Cedric Chin

One way that first principles thinking fails is when you build your analysis up from a deficient set of base principles. Everything is correct and true, but you still end up mistaken. Here's how that looks like in practice.

If you want to understand career moats, understand competitive arbitrage. It is the background and justification for the pursuit of a moat.

Thinking is split roughly into pattern matching against experience, and reasoning from first principles. Here's one argument for why you need both.

Actionable summary for reading for principles, from 'Every Actionable Book is Actually Two Books Inside'.

If you can only put two ideas to practice a week, then you're inevitably going to have to deal with a bottleneck of 'to-experiment' ideas.

Actionable summary for getting numb before you get good.

Actionable summary for opinion betting, which was presented as an alternative to 'strong opinions, weakly held'.

Actionable summary to exploit productivity momentum

Actionable Summary for setting yearly reading goals.

Actionable summary for executing a job market audit.