Ask HN: Any recommendation from books on First principles thinking?
&quot;First principles&quot; is an indirect reference to the idea of &quot;doing the right thing instead of the wrong thing.&quot;<p>If the people who use the phrase &quot;first principles&quot; knew what the right thing was, they wouldn&#x27;t need to reference &quot;first principles&quot;. Likewise, they generally don&#x27;t understand what the wrong thing is, only that they are experiencing it.<p>I would not take the idea of &quot;first principles&quot; as something to chase or understand, but instead recognize that those who use the phrase rather than explaining what the principles are, are likely ignorant and lost themselves. This provides you an opportunity for technical leadership.<p>&quot;First principles&quot; is corporate speak for &quot;we don&#x27;t know what we&#x27;re doing, all we know is that what we <i>are</i> doing is wrong&quot;.<p>Generally the prescription for such a situation is to read books aimed at the problems you are facing, likely books with formalized languages to help model and simplify the problem you are experiencing.<p>Taking &quot;first principles&quot; at face value (non cynically), the google SRE book and Designing Data Intensive Applications are probably good &quot;first principles&quot; books.<p>edit: Thinking about it a little bit more, when first principles aren&#x27;t being adhered to, I think that generally means that people are solving problems they don&#x27;t understand. So the first principle is: <i>Understand the problem</i>, before you try to engineer a solution to it.