From an early age my grandpa (D. M. Byler) would occasionally explain advantages of \‘Thinking in Principle.’ The occasions would often occur when he saw an opportunity to point out a common underlying principle between something he knew that I knew and something I was learning. He was demonstrating the leverage of already knowing the pattern of relationships when encountering new experience and acquiring new knowledge.

Understanding new information could be a lot of work, but translating what you already understood to a different set of details could often be much quicker and easier. "Always look for the underlying principle(s) in the things you learn," he would say. When you recognize the principle in something you are learning who suddenly have considerable insight into what to expect and with a little attention to detail, you may know a lot that you haven’t been taught yet.

He would show me examples that demonstrated many ways that ‘Thinking in Principle’ could give insight that many people wouldn’t recognize. He would give examples of how specialization, which was one of the ‘buzz word’ of those times led to building different sets of terminology for the same basic patterns of relationships. Specialists would think they were privy to special knowledge that only they knew. Specialists in various fields could be condescending to everyone else who knew the same thing using different words to describe it.

Another leverage of’ Thinking in Principle’ is a kind of mental checks and balances. Every subject that develops its own vocabulary, because of its narrow way of defining relationships hides and illuminates a different set of insights sometimes leading to misinterpretation in modeling the patterns. Always looking for the most basic principle and comparing patterns in various fields of study will often bring to light problems developing in some area due to the limited range of information considered relevant.

Thinking in principle, all leverage systems can be rearranged for different advantages to be used for different purposes. If extensive separation can lead to blindness due to not recognizing what is relevant due to a specific point of view, then reversing the attitude from exclusion to inclusion will make use of the comparative process, and other processes, to illuminate what is hidden in one model with what is obvious from some other point of view.

"There are only 92 elements and just a few forces that act on them, so the same patterns/principles occur over and over in every subject on every scale." D.M.Byler