Hume spent a great deal of time studying cause and effect. He thought, “The same motives always produce the same actions: the same events follow from the same causes.” He believed you could learn something about the French and English from studying the Greeks and Romans. In other words, Hume believed in principles.
He writes in Enquiry:
“Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature.”
He though this was not so different from the uniformity of cause and effect in nature. Societies are governed by certain principles, just as nature is governed by certain principles. Hume believed there are laws of life, just as there are laws of nature:
“These records of wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions, are so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science, in the same manner as the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the nature of plants, minerals, and other external objects, by the experiments which he forms concerning them.”
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Some say college teaches you how to learn—one of those clichés that becomes a cliché because it’s true. A very intelligent person is not necessarily great at trivia.
They asked Einstein, “How many feet are in a mile?” He replied, “Why should I fill my brain with facts I can find in two minutes in any standard reference book?”
A true genius understand principles, and therefore understands facts, not for having memorized them, but for understanding their patterns that manifest principles which then predict future facts.
Like in fifth grade, we used flashcards to memorize our multiplication tables, but our known products were limited to the number of factor combinations we could fit in our stack of flashcards; while a true genius knows all products from any combination of factors because she understands the principle of multiplication.
College teaches us to learn for the same reason the proverb is true: “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.” Give a man a fact, or teach a man to learn—the latter is the superior education.
As a business major in college I learned a lot of, frankly, useless facts—international accounting rules, business law minutia, commercial real estate best practices. But from these facts I found cross-disciplinary patterns, i.e., principles.
Marketing a product for optimal sales is not so different from constructing a personal brand optimal for social interactions; investment decisions to maximize return are not so different from scheduling decisions, investing the currency of time in securities of present and future; lean manufacturing maximizes output of success and happiness from inputs of food, sleep, exercise, work, play and socializing.
Ray Dalio, $16-billion-net-worth hedge fund manager, writes in his self-published, 123-page volume called “Principles:”
“Principles are concepts that can be applied over and over again in similar circumstances as distinct from narrow answers to specific questions. Every game has principles that successful players master to achieve winning results. So does life. Principles are ways of successfully dealing with the laws of nature or the laws of life.”
Dalio is one of the most successful investors ever, not because he understands finance, but because he understands principles.
The facts change but the principles stay the same. The key is learning how to learn: pattern matching cross-disciplinary facts and developing paradigms based on true principles.