First-principles unpacking (writing rule)
Part of Writing principles.
What the rule is
Refuse to treat jargon as foundational. Start from irreducible facts (finite memory, exclusive versus shared access, sequential instruction streams, explicit ownership of references) and only then introduce specialized vocabulary that compresses those facts.
What good looks like
-
Later sections use only terms established earlier.
-
Each specialized word has an explicit “rests on …” chain.
-
No appeals to “as everyone knows” for the load-bearing bits.
Failure modes for LLM writing
-
Pseudo-first-principles that start mid-stack (“first, the nursery…”).
-
Reordering that smuggles undefined terms into the foundations.
-
Endless reduction that never rebuilds the useful abstraction.
Micro-example
Weak: “Generational hypotheses motivate nursery collection.”
Stronger: “Memory is finite, so something must reuse space that programs no longer need. Many programs create short-lived objects often and long-lived objects rarely. A collector can therefore scan the short-lived region more often. That design is called generational collection; the short-lived region is often called a nursery.”