An independent research and software company for auditable decision intelligence.
FP1 develops methods and instruments for consequential decisions made under changing evidence. The work combines structured evidence, explicit falsification, preserved analytical disagreement, and human accountability at the judgment layer.
Software, methods, and published research.
Instruments
The Radar, the Register, and FP1 Evidence. Each carries its own thresholds, grade dates, version, and operating status so a reader can distinguish what is running from what is planned.
Method
Published rules for building, grading, and retiring the instruments, including who is accountable at each stage and what evidence would overturn a conclusion.
Institutional work
The same evidence and decision structures applied to a named decision inside an institution's existing research, policy, risk, or intelligence workflow.
Who leads the work.
David Lovejoy leads methodology, instruments, and software. John Henry Clippinger leads the longer-term theoretical research. The published method and evidence must stand without relying on either biography.
David Lovejoy
David leads the methodology and instrument track. The Radar and its scenario-assessment method, the composite index and its Belief Index overlay, the Register, and the evidence layer all sit on his side of the house. He is lead author, with John Clippinger, of the FP1 methodology papers.
His background spans growth-stage company building, strategic advisory and product design across software and services ventures, with operating experience in the United States, Japan, Korea and Canada. His public professional profile records an MBA from the University of British Columbia.
His research interest is measurement under reflexivity: the conditions under which a research instrument produces epistemic gain rather than the distortion the finance literature usually attributes to a cited index.
John Henry Clippinger
John leads the long-form theoretical track the analytical work draws on. His five-decade body of work spans complex self-organizing systems, decentralized governance, and the institutional design problems posed by emerging technologies.
He is a former research affiliate of the MIT Media Lab's City Science group and a former fellow of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he helped lead the Law Lab. He served on the Active Inference Institute's board from 2022 to 2025.
His earlier work includes natural-language research and writing, institution design, digital identity and decentralized governance. Those published ideas supply lineage for FP1's theoretical work; the operating methods must be judged on their own evidence and implementation.
Principles that keep the work inspectable.
First Principles First is a research and software company. Its analysis is a research product, not investment advice.