# What's the Point of Understanding Underlying Principles? 🤔

We often say we need to be logical and work through the details to find the underlying principles of everything. But it seems no one ever explains the "why"—why must we understand underlying principles? And what exactly constitutes a more fundamental principle?

To understand this, you need to grasp what benefit comes from "extracting more fundamental principles." First, you must recognize that the human brain's computational power isn't that strong. When something has too many prerequisites and requires us to do massive calculations, people often fall into decision paralysis.

Let me give you an example. You have no social experience and don't know how to interact with others. Someone treats you well, so you follow the "reciprocity principle" you learned and treat them well in return. This is what parents, teachers, and ancient sages have always taught us. But is this fundamental enough? Until one day you discover that someone's kindness had ulterior motives and you actually lost out, do you realize "that principle doesn't always apply"—the point being, if your social principle is just "treat people as they treat you," you'd still need to learn additional principles for "other situations," like "when someone is nice to you for no reason, either they're scheming or stealing."

So you learn to distinguish different situations and hear the saying "speak appropriately to different people"—like telling people what they want to hear and demons what they want to hear. But if you initially can't tell whether someone is a person or demon, what should you say? You'll find things get increasingly complicated. Complexity grows until one day you've exhausted all these "principles" and still can't cover all the new situations that keep arising. Or you'd need to spend enormous time using extremely complex prerequisites to judge how to handle your current situation.

This is what you face when you haven't extracted more fundamental principles. It's the same across all fields—investing, business, working, and interpersonal relationships—there's no escape.

So what's a more fundamental approach? Boundary control. Meaning I don't need to distinguish whether your intentions are good or bad; I first establish a boundary that "guarantees you can't take anything from me" before building any relationship. I don't let people help me—if something requires others' help to complete, I simply won't do it, or I'll directly write off the loss and bear the consequence. In turn, I won't respond to others' requests either. This way I don't need to spend time or energy guessing people's hearts or distinguishing true friends from false ones.

It's the same with investing. If your prerequisites are so complex they'd fill a book, you definitely haven't grasped the underlying principles of investing. Because humans can't constantly follow some "principle" while facing endless exceptions and exceptions to exceptions and still make correct decisions.

So what's the process of extracting underlying principles? It's the process of fighting entropy—you need to continuously fight entropy so your brain can hold more information. You ask why Elon Musk can do so many things simultaneously? Normal people get overwhelmed trying to do one or two things well, because one or two things contain countless complications. A three-person office can produce fifty episodes of court intrigue drama—no matter how you handle it, it requires "wisdom," right? If your perspective always circles within this small space, it means your situation has too much entropy and you're not following more fundamental principles.

What we call "learning" from childhood to adulthood, comparing it to AI large models, is constantly packaging chaotic information into individual "skills" for how to handle things, so they can be reused later. But the more skills you have, the slower you process things, and the more easily different skills create logical conflicts and bugs, leading to wrong decisions.

Will simply packaging skills for automated problem-solving solve everything? Skills do speed up problem-solving, but could the packaging itself be wrong? For instance, falling into fixed thinking or path dependency, so when exceptions arise, you still handle them the old way, causing losses—absolutely possible. That's when you need to update your skills. When exceptions appear, it means your original skill isn't fundamental enough. You need to extract more fundamental principles that encompass this exception, then package a new skill and completely eliminate the old one. Rather than using if-then statements to constantly add prerequisites to your original skill, or keeping old skills around and packaging new ones alongside them, letting their numbers grow endlessly.

What we call "dimensional jumping" is a similar process: "I no longer need to care about the micro situation you're endlessly weighing." Only then will the world appear simpler in your perspective, with clearer structure, and only then can your mind handle more information. $BTC ‌#Gate13周年全球庆典