but that's not the analogy the article was making at all! it was making an analogy with using technology based on underlying physical principles, where you could either be cognizant or ignorant of those principles, and similarly you could use something like https while either knowing or not knowing what the lower level pieces it relied on were.

Yeah and I'm saying it's a bad analogy. Because the principles of security are made up. They aren't fundamental. They are arbitrary and they exist by convention.

Usually concepts that are arbitrary I wouldn't call "principles" because they aren't principles. Just convenient rules to follow. A principle is much deeper.