluid, ready to learn new things and be molded as we think with them.

An interesting thing to ask is, what type of mindware we can make to externalize thoughts?The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas. — Alan KayWe are certainly not short of tools to do this (think sketches, diagrams, writing) - but can they be faster? More tightly coupled with our thinking processes? The way speech is coupled with internal dialogues?

To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.