Should we argue from first principles or seek experience?

Take a look at this video in which Elon Musk describes the method or using first principles to come to conclusions. This way of thinking has been associated with rationalism, the idea that you can reason and deduce, which has been contrasted with empiricism, the idea that you need to seek knowledge from experience and experiments.

In my view that is a false dichotomy. Reason can lead to knowledge about the real world, and it is completely valid. Its only problem is that humans are bad at it and even great intellectuals are wrong all the time. So we need empiricism as well, to check our reasoning. The real world is brutally rational as we often find when we correct our reasoning after the real world shoots down our errors.

One way of seeing the truth of this is to get any kind of experience from computer programming. The computer is a rational system, created by humans. It is a system that you can theoretically instruct to do precisely what you want it to do and it will do it. Yet programmers make subtle errors all the time and almost no program functions with coding alone. No programmer can do without testing the code and debugging it.

Programming is humbling, because it is obviously more logical than thinking e.g. about social sciences and almost everything else. It makes you value experiment and experience more, but at the same time treat reason with greater respect – and even awe when it is done correctly.