fpt.guide Product Information and Latest Updates (2025)

There’s so rarely philosophy on Product Hunt! Nice collection, and good work cutting large knowledge areas into digestible chunks. In the interest of first principles, should you consider listing your premises? The framing of the topics is libertarian, reductionist, and generally limited to methodological individualism. I don’t know if that can be avoided, though. First-principles thinking favors reductionism because of its agenda to describe causal explanations. That's an epistemic, arguably even an ontological position. And in practice in social human realms such causal explanations with predictive power have been elusive. In FPT.guide, all of the economics and most of the psychology and philosophy sources display a commitment to reductionist (genetic, individualistic, etc) causal explanations. But going up the reductionist ladder, multiple levels of explanation become real by the level of evolutionary group selection, and from there “up” things just get more complex through psychology and social psychology all the way to anthropology and economics in the more complex end. In other words, turns out the first principles have quite a few underlying principles, one of them methodological individualism. So first-principles thinking is not close to giving us "fundamental principles" from which "all complex phenomen[a] in life" flow, though it is clearly appealing. Instead of trying to fix first-principles, maybe just include a disclaimer that first-principles is just one attempt of many at explain the world.

Lohran Schmidt

Thanks a lot for the content. I was wondering if that is any way I can save it on my Notion? Thank you!

4yr ago

Ayush Sharma

fpt.guide

Maker

@lohran Hey, thank you! For saving, have you tried duplicating into a Notion page?

Yaakov Cohney

awesome guide by an awesome team. so happy to see this passion project become something big that I hope will stand the test of time!

@yaakovcohney appreciate this a lot!

Mikko Järvenpää

Valosan PR Network Platform

@mhj really appreciate your comment. You touch on some important philosophical roots of this project. If you'd like to continue this conversation and get an insider look at everything we are up to, I can invite you to our Slack community. Please let me know!

fpt.guide

The ultimate guide to first-principles thinking