Elon Musk says

“I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths… and then reason up from there.”

More from Elon Musk

“Science is discovering the essential truths about what exists in the Universe, engineering is about creating things that never existed.”

“I really like computer games, but then if I made really great computer games, how much effect would that have on the world.”

“When I was a child, there's one thing I said: 'I never want to be alone.' That's what I would say.”

“I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.”

“AI will be the best or worst thing ever for humanity.”

“The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment.”

“I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”

“The goal of OpenAI is really just to take the set of actions that are most likely to improve the positive futures. Like, if you can think of like the future as a set of probability streams that branch out and then converge; collapse down to a particular event and then branch out again and there's a certain set of probabilities associated with the future being positive and a different type flavours of that and at OpenAI we want to try to guide… do whatever we can to increase the probability of the good futures happening.”

“Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”

“It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.”