I think >90% of the time I hear the phrase "first principles" mentioned I'm safe in expecting something that is very high level to follow. I'm glad nerds have (kinda) been pushed into celebrity status but I also think there's a lot of cargo culting that has followed. Unsurprising I guess, since one is much easier than the other. I just wish there was more pushback, especially in tech (not because the only abuser of this, but we're definitely the ones with the most weight)

  > you can get far more mileage out of the naive models than people want to admit.

I feel like the biggest problem of first principles is that this is almost never where you start. Rather it is something you work towards. Where it then becomes an iterative process expanding/extrapolating out, then coming back in and refining. Low level knowledge is so beneficial, but also very difficult to obtain. It's even more difficult to see how much room is below you without ever having gone down.

Right, this is why I think people assume "first principals" means "first [learned] principals." It is almost always super high level and used synonymously with "back to basics."

And fully agreed on your reasoning on why these are good phrases to keep in mind. I think I would pile on to the "becomes an iterative process" to highlight that "starting from first principals" is more likely to be where folks start. With advanced solutions expanded to cover more and more details that the initial assumptions could gloss over.

I think this is largely justified, if only because "first principals" meaning "absolute foundation" are almost certainly still being discovered.