How Elon Musk Thinks

And how you should think too

On any interview regarding his successes, one is almost sure to hear Elon Musk stumbling about the words “just go back to the Physics concept of first principles”. You might’ve written it off as just another piece of fuzzy advice from a self-made genius.

But Elon Musk is no ordinary genius. And this is no ordinary platitude.

Hyper-achieving Musk likes to compare his science-based approach with “reasoning by analogy”.

Musk wasn’t the only one to preach reasoning by established truisms. This thinking has its roots far back in ancient philosophy, from the genius of Aristotle to the skepticism of Descartes.

Most of modern philosophy tackles onerous questions through the logic of first principles. For example, in reasoning, the skeptic Descartes favoured doubting everything that could be doubted, until the issue was left with bare-boned fundamental truths. From there, he reasoned his way up.

“Cogito, ergo sum” (or “I think, therefore I am”) is his most famous contribution to philosophy. The gist of this deceptively simple one-liner is that evidence for our existence is found the very act of questioning it.

In deriving his work, Descartes questioned established assumptions of reality. He pictured the possibility of evil demons lurking behind our veil of consciousness, deceiving us of our every move such that we cannot trust even our senses. He doubted his own existence. This approach was eventually given a name — “Cartesian Doubt”. It entailed hyperbolic doubt and methodic skepticism about everything.

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