First Principles

I have three great posts I would like to share. All deal with the subject of mental models and reasoning from first principles:

“Speculation In A Truth Chamber” (Philosophical Economics)

First, the idea behind the exercise is not for you to literally walk through it, in full detail, every time you are confronted with a question that you want to think more truthfully about. Rather, the idea is simply for you to use it to get a sense of what it feels like to be genuinely truthful about something, to genuinely try to describe something correctly, as it is, without pretenses or ulterior motivations. If you know what that state of mind feels like, if you are familiar with it, then you will be able to stop and return yourself to it as needed in your trading and investment deliberations and in your everyday life, without having to actually step through the details of the scenario.

Second, the exercise is intended to be used in situations where you actually want to get yourself to think more truthfully about a topic and where you would stand to actually benefit from doing so. Crucially, that situation does not describe all situations in life, or even most situations. There are many situations in life where extreme truthfulness can be counterproductive, creating unnecessary problems both for you and for others.

Third, all that the exercise can tell you is what you believe the most likely answer to a question is, along with your level of confidence in that belief. It cannot tell you whether you are actually correct in having that belief. You might believe that the answer to a question is X when it’s in fact Y; you might have a lot of confidence in your belief when you should only have a little. Your understanding of the subject matter could be mistaken. You could lack the needed familiarity or experience with it to have a reliable opinion. Your judgment could be distorted by cognitive biases. These are always possibilities, and the exercise cannot protect you from them. However, what it can do is make you more careful and humble as a thinker, more open to looking inward and assessing the strength and reliability of your evidence and your reasoning processes, more willing to update your priors in the face of new information–all of which will increase your odds of getting things right.

“Thinking From First Principles” (Safal Niveshak)

Practicing first principles thinking is not as easy as explaining it. As Musk said, it’s mentally taxing. Thinking from first principles is devilishly hard to practice.

The first part, i.e., deconstruction, demands asking intelligent questions and having a deep understanding of the fundamental principles from various fields. And that’s why building a latticework of mental models is so important. These mental models are the fundamental principles, the big ideas, from different fields of human knowledge.

The best way to achieve wisdom, said Charlie Munger, “is to learn the big ideas that underlie reality.”

The second step is the recombination of the pieces which were identified in the first step. This is again a skill which can only be developed by deliberate practice. Any idea as an isolated piece of information doesn’t stay in the human brain for long. To be sticky, it needs to be connected with other ideas. A latticework is essentially a grid of ideas connected to each other. These connections are the glue which holds those ideas together.

If the new knowledge doesn’t find any connection or relevance to the old knowledge, it will soon be forgotten. New ideas can’t just be “stored” like files in a cabinet. They have to connect with what’s already there like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. As you become better in finding connections between seemingly disconnected ideas, your recombination-muscle becomes stronger. Someone with a strong recombination-muscle will find it easy to practice the second step of first principles thinking.

“Playing Socratic Solitaire” (Fundoo Professor)

I am going to play a game based on ideas derived from Socrates and Charlie Munger. We will start with “Socratic Questioning” which is described as

disciplined questioning that can be used to pursue thought in many directions and for many purposes, including: to explore complex ideas, to get to the truth of things, to open up issues and problems, to uncover assumptions, to analyze concepts, to distinguish what we know from what we don’t know, to follow out logical implications of thought, or to control the discussion.

Socratic Questioning relates to “Socratic Method,” which is:

a form of inquiry and debate between individuals with opposing viewpoints based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to illuminate ideas.

Charlie Munger started using these two Socratic devices in a variation he called Socratic Solitaire, because, instead of a dialogue with someone else, his method involves solitary play.

Munger used to display Socratic Solitaire at shareholder meetings of Wesco Corporation. He would start by asking a series of questions. Then he would answer them himself. Back and forth. Question and Answer. He would do this for a while. And he would enthral the audience by displaying the breadth and the depth of his multidisciplinary mind.

I am going to play this game. Or at least, I am going to try. Watch me play.

If you are seriously interested in finance and investing, there is nothing more important to your development than accumulating a robust inventory of mental models. What mental models and reasoning from first principles allow you to do is see through to the true drivers of a situation, where it is often easy to get bogged down in unimportant details.

For example, if you are viewing a business through the lens of discounted cash flow valuation, here are the drivers of intrinsic value:

• Operating margin
• Asset turnover
• Maintenance capex needs
• Growth capex/reinvestment opportunities
• Discount rate

Operating margin and asset turnover are quantitative measures reflecting the strength of your competitive advantage and, perhaps more importantly, the source of your competitive advantage.

Maintenance capex tells you how much cash the business needs to spend to keep running.

Growth capex/reinvestment opportunities give you an idea of growth potential over time.

When you combine operating margins and asset turnover (technically NOPAT x Sales/Invested Capital) you get a figure for return on capital. Return on capital is an excellent quantitative proxy for management’s skill allocating capital. Thus, it is also an excellent proxy for quality of management (though it is certainly not a be-all, end-all measure). When you combine return on capital with reinvestment opportunities you get an idea of what sustainable growth in operating income might look like.

There are lots of ways to handle the discount rate. Over time I have come to prefer an implied IRR method, where you simply “solve for” the discount rate that sets your cash flow model equal to the current stock price. You can then compare this to your hurdle rate for new investments.

DCF is one of the most important models in finance because it works with any investment that produces (or is expected to produce) cash flows in the future. At the end of the day, even an exercise as complicated as valuing a mortgage-backed security is just a variation on discounting cash flows.

All great mental models have two defining characteristics:

(1) They are robust. That is, they are applicable to a broad set of opportunities.

(2) They are parsimonious. That is, that is they demonstrate “economy of explanation.”

In my humble opinion, the most important mental models you need to understand in investing are:

• Time Value of Money/Discounted Cash Flows
• Capital Structure
• Expected Value/Probabilistic Thinking
• Optionality
• Convexity/Linear Vs. Non-Linear Rates Of Change (e.g. compounding)
• Investor Psychology

Conceptually that is really what it all boils down to (though the permutations are endless–for instance, a mortgage can be viewed as the combination of discounted cash flows and a call option). Now, you could of course write dozens of volumes on the nuances and applications of each of these models. That is part of what makes them robust. They are adaptable to an almost inconceivable range of circumstances.

This is something I don’t think most candidates in the CFA Program think about (they are too preoccupied with passing the exams!). The curriculum is designed to comprehensively introduce you to the most robust mental models in finance, and then to test your ability to apply those models to specific cases. Level I tests whether you understand the basic “tools” you have available to you; Level II tests more advanced uses of those tools (in exhausting detail, one might add); Level III tests your ability to apply all your tools to “real world” situations.

Maybe some day I will write up how I think about these super important mental models. In the meantime, enjoy the above linked posts!