First Principles: What It Is And Why I Want You To Get Involved

And, as usual, I'm going to ask for your help

straight is the way, and narrow is the gate, &c.

It’s not a cult.

Let’s just get that out of the way.

A cult would be fun, in a sort of “let the world burn” way, but it’s not that.

Here’s how it went down.

I got my son a Flipper Zero for Christmas. Well, that’s not quite true. I got myself a Flipper Zero for Christmas, but when my son saw it, there was no chance I was keeping it. The F-Zero is best thought of as a general-purpose antenna. It can generate, record, and replay a wide variety of radio, infrared, NFC, and WiFi signals. There are legitimate uses for the thing: it can copy and impersonate your hotel room key and corporate access ID so you don’t have to worry about losing that stuff or having it wear out. It can open some cars and garage doors and whatnot, so it can allow you to leave your remotes in the house and your keys in the car.

Naturally, my son has no interest in that stuff. He wants to change gas station prices, open Tesla charging doors at Supercharger stations over and over again while the owners get progressively more agitated, deauthorize competing WiFi devices so he can have all the bandwidth at Starbucks, that sort of thing. I’ve explained that I don’t condone criminal hacking, but that I especially don’t condone him misusing the thing without understanding how it works down to the last detail.

You’d think that an 8th grader who is in 10th grade math and accelerating rapidly down that road would have some clue about radio waves and whatnot — but his school curriculum seems almost purposely designed to have zero practical application, as if the country needs another 50 million people who FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE but can’t explain the difference between a triple beam and a spring scale. So during our 5-hour drive to Uncle Bark’s house this week, I taught a terse and unsympathetic class on sound, light, and radio waves. We covered everything from blueshift to vacuum tubes. Along the way, I discovered that he thought his bass guitars had microchips in them that communicated digitally with the amp.

“How else could it work?” he asked. It took about half an hour to get through the whole signal chain, but now he understands it about as well as anyone can in a single discussion. We also talked about how smart the Insane Clown Posse really is: nobody truly understands how magnets work. Lastly, we had a meta-discussion, in regards to electromagnetism, about how understanding the analogy is not the same as understanding the science.

In explaining the “ancient world” to John, by which I mean the pre-microchip era, I kept thinking about John Strong and the “100 to 1 Shot Club”:

Yes. We saw a lot of each other. With Russell Porter a group of us organized a club. We called it the "100 to 1 Shot Club." We met at various member's houses at Palomar; in the Mohave Desert; etc. — about 6 or 7 times a year. It was called by the name mentioned to indicate that our considerations (like: Does the water spin in a contrary way in the Southern hemisphere when it runs out of the bath tub? — etc.) were restricted to topics that were fantastic by a factor of 100:1 over scientific. The dozen members included:

Trim Barkelov — patent council for Paramount Pictures\

Roger Hayward — artist and architect

Victor Neher laboratory roommate

George Mitchell — millionaire manufacturer of the Mitchell camera; a former Hollywood camera man

Byron Graves — an amateur astronomer and retired executive from Ford Co. in Detroit

John Anderson — my boss Jack McMorris — a chemist (and disappointed concert pianist)

George Worrell — successor to Mitchell at the Camera plant

Milton Humason — astronomer

I mention this because it was a group worthy to go down in history. On one of his earlier Arctic expeditions Porter had composed some piano music which his wife, Alice, had discovered in the attic. Without telling him she gave it to Jack McMorris who in turn had a local concert pianist, Lillian Stuber, play it for a disc recording. Then at Jack's house, on the occasion of a Sunday morning 100-to-1 Shot breakfast meeting Jack surprised Russell by playing it. We all knew what was up. Russell recognized it at once.

Scott Locklin rather archly tells us that such a gathering of intelligent, accomplished, and intellectually diverse men, like this or the X Club, would be “absolutely forbidden” today.

Well, as Todd from Project Farm chirps during his wrench-evaluation videos: We’re going to test that!

After some discussion with Brother Bark, we came up with the following idea: We’d like to hold a few small gatherings from time to time in which “100 to 1” style ideas are considered. This isn’t a TED talk, in which an audience of idiots listens to a midwit. Nor is it a cash-mining “panel discussion” for mooks like NYT Dealbook. It’s simply an attempt to continue the tradition of informed, serious discussion among intelligent men above college age. This sort of thing has almost entirely disappeared, and where it exists, as here on ACF, it is online.

I named this psuedo-club “First Principles” because I firmly believe that any intelligent man can learn and understand almost anything from first principles, rather than just accepting it because some “expert” said so. And once you’ve learned it that way, you can actually use it in the formation of further ideas.

The meetings would work like so: A few topics would be selected in advance by common agreement. Attendees would be free to sit in on the topic[s] that interested them. The topics could be literary, scientific, artistic, fantastical, unserious — and the idea would be to have a broad variety among them in any individual meeting. Examples, just off the top of my head and with a bias towards things already discussed in these digital pages:

• What would a truly reliable nationwide power grid look like? What are the steps to get there?

• Can rock music be advanced any further without falling into a “Dream Theater” hole of narrow appeal?

• What would you do with a space elevator, if you could come up with one?

• Is there a better way to do “collision detection” and thus increase the bandwidth of existing networking lines/equipment?

• What can be done to reduce the number of “80/20” situations in American society, from dating to college admissions?

• Could you come up with a rational way to judge the excellence of portraiture? If so, could that apply to modern painting as well?

• How would you solve traffic jams in Los Angeles, if you had dictatorial powers?

• Can existing 3-D printers make anything that would significantly improve life in the Third World?

Many of will remember having big idea conversations like this when we were in school — but as we aged and our friends dissipated, our chances to talk about serious ideas, or even unserious ones, simply vanished. What do people talk about at modern parties and gatherings? Nothing but bullshit. What’s on Netflix. Food. Travel. Food and travel. Current events, viewed through one’s polarizing lens of choice. You get home and realize you’re probably dumber than you were when you started the night.

Instead of sitting around and waiting for someone to do something about this ennui, I’m going to handle it myself. Brother Bark and I will hold the initial First Principles meeting in April or May. We’re thinking Detroit, probably at a Lions or Elks Club or some place adapted over time to the approximate desires of older, serious people. If it goes well, we could try more interesting places in the future: the guest house at Fallingwater, the plateau of Delicate Arch, the suite on the front straight of Laguna Seca. But right now cheap-and-cheerful is the goal.

I’d be thrilled if twenty people showed up. Honestly, I’m not sure we could handle more than that. Invitations are initially limited to paid members of ACF and their friends/family/associates. I won’t be promoting this on social media, on the public side of Substack, or elsewhere. What follows is a list of founding principles, subject to discussion and modification in the comments and afterwards.

• This would probably be a two-day event, maybe a day and a half, broken up by meals and a few social opportunities for people who feel social. One “keynote” speech to open things up and set the terms of engagement, then perhaps four discussion periods in total. Duration of the discussion period is open to, uh, discussion.

• You’re free to register ahead of time or pay in cash at the door anonymously if you’d prefer. My first idea for “attendance fee” is $100. That should cover a couple of lunches and the room rental. It will also keep out anybody who can’t see the point of spending $100 to discuss things with grownups. For Trackday Club members, who have already made me wealthy beyond human imagining, that fee is waived.

• I encourage men over the age of 25 to attend. If you are under 25, then you should be able to have these discussions at school — but if you’re serious about attending, contact me and we will figure it out. Women are not prohibited from attending, but I’d like to avoid the “Mensa factor" where you have 100 midwit dudes trying to impress two midwit girls.

• While some of these discussions will contain political components, I want us to be apolitical by default. If you want to have an Andrew Anglin or Morris Dees approach to life, that’s available elsewhere. Some of you really enjoy topics like “why are there no pictures of Michelle Obama pregnant?” or “What does Putin have on Trump?” I’d encourage you to take those topics to 4Chan. In a perfect world, you would leave these events having more sympathy for, and understanding of, your perceived political opponents, not less.

• First Principles is not racist: everyone is equally welcome regardless of color or creed, and anyone who tries to introduce racial topics into the discussion will be severely discouraged using any means at hand, possibly by Guest Speaker And Relationship Counselor Rodney. However, First Principles is not antiracist in the Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi sense: we will leave the important “work” of dunking on low-income rural white people to every Fortune 500 company and educational institution in the Western World, the same way “Weird Al” once said that he would “leave the serious music to serious people, like Right Said Fred.” If you think that every discussion on every topic needs to revolve around “whiteness”, perhaps that’s a sign that you’re too stupid to understand a space elevator or even how polarized lenses work, and that you won’t enjoy these meetings anyway.

• Speaking of intelligence, or lack thereof: If you can make it through a typical ACF article then you’re smart enough to attend. You don’t need to be a scientist, engineer, musician, or arist. You are particularly encouraged to show up if you work in the trades, because I’d like to understand more about how things work in the real world and I bet a lot of relatively academic ACF people would as well. I guarantee that everyone who reads this site has something to teach all of us.

• As previously noted, this ain’t no TEDx lecture. Be prepared to talk, if you’re willing.

• Each discussion group will have a facilitator to prevent all the maladies that affect any congregation of confident men. Right now, I only have two facilitators readily available: me and my brother. If you think you have the right stuff for this, let’s talk.

• I suspect that there will be some level of general public misunderstanding regarding this event, simply because the average idiot on the street is precisely that. Ideas for how to combat that misunderstanding are welcomed. I’m seriously considering Robot Kickin’ Rodney as public spokesman for the group; he has a terse yet effective way of dealing with white people who think they are speaking for oppressed minorities.

That’s about it for now. I’m hoping that First Principles will be of tremendous use to people like us, by which I mean “people who aren’t entirely comfortable just sitting on our fat asses CONSOOMING every sort of garbage thrown our way.” As with the “100 to 1 shot club”, I would hope that we each leave every meeting feeling like we have both learned from others and increased someone else’s understanding as well. And who knows? Maybe one of us will make a genuine and lasting contribution to the world as the result of a conversation he has along the way.

Naturally, there’s a website, and it’s here. It will be a registration portal, and it will also host private online discussions separated by event — so if you attend Meeting #16 at Fallingwater, let’s say, and want to continue the discussion on bimetallic strip technology with a few of the members, there will be a small bulletin board for that meeting in particular.

Brother Bark thinks this will end up being a Very Big Deal. I’m not so sure it will, or if such a thing would even be desirable. There are enough Very Big Deals in the world today. You’ve all heard the saying “Small minds discuss people. Average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss ideas.” Well, let’s do the last of those three. Thanks for reading.