You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more
First of all, it's practice for problem-solving. It also makes you more familiar with the crux of the problem as well as subtleties you might otherwise be missing -- you will find it much easier to understand other existing solutions after thinking about the problem for a while.
And crucially, approaching problems from first principles means that the act of looking up best practices later will not artificially restrict the space of thoughts you can think. Because you've already glimpsed the possibilities. You won't merely assume "this is the only way".
Sometimes looking up existing practices can expand your space of thoughts. Like "I didn't know this was possible".
That’s a fair point. But many great inventions or breakthroughs came out when the researcher knew the existing approaches but chose to think out of the box. Many of 20th century’s theoretical physics came this way as far as I know
Excellent advice! I would like to add that thinking from first principles is useful at each stage of problem solving (and not just the beginning). This is especially true when one is working on a new area, and the only starting point is looking up good practices.
"In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few" from Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
Any recommendations on sources for learning the underlying concepts?
This is essentially the same advice that Hal Varian gives in How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time. It’s good advice and reaching for the existing literature too early can later on lead to anchoring bias on a less-than-optimal solution. In engineering too.
Exactly. Whenever people say to me that’s it’s already been done, I’m like, “yes but I haven’t used my brain cells for it. I don’t have those neural pathways.”
I think that rarely happens: "This is the only way to solve it".
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.
