fpt.guide

The v1 had been a great resource to revisit some of the basic principles of thinking that are easily lost in adulthood. Excited to see the v2 come out with more resources and suggestions from experts. While being thorough, the simple navigation also makes it digestible. It would be fun to see a print version come out as a pocket-friendly guide.

Hey everyone, Information is free and abundant today. What remains scarce is insight. Given a constant barrage of information thrown at us, how do you actually find out what's true? By becoming a clear, first-principles thinker. "I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy." -- Elon Musk fpt.guide collects and organizes a Minimum Spanning Tree of the most fundamental principles from Maths, Physics, Econ, Game Theory, Computation, mental models, and more. All complex phenomenon in life is downstream of these fundamental concepts. Be it startups, social affairs, or interpersonal relationships – mastering fpt.guide will help you think clearly through all of it. We – I'm Ayush, and I just graduated from MIT with two degrees in Computer Science. Rahul (@raulgarg) is an entrepreneur and a college dropout in India. @sidharthajha is a recent grad working full-time in tech while writing regularly on his Substack. We built fpt.guide working across three time-zones! Please let us know if you have any feedback/questions at all about fpt.guide. We can't wait for you to explore it.

Nice work. Design Thinking (DT) though? I can't look at it the same way since Nastsag Jen's teardown of it and few others (though I still take value from it with a large dose of salt). But irrespective of whether those are merely contrarian views, is DT first-principles?

awesome guide by an awesome team. so happy to see this passion project become something big that I hope will stand the test of time!

Awesome project and even better creators! Excited to learn even more with v2

There’s so rarely philosophy on Product Hunt! Nice collection, and good work cutting large knowledge areas into digestible chunks. In the interest of first principles, should you consider listing your premises? The framing of the topics is libertarian, reductionist, and generally limited to methodological individualism. I don’t know if that can be avoided, though. First-principles thinking favors reductionism because of its agenda to describe causal explanations. That's an epistemic, arguably even an ontological position. And in practice in social human realms such causal explanations with predictive power have been elusive. In FPT.guide, all of the economics and most of the psychology and philosophy sources display a commitment to reductionist (genetic, individualistic, etc) causal explanations. But going up the reductionist ladder, multiple levels of explanation become real by the level of evolutionary group selection, and from there “up” things just get more complex through psychology and social psychology all the way to anthropology and economics in the more complex end. In other words, turns out the first principles have quite a few underlying principles, one of them methodological individualism. So first-principles thinking is not close to giving us "fundamental principles" from which "all complex phenomen[a] in life" flow, though it is clearly appealing. Instead of trying to fix first-principles, maybe just include a disclaimer that first-principles is just one attempt of many at explain the world.

As always! Best!