RICHARD FEYNMAN

First-principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated problems and unleash creative possibilities. Sometimes called “reasoning from first principles”.

The idea is to break down complicated problems into basic elements an...

It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e., the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.

So much of what we believe is based on some authority figure telling us that something is true.

This way of learning applies to schools, where most teachers try to transfer knowledge to us through a mechanical process that doesn't involve reasoning which le...

How many times did we hear the phrase "We’ll do that because it’s always been done that way"? Personally, I would say many times.

When we reason by analogy we build our "reasoning" on top of impure assumptions and conventions. We tend to do this si...