UBP: Upside-down Brick Pyramid.

This is actually three similar principles wrapped into one, since they complement each other very nicely.

The first part is the brick part. Brick as in the third pig was smart and built a house out of brick. It is almost always better to take your time and do something as good as you possibly can. While this brick principle is very important for things like building houses, it is even more important when pondering about a problem and trying to come up with new ideas. Why? Because, as the Yoda principle says, your idea is either right or wrong, logical or illogical. if it's right, then great, you've built a marvellous, indestructible house. but if it's wrong, it's not like building a house of wood or straw, it's much worse. it's like building no house at all. If you build a house with a leak in the roof, well, at least you prevent some rain from coming in. but if you do a calculation in miles, and program the Mars Lander kilometres, that's it, your Mars Lander is gone for good.

now comes the pyramid part. Imagine your building a pyramid of ideas, were your first ideas hold up your other ideas. If you didn't take your time and made the base of your pyramid out of wood instead of brick, your pyramid might not hold for as long as you'd like. In the wolrd of logic and reason the consequences are a lot worse. if one of your founding ideas is incorrect, and you base latter ideas upon it, then those later ideas are automatically incorrect as well. For example, let's take A = 3, B = 4 and C = 5. you calculate A+B = 9, and based upon that calculation, you get A+B+C = 14. Guess what, even though your second addition was flawless, your overall answer is false because of your initial mistake. With logic, it's not like dropping a big stone on a small wooden base, it's like letting go of a huge stone in mid-air and hopping it will stay there.

Finally, the upside-down part. This principle is an extension of the KISS principle. Imagine your pyramid of ideas, only upside-down. Now your pyramid looks like a gigantic V, with a couple blocks on the bottom supporting the whole thing. You're worried that those few blocks at the base won't be enough to support the whole pyramid, but they are, because this is logic, and Yoda says if the ideas at your base are correct, they will support any number of ohter ideas. If they aren't, then it doesn't matter how you position your pyramid, it will crumble to the ground anyway.

So now that you know your giant V it will hold, you're asking why place it like that anyway? To Keep It Simple Stupid. Each brick in your pyramid is an idea, a statement. If one of the statements at the base of your pyramid is false, so is the whole pyramid. Hence you'd better make sure every single idea at the base is correct. know imagine your pyramid the right way up. Count the number of statements you have to verify to make sure base will hold. Quite a few, huh? Now imagine your pyramid upside-down, like the giant V. How many statements do you have to verify now? not that many.

See the beauty of the letter V as opposed to the letter A? This upside-down pyramid works because of the Yoda principle. Because of the nature of logic, If the ideas at your base are correct, they will hold, no matter what you put on them. Increasing the number of ideas at the base doesn't make it any stronger, it just increases the chance that one of the ideas is wrong. And if one, just one idea, is false, then Yoda says the whole pyramid will collapse. So when making the base for your pyramid, create as few ideas as you possibly can in such a way that they can support as many other ideas as possible. Remember, Keep It Simple Stupid.