I often agree with you on many things you say but since I practice First Principles myself - I've been trained with a friend of Deming who advocates to do so and he goes well beyond with what he called SOPK (System Of Profound Knowledge) - but I think your "First Principles Thinking" may be misleading : for complex systems you cannot deduct everything from just facts and logics rules, Deming insists (as well as others like the great scientist Henri Poincaré in his writing "Science and Hypothesis") that you always have a THEORY behind and that Science is about EXPERIMENTING to make your theory WRONG so as to ADJUST it. So he invented for non-scientific people his Deming wheel or PDSA : Plan Do Study Act (which is the true essence of Kanban - Toyota created Kanban to win the prestigious Deming prize after WWII)
And since you mention epistemology indeed Deming learned with Walter Shewhart who wrote a book on the subject as he was worried about the way statistics are misapplied in the real world including by scientists as they think that math + datas alone equates science which is wrong and that can lead to biases (like in pharmaceutical industry where studies show that many "scientific" studies made by corporations are 4 times more positively conclusive than by public laboratories).
In software it's even worse as no stats are not even involved but opinions : there are many cults under the guise of "best practices" which people follow blindly or even by social pressure (which is weird in a technical field) see for example overreacted.io/the-wet-codebase/ or interest in disguise (for example Håkon Wium Lie being accused of abusing his position in w3c according to this article polylogue.org/#:~:text=Paged.js%20...)
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I often agree with you on many things you say but since I practice First Principles myself - I've been trained with a friend of Deming who advocates to do so and he goes well beyond with what he called SOPK (System Of Profound Knowledge) - but I think your "First Principles Thinking" may be misleading : for complex systems you cannot deduct everything from just facts and logics rules, Deming insists (as well as others like the great scientist Henri Poincaré in his writing "Science and Hypothesis") that you always have a THEORY behind and that Science is about EXPERIMENTING to make your theory WRONG so as to ADJUST it. So he invented for non-scientific people his Deming wheel or PDSA : Plan Do Study Act (which is the true essence of Kanban - Toyota created Kanban to win the prestigious Deming prize after WWII)
And since you mention epistemology indeed Deming learned with Walter Shewhart who wrote a book on the subject as he was worried about the way statistics are misapplied in the real world including by scientists as they think that math + datas alone equates science which is wrong and that can lead to biases (like in pharmaceutical industry where studies show that many "scientific" studies made by corporations are 4 times more positively conclusive than by public laboratories).
In software it's even worse as no stats are not even involved but opinions : there are many cults under the guise of "best practices" which people follow blindly or even by social pressure (which is weird in a technical field) see for example overreacted.io/the-wet-codebase/ or interest in disguise (for example Håkon Wium Lie being accused of abusing his position in w3c according to this article polylogue.org/#:~:text=Paged.js%20...)