Baldur Bjarnason

... works as a web developer in Hveragerði, Iceland, and writes about the web, digital publishing, and web/product development

These are his notes

Most of those who have a fetish for first principles thinking are actually utterly ignorant about the field they are FTPing™. To the point where they don‘t have enough expertise to even recognise what that field‘s first principles actually are and frequently swap cause and effect.

(As in “every time I see that it’s raining, the pavements are wet, so wet pavements must cause rain” which is a really easy mistake to make when you’re seeing rain and wet pavements for the first time in your life.)

When a techie or finance person develops a fetish for First Principles Thinking™ it‘s almost always due to impatience. They want shortcuts to enlightenment and aren’t willing to put in the work of studying a field for years.

This leads to garbage writing and half-baked ideas.