Conversation

Rodney Daut

@roddaut

Feb 26

Replying to

@comfyrange

@fortelabs

and

@commoncog

If the domain is simple enough, or well-understood enough then finding the necessary conditions for goal achievement may be all that is needed. But if the domain has as many variations as a heart attack, then first principles are not sufficient to diagnose the tricky situations.

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Seems like that's just passing the buck. If you've (correctly) organized all possible heart attacks in a way that's easy to read off necessary conditions, sure. In the meantime, you still have to treat heart attacks as you find them.

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Expertise researchers, funded by the military, as part of a 30 yr attempt to accelerate expertise (which they care a huge amount about because … death): “We’ve tested and tested and we think you can’t reduce to first principles.” Some guy on Twitter: “Seems simple enough.”

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That doc is reasonable, even interesting, but you can't honestly believe sharing it in this context makes you MORE credible. What's your FIDE score? How many people have you trained to be expert chess players? What about things that aren't games of perfect information?

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To solve this try solving a learning problem similar to what is described in the article. There may be cases in which a first principles approach works. There are likely cases in which it does not work.

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and

I think the major problem here is that @korianski believes that first principles can be used to solve everything. I’m guessing that he hasn’t yet had experiences where it has failed him. Until he does, it’s going to take a lot to convince him.

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and

Whoever said first principles thinking doesn't work for me? What I'm saying is more nuanced and more interesting: that there are domains where it doesn't work as well, and that if you are not aware of the limitations, you probably haven't pushed it far enough. Good luck!

3:14 PM · Feb 27, 2022Twitter Web App

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and

Your sentence was a bit too complicated for this early in the morning. Are you saying that you acknowledge that a first principles approach does not work well in identifying heart attacks or something else?