Thinking in First Principles

The Prison of Analogy

Most of us, most of the time, navigate the world by analogy. We are expert copyists, clever remixers. When we face a new problem, our brains instinctively scan our memory for the nearest precedent. What have other people done in this situation? What did *I* do last time? We take an existing solution, an established convention, and we iterate on it. We put a fresh coat of paint on an old house, add a new feature to an existing product, or follow a well-trodden career path with minor deviations. This is not a flaw; it's a feature of human cognition, a brutally effective shortcut for conserving mental energy. Imagine having to invent a new way to tie your shoes every morning or devising a novel method for making coffee from scratch. We would be paralyzed by the sheer computational load of daily life. Reasoning by analogy is what allows us to function. It lets us stand on the shoulders of giants and, more often, on the shoulders of everyone who came before. But this efficiency comes at a cost. It erects invisible walls around our thinking, defining the boundaries of what is possible by what has already been done. We become trapped in the logic of the past. The suitcase, for instance, existed for centuries. The wheel existed for millennia. It took an embarrassingly long time for someone to look at the two and create wheeled luggage. Why? Because a suitcase was an iteration of a trunk or a satchel—things you carry. The analogy was with other forms of baggage, not with a chariot. When we reason by analogy, we accept the assumptions of our predecessors. We work within their frameworks, inheriting their blind spots. True innovation, the kind that reshuffles industries and redraws maps of possibility, rarely comes from a slightly better version of what already exists. It comes from razing the existing structure to the ground and starting again from the bare earth.