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First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge - Farnam Street

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First Principles thinking breaks down true understanding into building blocks we can reassemble into something that simplifies our problem.

Mental Models | Reading Time: 14 minutes What is First Principles Thinking? First principles thinking is one of the best ways to discover new solutions. Sometimes called “reasoning from first principles,” it’s a tool to help break down complicated problems by separating what we know is absolutely true from anything that is an assumption. What remains are the essentials. If you know the first principles of something, you can build the rest of your knowledge around them to produce something new. While you could take this way of thinking down to an atomic level, a lot of value is gained by simply

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