14 ms·

Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform (2016)

397 points by arunc 8y ago

makerescape 8y ago
I call it S1 (simple 1, arrogant and ignorant) vs S2 (simple 2, which is elegant and informed), but I’ve only found it possible to attain S2 after navigating the complexity between these two points, which implies that I’m often guilty of S1 thinking as the genesis of getting to S2, if I have the sand for it.
- idlewords 8y ago
  And S3 is where you store all your memories.
  - publicWorldRead 8y ago
    And where everyone else rifles through them, when you unwittingly leave the bucket permissions wide open for EVERYONE across all objects.
  - makerescape 8y ago
    And S10 is a smartphone. I think I’m seeing the matrix.
idlewords 8y ago
And here I was using regular thinking like an idiot.
- peteradio 8y ago
  D'oh!
blattimwind 8y ago
> The ability to think through problems to the second, third, and nth order—or what we will call second-order thinking for short—is a powerful tool that supercharges your thinking. Clearly it should be called higher-order thinking.
- ilaksh 8y ago
  Just "planning" seems adequate to me.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    If the author called it planning then everyone would realize that they had already heard of it... People might also realize that with every additional step of reasoning the chance that you got it right decays exponentially.
    - mStreamTeam 8y ago
      That's why people make multiple plans and backup plans
  - karmakaze 8y ago
    Plans for the most part execute the 'happy path'. That's wny everything's late and over-budget. Contingincy planning captures 2nd order and that's about as deep as it ever goes.
- ausd123 8y ago
  This is already a similar concept - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_thinking I would be quite happy to see these kinds of concepts rolled into one. Looking back, most times I heard "higher order thinking" at school, I feel like they meant "thinking at a higher level of abstraction" (as I would describe it now). You could make an argument that the kind of "nth derivative thinking" identified here is similar though.
  - FakeComments 8y ago
    As an interesting aside, the n-th partial derivatives form an n-cube: For m variables, there are m first orders, m^2 second orders, etc. and most proofs about, eg convexity, amount to a proof over that shape. The reason that n-th order reasoning about an m-dimensional problem is difficult is that it requires reasoning using m^n objects. If you figure we can remember about ten things intuitively, that’s just enough for three dimensions and two derivatives — enough to do motion analysis. But it’s leagues away from being able to do the second order of a ten-dimensional problem intuitively.
alan-crowe 8y ago
This reminds me of Frédéric Bastiat and his essay "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen". Nicely formatted at http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html The article notes that "It’s often easier to identify when people didn’t adequately consider the second and subsequent order impacts." That failure to consider the second order impacts is what Bastiat refers to as "That Which is Not Seen"
- seleniumBubbles 8y ago
  That is such a fantastic article. It’s timeless: it was published in 1850, but it remains more relevant than ever.
empath75 8y ago
The best way to exercise second order thinking is to play turn based games like chess or even magic the gathering. You can’t be good at those games without considering actions several turns ahead and aggregating a tremendous amount of knowledge about the game, and you get almost immediate feedback on how good your thought process actually was.
- T-A 8y ago
  http://theconversation.com/does-playing-chess-make-you-smarter-a-look-at-the-evidence-76062 http://theconversation.com/does-playing-chess-make-you-smart...
  - empath75 8y ago
    I don't think playing games makes you smarter. I think it practices a certain kind of thinking, and practicing thinking makes you better at that kind of thinking.
- contingencies 8y ago
  turn based games like chess or even magic the gathering Risk -> Risk 2210.
_bxg1 8y ago
Not terribly insightful... I expected something about meta-reasoning - thinking about your own thinking - but it was more along the lines of just, "smart people don't have tunnel vision when making decisions".
mnm1 8y ago
This definitely explains why we have things like the drug war (and other idiotic pseudo wars) and can't even learn the second and third order effects of such prohibition after the mass experiment with alcohol prohibition in the twenties and thirties. In fact, it explains a lot if not most bad policy decisions. I'm convinced regular people are simply incapable or unwilling to consider second, third, and higher order effects of their actions and politicians especially take advantage of this to push through atrocious policies. Healthcare policy is another that comes to mind. Retirement saving. Lack of infrastructure spending. Anti vaccine idiots. Etc. Etc. I mean towards people being to incompetent and stupid rather than unwilling, as there is plenty of evidence for that (three quarters of people are purported to not be able to name the three branches of government), but who knows? The end result is the same. Stupid thinking driving forward a stupid populace. I didn't know there was a term for what the stupid were missing till now.
vincentmarle 8y ago
I love to do this, keep iterating on n-th order thoughts, figuring out emergent behavior etc etc (systems mapping is actually a quite useful technique to do this) but at some point you need to scale it back down to the 1st order to actually get things done. It's fun to fantasize where the industry will be heading 10-30 years from now, but figuring out what needs to be done tomorrow is more important.
- kaycebasques 8y ago
  Honest question, just for the sake of respectful debate, not trying to be obnoxious: Can you actually derive emergent properties from nth-order thinking? I think they're both fascinating topics, but when I think about emergent properties of human biology, I struggle to imagine how I could have derived them from nth-order logic. To me, emergent properties seem like something you have to observe first, not something that you can reach from any kind of reason. Emergent properties are so awe-inspiring precisely because you can't predict them when you go down a level or two.
  - vincentmarle 8y ago
    I see emergent behavior as something that we didn't think of before (maybe because we didn't think about it enough), rather than something that is inherently impossible to predict. Did Mark Zuckerberg know in 2003 that his dorm room creation would affect elections? Probably not, but I also wouldn't say it was impossible to predict. A complex system is chaotic for sure, which definitely makes it hard to predict emergent behavior, but it's also not completely random. I wouldn't claim that you can figure out all emergent behavior beforehand but you can definitely reason about some emergent behavior just by doing some nth-order thinking and systems mapping. One example that I thought of recently: Today most innovation with food is about innovating on logistics. It's all about getting your food faster and cheaper to your door. Let's say, in 5-10 years from now we live in a world where on-demand groceries are instant and cheaper than anything else, maybe even powered by autonomous drones or what not. Would we still be going to restaurants and grocery stores? One emergent behavior may be that we get everything delivered with a snap of our fingers straight from warehouses and delivery kitchens. So is it wise to put all our money into Instacart and Doordash now that we know this? Maybe not, because what's the next step beyond delivery? What if there's a new technology to print your food, 20-30 years from now? Will Instacart and Doordash still be relevant in a world like that? Emergent behavior would then be that innovation will be more about what you eat than when you get it (the innovation vector that we focus so much on today). The company that learns your taste profiles and can figure out exactly what you want/need will probably win in that scenario, so maybe companies that are solving logistics today (Instacart/Doordash) are not the companies that will win in the end (Google has a better shot when it comes to AI and data collection).
evrydayhustling 8y ago
That is quite a lot of words to say "think a few steps ahead".
- rygxqpbsngav 8y ago
  + Look beyond the obvious and conventional and what it is saying that the second order thinkers see unconventional things that might sound absurd to conventional first order thinkers. And do it with good precision, otherwise, they might end up with failed results too.
fogetti 8y ago
Ordinary people don't like when they are getting asked "And then what?" Socrates kept asking questions. That was his defining characteristic. We know how that went...
- pojzon 8y ago
  I think the story of socrates has repeated itself multiple times over the course of history. Very often men who were ahead of their times were prosecuted for being right.
0_gravitas 8y ago
Why didn't I think of that!?
munin 8y ago
Smart people get everyone else to bog themselves down with "second-order thinking" perpetually tying themselves in mental knots wondering endlessly "what happens next" and "should I or shouldn't I." That is because smart people that get shit done will not think twice, do the thing, and then quickly re-evaluate the results and proceed apace. Smart people that get shit done, outperform by actually executing. You can't predict the future. Asking "but what about in ten years" is the height of hubris. The only answer can be "who knows."
- nixpulvis 8y ago
  Depending on your aim, smarter people probably don't spend time bogging others down, and instead probably fall closer to the teach a man to fish side of things.
- whynotminot 8y ago
  Please don't give this man a company. I agree that smart, effective people do generally have a bias toward action. But not in the bull in the shop "thinking twice is a waste of my time" sort of way you're describing.
  - hinkley 8y ago
    Yeah I was thinking this is how Erie Canal, love canal and more boring things like Clinton Lake happened.
- bobthechef 8y ago
  There is some truth to this. The future is impossible to predict. There is foolishness in failing to understand where predictions make sense and where they don't. We like to talk about "intelligence", but wisdom and the virtue of prudence are essential. Without the disciplining effect of the virtues, intelligence is thwarted. The degree and the kind of effort one puts into something is extremely important and requires a comprehension of the confluence of factors that are important to making the correct decision. This requires experience. And as the saying goes, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. But that isn't to say we shouldn't plans. This should not be taken as license for impulsive behavior and an irresponsible absense of forethought. But it should be understood that plans are often dependent on certain conditions holding, on the completeness of our knowledge, etc, thus requiring humility in the face of uncertainty and recognizing that plans must be adjusted or abandoned sometimes. There is no recipe for any of this and first principle are not enough.
mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
Maybe world policy makers should think to the nth order before making bad policies.
- sverige 8y ago
  I think they do, but I suspect that their goals are bad, which is why we have the world we have now.
  - seleniumBubbles 8y ago
    It’s worth noting here that an astonishing number of prominent politicians and politically-involved elites are still avowed (and publicly acknowledged) Malthusians. So when trying to understand their actions, keep in mind, their goals may in fact be to “reduce the global population to a more sustainable level.”
busyant 8y ago
I think this article is saying: - 1st order thinkers primarily see causes and *direct* effects. - 2nd order thinkers frequently see causes and their *indirect* effects. I guess that seems like a reasonable idea. For what it's worth, the truly exceptional people I've met in life had a different quality. * When most people are presented with a difficult/challenging problem, they soon give up. * The most exceptional people that I've met just kept hammering away after the rest of us had stopped. Most of the time, they failed, but if you have some aptitude and you keep hammering, you have a better chance to make breakthroughs that the rest of us don't make. Just as an example, I had worked for a company that used X-ray crystallography as a tool for drug-development. I would be in meetings with crystallographers where we discussed the technical problems they were having in trying to grow crystals. The crystallographers were all smart and talented, but when we had group meetings, there was only one guy who would float suggestion-after-suggestion-after-suggestion, long after everyone else had run out of ideas. I don't think he was any "smarter" than anyone else in the room, but he just could not shut himself off. He was relentless. He went on to make some important contributions to the field.
- SquishyPanda23 8y ago
  It's worth pointing out that blindly hammering away on the wrong problem is a failure mode for many intelligent people. The key is not just sticking to things, but also having enough taste to know when to drop a problem.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    Sometimes. Forward motion is always important. In incident command scenarios, I’ve seen situations where people will sit around and wait... you need to move forward at all times or you get used to nothing happening.
  - CamperBob2 8y ago
    It's worth pointing out that blindly hammering away on the wrong problem is a failure mode for many intelligent people. Also, being right about something, but at the wrong time. That's the worst failure mode of all IMO.
hcarvalhoalves 8y ago
A good book on the topic is "Thinking in Systems" by Donella Meadows [1]. It's a catalog of common system patterns and how they behave to give you some tools to answer the "then what?". [1] https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/1603580557 https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp...
DoreenMichele 8y ago
The lack of second order thinking seems to be the essence of what ails modern medicine. "I have an infection!" "Time for antibiotics!" Don't bother to ask "And then what?" Some populations are given antibiotics so regularly that it isn't uncommon for them to develop antibiotic resistant infections and even lose their colon to E. Coli. We are given drugs with a multi page handout covering side effects, the doctors take credit for short term improvement -- "Look! Your latest infection got better!" -- then blame your condition for long term decline. No one stops to wonder if it's the drugs -- even though in some cases we absolutely know the drugs caused X.
- mschuller 8y ago
  Second order thinking was thought further by Hans Jonas [1], a philosopher known for his contribution to environmentalism. In his book "The Imperative of Responsibility"[2] he argues that because of our technological breakthroughs (e.g. medicine) it's so easy to make impacts beyond your control that thinking through whatever you do has to become the core of a new ethic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Jonas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Jonas [2] https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo5953283.html https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo59...
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    I'm an environmental studies major. It's been very helpful in trying to develop mental models for thinking about my health issues.
    - Pamar 8y ago
      This is interesting: can you provide some examples?
      - DoreenMichele 8y ago
        I've had a class in Hydrology and also read "Salt Dreams" (about water in Southern California) and a book about the history of water development in Fresno County. Modern people often seem to have mental models of the world where a river has a set place, similar to a road. This is not accurate. Water percolates down into the soil. Rivers meander. The amount and type of plants impacts rain patterns. Water is constantly moving and cycles through the air and moves through the ground, both largely invisible to the naked eye, but critical to the pieces we can readily see. Plus, its movement occurs in a larger context, such as the Moon causing ocean tides. The human body's relationship to water is similar. It isn't just limited to how much you drink, how much you sweat and how much you pee. Like the Earth's crust, your skin takes in water. aso, for example, you can get hydrated with a bath, especially a salt water bath. This is helpful to understand if you are so sick that you are having trouble taking anything by mouth. My condition predisposes me to retain fluids. I've made progress on reducing the chronic bloat in part because I have mental models for how water moves through the environment. Invasive species disrupt ecosystems. This is not unlike infection. Trying to fix a thing like that is far more complicated than our current medical mental model of just giving out antibiotics for infection. On some island, someone wanted to eradicate mosquitoes. They poisoned the mosquitoes, which all died. Small animals ate they poisoned mosquitoes and they died too. This went through several layers, almost like the Biblical plagues (deconstructed and analyzed by modern science on some TV show). Those sorts of things influence my concept of the body's relationship to disease. I don't accept the mental model that "Well, just add antibiotics to the mix and voila! All better now!" We know antibiotics kill gut flora. We know gut flora are critical to our digestion and even help provide certain nutrients. We know that killing gut flora not only screws up digestion, it also promotes the overgrowth of Invaders like E. Coli. Yet we currently do not have a policy of making sure to remediate what antibiotics do to the body. We assume the gut will just repair itself over time without active intervention. Some individuals know to at least eat yogurt, but doctors do not give out handouts with recommendations for "The Post Antibiotics Diet." And then we kind of shrug if someone "mysteriously" develops serious and chronic gut issues. Broader society also seems to fail to understand the gut as the foundation of the immune system.
aphextron 8y ago
This closely mirrors my own thesis on genius. There are first level, direct thinkers. This is the lower 50% of all people, although everyone is capable of it. It is direct and without irony, sarcasm, or self reflection. Think slapstick comedy, or superhero movies. The second level is in 4th wall breaking, analogy, simile, anything which takes "getting" the joke beyond the purely visual. Most people who consider themselves "smart" fall here. About the 50th to 90th percentile of intelligence/creativity. Third level is hard to describe with words by it's nature. It's all about indirection. Not making an analogy, but taking the analogy for granted and riffing off of that. Most truly genius artists, comedians, musicians, scientists, etc. live at this level. Think the comedy of someone like Dave Chappelle, the music of Bob Dylan, or scientists like Stephen Hawking. The fourth level is unattainable for humans as a constant state. The very best third level people can just barely get glimpses of it, and bring those glimpses back down for us to see. These are our all time great works of art, and generational scientific breakthroughs. Picasso, Bach, and Einstein are the archetypes here. But what we (the second level masses) are able to see is just a projection, like a 3 dimensional representation of a 4 dimensional shape. The effect is still mind-blowing, but unless you're at that 3rd level it's impossible to really conceive its' true nature. Genius is in the ability to translate those brief fleeting glimpses of the 4th level by a 3rd level person into something intelligible by the 2nd and 1st.
- disqard 8y ago
  You should check out the concept of the "SOLO Hierarchy" by Raymond Lister.
- goatlover 8y ago
  > It is direct and without irony, sarcasm, or self reflection. Think slapstick comedy, or superhero movies. RDJ/Tony Stark would like a word with you.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Irony, sarcasm, and self reflection at the context of the movie, not the character. RDJ/Tony Stark's "Irony, sarcasm, and self reflection" are still a flat description of an ironic, sarcastic etc character. Not irony, sarcasm etc superimposed on the design/presence of the character itself within the movie.
hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
While I agree with most of this, this can also lead to a kind of "analysis paralysis". I've seen a good number of "first order thinkers" succeed because they just plow through stuff, and when the indirect consequences appear that they didn't originally think about, they plow through that, too.
revskill 8y ago
So, most of Robots are smart ?
keyle 8y ago
Just make sure though that you don't end up in 'paralysis by analysis'. Sometimes, the bullish people that don't overthink things end up in far greater situation (through a rollercoaster) than if they just sat there and pondered about all the consequences.
DubiousPusher 8y ago
I'm not sure how much I agree with this article. In my opinion, most people's practical problems don't come from an inability to consider the later consequences of an action. They're either things completely beyond our control or they come from an inability to discipline ourselves to do the responsible thing given the consequences. People don't take the easy road because they're dumb. They take it because the hard road is hard. And as far as I can tell, gaining or building discipline oneself is nearly impossible. (To be clear, I'm not some hard core libertarian that thinks everyone has made their bed and therefore should sleep in it. I think the struggle to conform one's life to productive positive decisions is ubiquitously difficult and just telling people their problems are their own fault has probably never helped a situation.) Regarding less daily matters like foreign policy, I actually think this kind of second order thinking is a trap. It's the pride that goeth before the fall. It leads us to believe problems that are too complex, too variable and too opaque are within the grasp of our rationalim if only we think hard enough. Robert McNamara didn't advise Kennedy and LBJ deeper and deeper into the Vietnam war because he lacked second order thinking skills. He did so precisely because he had like 10th order thinking skills.
- pitaj 8y ago
  > To be clear, I'm not some hard core libertarian that thinks everyone has made their bed and therefore should sleep in it. I think the struggle to conform one's life to productive positive decisions is ubiquitously difficult and just telling people their problems are their own fault has probably never helped a situation. Not super relevant to the topic at hand, but I am a very hardcore libertarian, and I have to say that this is not an accurate representation of libertarian views. It's not your fault, this seems to be a common misconception among many, even some of those who call themselves libertarian. Libertarian philosophy does indeed stress personal responsibility as a part of voluntary interactions with others. However, this doesn't mean that a person's status is deterministic. Many of people's problem are not their own fault: hell, many of the problems are caused by the state, which is why we hate it. The problems that aren't caused by the state (scarcity, some inequality, externalities, etc) ate very difficult to solve, and state attempts to fix them usually result in even worse outcomes. To bring it back around to second-order thinking, it's very important in politics especially to be able to see these unforseen consequences of political action. First-order thinking is how we end up with things like the PATRIOT Act and other emotionally-driven policies.
NicoJuicy 8y ago
So, to put it in a meme: https://youtu.be/CkdyU_eUm1U https://youtu.be/CkdyU_eUm1U ( not really a smart movie - dude where's my car, but it thought about that the entire time)
JoshCole 8y ago
This article reminds me of tree searches. One of the results we've found in various AI related investigations into the playing of games is that a good policy selects the action which maximizes the value of a future state. A good value for an action corresponds with where that action would eventually leave the agent. The article points out that a person will get better results by expanding the tree out to a depth beyond one. This is usually true. Interestingly, humans are real time and so we also experience contexts in which this is not true. Expansion takes precious time. Thus, one of the cognitive biases which sometimes steers us away from more optimal answers.
jjk166 8y ago
This isn't second order thinking. Deciding to eat a salad when you're hungry instead of a candy bar because you value health over immediate satisfaction is discipline, not intelligence. You're still thinking linearly about the costs and benefits of the decision, you're just placing more emphasis on the longer term costs and benefits. Second order thinking refers to holistically looking at a situation to see emergent behaviors, which allows the intelligent to see things that are not intuitive. Second order thinking would be choosing a salad when you're hungry so that salad becomes associated with relieving hunger, thus making it easier to choose salads going forward, which will create a positive feedback loop keeping you on your diet. It's the self-interaction of the decision that makes it qualitatively more complex than first order thinking.
- jonnycoder 8y ago
  The first thing I thought of in that salad example was to understand why I am hungry. Am I hungry because I’m really just thirsty and need water? And am I not drinking enough water because I chose coffee twice in a row earlier this morning? It’s more like I evaluate in historical choices and need to give more thought to upcoming choices.
- rahulrrixe 8y ago
  But he gave a thought to leave chocolate and take Salad. How do you think this got triggered in his brain. Discipline comes after you have formed rules by seeing it's effect either by you or learning from others. Second-order thinking is too abstract: some time thing which is obvious for you might not be for other e.g. binary search is not always a good option, it can be obvious to you (here you are an intelligent person with acquired knowledge) and for novice to this concept; their second order thinking would be to find out what Binary Search is and then why not it is always good to use it. I think second order is trying to convey to look beyond what you have good in your first glimpse and try to connect dots. I haven't done much study on it but that what I get from it.
  - raxxorrax 8y ago
    I agree with the previous poster that the example given is pretty bad, even if choosing a most trivial case was the goal. Perhaps it is a good idea to associate health and intelligence, and to achieve that it would require higher order thinking. Still skeptical though. Intelligent people probably lead statistics in being healthy, but extrapolating a correlation would be primitive first order thinking, no?
coconut_crab 8y ago
I think it is just one skill of critical thinking, why stop at second order when third order thinking is even better?
- ludston 8y ago
  You have an opportunity to practice second order thinking in regards to using second/third order thinking here.
eismcc 8y ago
Interesting article. While there may be nature/nurture arguments here, IMO, first order thinkers are trained to be that way by society and markets. Someone who doesn’t think ahead is more “useful” as a consumer. Someone who doesn’t think ahead and question, gets along with others with less friction.
henryw 8y ago
The first quote by Ray Dalio is from his most excellent book https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Life-Work-Ray-Dalio/dp/1501124021 https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Life-Work-Ray-Dalio/dp/150... I've listen to the section for personal principles on audible 5 times now, and I will probably keep repeating it at least a couple times a year.
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teekert 8y ago
"For example, consider a country that, wanting to inspire regime change in another country, funds and provides weapons to a group of “moderate rebels.” Only it turns out that those moderate rebels will become powerful and then go to war with the sponsoring country for decades. Whoops." Unless you want to make it look like a beneficial regime change but your actual wish is long term destabilization of a region ;)
- radosc 8y ago
  To stimulate sponsoring country's economy and cement electoral choices in the face of a common threat.
  - teekert 8y ago
    Indeed, but you can hide behind your 1st order thought, play dumb and get the vote of the 1st order thinkers.
- karmakaze 8y ago
  > long term destabilization of a region That's not the final order thought--it doesn't show 'what's in it for me?' There's got to be another 'why?'
mmiliauskas 8y ago
Here is my attempt at second order thinking -- where did he pull out that odds of success exponentially depending on "second order thinking" graph?
WheelsAtLarge 8y ago
Another way to say this is to evaluate the consequences of your actions. Good advice but don't confuse people by renaming it.
dalbasal 8y ago
I think people are generally good at 2nd order thinking, and thinking within complex systems with multiple causes, effects and subsequent effects. Especially so if we're immersed and experienced in a field. We are bad at thinking this way in groups, relatively. We're especially bad when these groups are political. If we're deciding on arming rebels, the political dynamics are the 2nd order effects that dominate thinking, not the war... especially if it's a small foreign war that's unlikely to reach home. The rebel field commander has no problem recognising these strategic dynamics.
- mjburgess 8y ago
  I don't know that this is true. I meet quite a lot of utopians (which are 1st order thinkers!), who assume the stated goal of a policy will be its effects. Perhaps this is about knowledge. In domestic situations where you know how to casually infer to more distant effects, 2nd order is easier. In politics, 2nd order is hard because people know very little and need to know very little (in their daily lives).
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    Politics is the poster entity for this. Stupid 1st order: Making jails as bad as possible will deter criminals which will make everyone safer. Good 2nd order: That doesn't work. How about we try rehabilitation and cutting the social and economic causes of crime? Evil 2nd order: You're a snowflake. Of course it works. [I know it's nonsense, but I'm going to lie to you for profit.] How are the shares in my prison services company doing today? Stupid 1st order: See! The authority agrees! We're right! 3rd order: So... how do we deal with the evil 2nd order people? Everyone else: Why are you creating imaginary problems? Let's get back to the real issues!
    - DATACOMMANDER 8y ago
      But the “stupid first order” proposition is correct. If our policy was to brutally torture people for even the most minor infractions, and we enforced it very well, no one would ever commit a crime unless they were extremely confident that they could get away with it. The problem is that this “cure” would be much worse than the disease.
dillondoyle 8y ago
In politics I've heard higher order thinking called 'running the traps.' Would love to learn of a way to apply derivatives or higher order thinking to polling and the decisions I make in my work. Take Trump in 2015 if voters were less likely to say they support Trump in polling which 2nd order affected Clinton campaign malpractice to not campaign in MI etc, which gave Trump election.
js8 8y ago
I am not against "higher-order thinking" but in my experience it often leads to wishful thinking and self-deception. Especially political arguments are prone to disagreements on higher order effects (as opposed to effects that are directly observable and measurable). For example, take basic income. Opponents of basic income argue that it will lead to inflation (second-order effect) and it will have no effect. Proponents of basic income argue that it will lead to higher velocity of money (second-order effect) and it will have positive economic effect. Often the magnitude of second-order effects is not clear (often they are large sums of small numbers, and somewhat non-linear), and this leads to disagreements even among reasonable people. It's very easy to see 2nd order effect of some type and not another. So I would be cautious to rely on it too much. (This is also partly a reason why I am in favor of empiricism as opposed to rationalism - humans often have bad intuitions when we just think about things.)
- mjburgess 8y ago
  Yes, there is this common reverse problem: If we allow X to speak, his ideas will spread and Y will be harmed. So banning X is best. But why not: Banning X will cause a back reaction in X supporters and spread X's message leading Y to be harmed. Or any other of a number of possibilities. There is a fallacy of "hypothetical higher order danger justifies first order violence (/action)" -- where the higher order thinking is mostly ideological fantasy.
  - Retra 8y ago
    Often that fallacy is argued on the basis of artificially reduced complexity. "Some first order actions can be justified by higher order danger" is often transliterated as "this first order action is justified by higher order danger" precisely because it drops all the subtlety and pretense for higher-order reasoning that the original speaker intended as an unspoken follow-up. People often seem to allow others only the luxury of starting a thought, but never finishing it.
tiku 8y ago
My second order thinking holds me back in some ways, because when I think of something new, immediately I start thinking of ways why it would not work etc.
rygxqpbsngav 8y ago
This is closely related to 'Chaos theory' too. There is a great correlation. "Small differences in initial conditions yield widely diverging outcomes for dynamical systems" My interpretation is that second order thinkers see unconventional things of how a dynamic system behaves to fine tune it initially and intervene when it's moving in wrong direction to drive it in the direction that yields desired results. > What do the consequences look like in 10 minutes? 10 months? 10 Years? 1 > Extraordinary performance comes from seeing things that other people can’t see. Although experience plays a key role, the second order still have to think that aren't yet experienced by them based on the patterns they can recognize.
karmakaze 8y ago
Temporal thinking is something that needs to be exercised. It's relatively easy to think 'what if', 'and then what' but much harder to think these through when each next level overwrites the previous one, it's not a matter of adding up the effects of static layers. Successive effects invalidate former ones to varying degrees. It's really just running thought experiments, but running them deeper and simulating for longer time periods. The most visual demonstration of most of these talking points is in the game of Go. Being able to 'read' the board is seeing the good/bad outcome of a world of possibilities. The other really good comment made was about quantifying second order effects. Being able to imagine higher order effects without being able to estimate them leads to analysis paralysis.
keepmesmall 8y ago
3rd order thinkers see direct causes, indirect causes, direct effects and indirect effects, which establishes the need for setting up an internal feedback loop to strengthen the causes classified as direct (coming from within) and to power the process of distinguishing between direct and indirect causes. Without this feedback loop the experience of indirect causes results in an experience of loss of agency. 1st order thinkers know what they do, 2nd order thinkers know what they do to others, 3rd order thinkers know what they want to do. I'm leaving an interpolation which is both obvious, crucial, trivial and infinitely deep to the reader.
markdog12 8y ago
1st order thinking dominates our politics and economics. And worse, there's no incentive for 2nd order thinking from our politicians, since the electorate doesn't go beyond 1st order. Further, pre-existing assumptions are usually backed by 1st order thinking, but not 2nd. Not a bad little book promoting 2nd order thinking in economics: https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson/ https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson/
- humanrebar 8y ago
  > 1st order thinking dominates our politics and economics. At least in U.S. politics, we have a surplus of second order thinking. We can't get mundane immediate compromises made because people are worried about identities, factions, and trust issues, which are all second order concerns. For instance, it's not controversial to think that H1B visas are a mess, but legislation on specific immigration reform tends to get stymied by the desire for comprehensive immigration reform. Why not just fix one immigration problem? Because immigration proponents and restrictionists do not trust each other that the piecemeal reforms they want will be passed the next time around. The same pattern comes up in plenty of other controversial issues such as abortion, tax reform, and lately judicial appointments.
  - bena 8y ago
    I think it's a tactic. Politicians use whatever order thinking is most convenient to promote their ideas. nth-order thinking is great for debate because you can use increasingly tenuous connections to justify your position.
timwaagh 8y ago
infinity-order thinking: hanging all the self-improvement gurus from the highest tree.
photon_lines 8y ago
OK, so to follow up with the author of the piece and to maybe throw in a little 2nd order thinking into this equation: “Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform” - the author makes a broad claim that all smart people use second order thinking to outperform those who aren’t smart. Questions: What makes the author credible, and what data / research does he/she have in order to support the claim? He/she cites Howard Marks as an example, but is Howard Marks really enough to support the claim for such a broad and generalized statement? What about the fact that even people who try to think deeply tend to get it wrong often-times, which has been shown to be true over and over again? Example: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-hazards-of-confidence.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-h... That’s not to say that I disagree with the premise – I think that in general, this piece puts forward a hypothesis that smart people are deep thinkers who think critically and deeply about the effects of their decisions, while those that aren’t so smart might not put such an effort in. There is some truth to the statement the author puts forward, but by no means is this the differentiating factor between smart people and the not-so-smart. I’m not an expert in this field either, but I’ve read a lot of stuff from Feynman, Einstein, and the geniuses of the field, and I find that some of the things which differentiate them from the rest are: 1. Deep curiosity. They were incredibly interested in finding out how things work / solving a problem. 2. Persistence: They worked hard to achieve what they wanted to achieve and didn’t give up. 3. They used their visual cortex / visual systems a lot. Tesla for example would have live simulated conversations with other people and build things inside of his head. Einstein is in the same boat - he would spend hours trying to visualize concepts. This makes total sense from my perspective. We have a heck of a lot more capacity to process information using our visual cortex than other areas in out brains. We can process something like 10 million bits per second vs. a much lower capacity in other brain areas. When you read silently for example, you're only processing around 45 bits per second. Apologies for the long write up here – I guess I might be over-analyzing things a bit, but I just don’t really see the point of this article, nor do I see it pointing out the real differentiating factors between those that are ‘smart’ and those that aren’t, and I think the author is making a very broad statement and doesn’t have any data to support his/her claim. Howard Marks also by the way is not a class above other investors. He still uses a value-based approach in a time where the value based strategy doesn’t really guarantee maximum returns. It doesn’t mean that he isn’t bright – he definitely is. I just don’t think that this presents enough evidence or data to support the generally broad claim made in the article.
kjbfojbejib 8y ago
Slightly off-topic: what app is used to create low-fi sketches like the illustration in this article? I'd love to use these in my product work.
- 23d 8y ago
  You could make images like these easily with Krita on most platforms or Procreate on an iPad/iPhone.
omega3 8y ago
There is a famous saying in chess which captures this: "If you find a good move, look for a better one".
indweller 8y ago
Has anyone read the book "The Most Important Thing", which is mentioned in the blog? If so, can you give a review of it?
Nemi 8y ago
Another way to look at Second-Order thinking is whether someone can understand C pointers intuitively. Joel Spolsky once wrote that understanding pointers is an aptitude, and I believe he was right. It is the same concept as second-order thinking - being able to follow several layers of indirection. Recursion and regular expressions fall into this group as well. I find otherwise very bright individuals that don't have something in their brain that allows them to grasp these concepts. I think it is how the brain is wired, like good hand-eye coordination or fast memory recall (aka being witty). Just because your brain is good at one of those traits doesn't mean you are good at all of them.
balena 8y ago
BS alert
bartimus 8y ago
So you're successfully applying 2nd level order thinking on your job. Other's don't do it. You're working towards your goal. Achieving your 2nd level order thinking successes. But the rest of your colleagues don't understand what you're doing. They don't see your vision. They live in the 1st order thinking world. To them your choices don't make sense. They don't understand how the successes came from the 2nd level choices. They'll say: "Why are you eating a salad? You're hungry! Take a chocolate bar! It has much more calories so it will better solve your problem." You try to explain. They don't get it. They wave it off like some ridiculous story. How can you effectively sell your 2nd order thinking ideas to 1st order thinking people?
termau 8y ago
This is interesting, I'm pretty sure we all do this to a large extent, I would say one thing that I've noticed when everything was going sideways was I learnt that in the absence of a good viable outcome doing nothing was a very effective strategy. Not without its risks either, but in some cases my act of doing nothing allowed what I had done to progress (where I knew it would not have a detrimental impact and couldn't see any path forward that was effective, I just circled the wagons and waited. Surprisingly effective.

397 points by arunc 8y ago

I call it S1 (simple 1, arrogant and ignorant) vs S2 (simple 2, which is elegant and informed), but I’ve only found it possible to attain S2 after navigating the complexity between these two points, which implies that I’m often guilty of S1 thinking as the genesis of getting to S2, if I have the sand for it.

idlewords 8y ago
And S3 is where you store all your memories.
- publicWorldRead 8y ago
  And where everyone else rifles through them, when you unwittingly leave the bucket permissions wide open for EVERYONE across all objects.
- makerescape 8y ago
  And S10 is a smartphone. I think I’m seeing the matrix.

idlewords 8y ago

And here I was using regular thinking like an idiot.

peteradio 8y ago
D'oh!

blattimwind 8y ago

> The ability to think through problems to the second, third, and nth order—or what we will call second-order thinking for short—is a powerful tool that supercharges your thinking. Clearly it should be called higher-order thinking.

ilaksh 8y ago
Just "planning" seems adequate to me.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  If the author called it planning then everyone would realize that they had already heard of it... People might also realize that with every additional step of reasoning the chance that you got it right decays exponentially.
  - mStreamTeam 8y ago
    That's why people make multiple plans and backup plans
- karmakaze 8y ago
  Plans for the most part execute the 'happy path'. That's wny everything's late and over-budget. Contingincy planning captures 2nd order and that's about as deep as it ever goes.
ausd123 8y ago
This is already a similar concept - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_thinking I would be quite happy to see these kinds of concepts rolled into one. Looking back, most times I heard "higher order thinking" at school, I feel like they meant "thinking at a higher level of abstraction" (as I would describe it now). You could make an argument that the kind of "nth derivative thinking" identified here is similar though.
- FakeComments 8y ago
  As an interesting aside, the n-th partial derivatives form an n-cube: For m variables, there are m first orders, m^2 second orders, etc. and most proofs about, eg convexity, amount to a proof over that shape. The reason that n-th order reasoning about an m-dimensional problem is difficult is that it requires reasoning using m^n objects. If you figure we can remember about ten things intuitively, that’s just enough for three dimensions and two derivatives — enough to do motion analysis. But it’s leagues away from being able to do the second order of a ten-dimensional problem intuitively.

alan-crowe 8y ago

This reminds me of Frédéric Bastiat and his essay "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen". Nicely formatted at http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html The article notes that "It’s often easier to identify when people didn’t adequately consider the second and subsequent order impacts." That failure to consider the second order impacts is what Bastiat refers to as "That Which is Not Seen"

seleniumBubbles 8y ago
That is such a fantastic article. It’s timeless: it was published in 1850, but it remains more relevant than ever.

empath75 8y ago

The best way to exercise second order thinking is to play turn based games like chess or even magic the gathering. You can’t be good at those games without considering actions several turns ahead and aggregating a tremendous amount of knowledge about the game, and you get almost immediate feedback on how good your thought process actually was.

T-A 8y ago
http://theconversation.com/does-playing-chess-make-you-smarter-a-look-at-the-evidence-76062 http://theconversation.com/does-playing-chess-make-you-smart...
- empath75 8y ago
  I don't think playing games makes you smarter. I think it practices a certain kind of thinking, and practicing thinking makes you better at that kind of thinking.
contingencies 8y ago
turn based games like chess or even magic the gathering Risk -> Risk 2210.

_bxg1 8y ago

Not terribly insightful... I expected something about meta-reasoning - thinking about your own thinking - but it was more along the lines of just, "smart people don't have tunnel vision when making decisions".

mnm1 8y ago

This definitely explains why we have things like the drug war (and other idiotic pseudo wars) and can't even learn the second and third order effects of such prohibition after the mass experiment with alcohol prohibition in the twenties and thirties. In fact, it explains a lot if not most bad policy decisions. I'm convinced regular people are simply incapable or unwilling to consider second, third, and higher order effects of their actions and politicians especially take advantage of this to push through atrocious policies. Healthcare policy is another that comes to mind. Retirement saving. Lack of infrastructure spending. Anti vaccine idiots. Etc. Etc. I mean towards people being to incompetent and stupid rather than unwilling, as there is plenty of evidence for that (three quarters of people are purported to not be able to name the three branches of government), but who knows? The end result is the same. Stupid thinking driving forward a stupid populace. I didn't know there was a term for what the stupid were missing till now.

vincentmarle 8y ago

I love to do this, keep iterating on n-th order thoughts, figuring out emergent behavior etc etc (systems mapping is actually a quite useful technique to do this) but at some point you need to scale it back down to the 1st order to actually get things done. It's fun to fantasize where the industry will be heading 10-30 years from now, but figuring out what needs to be done tomorrow is more important.

kaycebasques 8y ago
Honest question, just for the sake of respectful debate, not trying to be obnoxious: Can you actually derive emergent properties from nth-order thinking? I think they're both fascinating topics, but when I think about emergent properties of human biology, I struggle to imagine how I could have derived them from nth-order logic. To me, emergent properties seem like something you have to observe first, not something that you can reach from any kind of reason. Emergent properties are so awe-inspiring precisely because you can't predict them when you go down a level or two.
- vincentmarle 8y ago
  I see emergent behavior as something that we didn't think of before (maybe because we didn't think about it enough), rather than something that is inherently impossible to predict. Did Mark Zuckerberg know in 2003 that his dorm room creation would affect elections? Probably not, but I also wouldn't say it was impossible to predict. A complex system is chaotic for sure, which definitely makes it hard to predict emergent behavior, but it's also not completely random. I wouldn't claim that you can figure out all emergent behavior beforehand but you can definitely reason about some emergent behavior just by doing some nth-order thinking and systems mapping. One example that I thought of recently: Today most innovation with food is about innovating on logistics. It's all about getting your food faster and cheaper to your door. Let's say, in 5-10 years from now we live in a world where on-demand groceries are instant and cheaper than anything else, maybe even powered by autonomous drones or what not. Would we still be going to restaurants and grocery stores? One emergent behavior may be that we get everything delivered with a snap of our fingers straight from warehouses and delivery kitchens. So is it wise to put all our money into Instacart and Doordash now that we know this? Maybe not, because what's the next step beyond delivery? What if there's a new technology to print your food, 20-30 years from now? Will Instacart and Doordash still be relevant in a world like that? Emergent behavior would then be that innovation will be more about what you eat than when you get it (the innovation vector that we focus so much on today). The company that learns your taste profiles and can figure out exactly what you want/need will probably win in that scenario, so maybe companies that are solving logistics today (Instacart/Doordash) are not the companies that will win in the end (Google has a better shot when it comes to AI and data collection).

evrydayhustling 8y ago

That is quite a lot of words to say "think a few steps ahead".

rygxqpbsngav 8y ago
+ Look beyond the obvious and conventional and what it is saying that the second order thinkers see unconventional things that might sound absurd to conventional first order thinkers. And do it with good precision, otherwise, they might end up with failed results too.

fogetti 8y ago

Ordinary people don't like when they are getting asked "And then what?" Socrates kept asking questions. That was his defining characteristic. We know how that went...

pojzon 8y ago
I think the story of socrates has repeated itself multiple times over the course of history. Very often men who were ahead of their times were prosecuted for being right.

0_gravitas 8y ago

Why didn't I think of that!?

munin 8y ago

Smart people get everyone else to bog themselves down with "second-order thinking" perpetually tying themselves in mental knots wondering endlessly "what happens next" and "should I or shouldn't I." That is because smart people that get shit done will not think twice, do the thing, and then quickly re-evaluate the results and proceed apace. Smart people that get shit done, outperform by actually executing. You can't predict the future. Asking "but what about in ten years" is the height of hubris. The only answer can be "who knows."

nixpulvis 8y ago
Depending on your aim, smarter people probably don't spend time bogging others down, and instead probably fall closer to the teach a man to fish side of things.
whynotminot 8y ago
Please don't give this man a company. I agree that smart, effective people do generally have a bias toward action. But not in the bull in the shop "thinking twice is a waste of my time" sort of way you're describing.
- hinkley 8y ago
  Yeah I was thinking this is how Erie Canal, love canal and more boring things like Clinton Lake happened.
bobthechef 8y ago
There is some truth to this. The future is impossible to predict. There is foolishness in failing to understand where predictions make sense and where they don't. We like to talk about "intelligence", but wisdom and the virtue of prudence are essential. Without the disciplining effect of the virtues, intelligence is thwarted. The degree and the kind of effort one puts into something is extremely important and requires a comprehension of the confluence of factors that are important to making the correct decision. This requires experience. And as the saying goes, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. But that isn't to say we shouldn't plans. This should not be taken as license for impulsive behavior and an irresponsible absense of forethought. But it should be understood that plans are often dependent on certain conditions holding, on the completeness of our knowledge, etc, thus requiring humility in the face of uncertainty and recognizing that plans must be adjusted or abandoned sometimes. There is no recipe for any of this and first principle are not enough.

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago

Maybe world policy makers should think to the nth order before making bad policies.

sverige 8y ago
I think they do, but I suspect that their goals are bad, which is why we have the world we have now.
- seleniumBubbles 8y ago
  It’s worth noting here that an astonishing number of prominent politicians and politically-involved elites are still avowed (and publicly acknowledged) Malthusians. So when trying to understand their actions, keep in mind, their goals may in fact be to “reduce the global population to a more sustainable level.”

busyant 8y ago

I think this article is saying: - 1st order thinkers primarily see causes and *direct* effects. - 2nd order thinkers frequently see causes and their *indirect* effects. I guess that seems like a reasonable idea. For what it's worth, the truly exceptional people I've met in life had a different quality. * When most people are presented with a difficult/challenging problem, they soon give up. * The most exceptional people that I've met just kept hammering away after the rest of us had stopped. Most of the time, they failed, but if you have some aptitude and you keep hammering, you have a better chance to make breakthroughs that the rest of us don't make. Just as an example, I had worked for a company that used X-ray crystallography as a tool for drug-development. I would be in meetings with crystallographers where we discussed the technical problems they were having in trying to grow crystals. The crystallographers were all smart and talented, but when we had group meetings, there was only one guy who would float suggestion-after-suggestion-after-suggestion, long after everyone else had run out of ideas. I don't think he was any "smarter" than anyone else in the room, but he just could not shut himself off. He was relentless. He went on to make some important contributions to the field.

SquishyPanda23 8y ago
It's worth pointing out that blindly hammering away on the wrong problem is a failure mode for many intelligent people. The key is not just sticking to things, but also having enough taste to know when to drop a problem.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Sometimes. Forward motion is always important. In incident command scenarios, I’ve seen situations where people will sit around and wait... you need to move forward at all times or you get used to nothing happening.
- CamperBob2 8y ago
  It's worth pointing out that blindly hammering away on the wrong problem is a failure mode for many intelligent people. Also, being right about something, but at the wrong time. That's the worst failure mode of all IMO.

hcarvalhoalves 8y ago

A good book on the topic is "Thinking in Systems" by Donella Meadows [1]. It's a catalog of common system patterns and how they behave to give you some tools to answer the "then what?". [1] https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/1603580557 https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp...

DoreenMichele 8y ago

The lack of second order thinking seems to be the essence of what ails modern medicine. "I have an infection!" "Time for antibiotics!" Don't bother to ask "And then what?" Some populations are given antibiotics so regularly that it isn't uncommon for them to develop antibiotic resistant infections and even lose their colon to E. Coli. We are given drugs with a multi page handout covering side effects, the doctors take credit for short term improvement -- "Look! Your latest infection got better!" -- then blame your condition for long term decline. No one stops to wonder if it's the drugs -- even though in some cases we absolutely know the drugs caused X.

mschuller 8y ago
Second order thinking was thought further by Hans Jonas [1], a philosopher known for his contribution to environmentalism. In his book "The Imperative of Responsibility"[2] he argues that because of our technological breakthroughs (e.g. medicine) it's so easy to make impacts beyond your control that thinking through whatever you do has to become the core of a new ethic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Jonas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Jonas [2] https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo5953283.html https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo59...
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I'm an environmental studies major. It's been very helpful in trying to develop mental models for thinking about my health issues.
  - Pamar 8y ago
    This is interesting: can you provide some examples?
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      I've had a class in Hydrology and also read "Salt Dreams" (about water in Southern California) and a book about the history of water development in Fresno County. Modern people often seem to have mental models of the world where a river has a set place, similar to a road. This is not accurate. Water percolates down into the soil. Rivers meander. The amount and type of plants impacts rain patterns. Water is constantly moving and cycles through the air and moves through the ground, both largely invisible to the naked eye, but critical to the pieces we can readily see. Plus, its movement occurs in a larger context, such as the Moon causing ocean tides. The human body's relationship to water is similar. It isn't just limited to how much you drink, how much you sweat and how much you pee. Like the Earth's crust, your skin takes in water. aso, for example, you can get hydrated with a bath, especially a salt water bath. This is helpful to understand if you are so sick that you are having trouble taking anything by mouth. My condition predisposes me to retain fluids. I've made progress on reducing the chronic bloat in part because I have mental models for how water moves through the environment. Invasive species disrupt ecosystems. This is not unlike infection. Trying to fix a thing like that is far more complicated than our current medical mental model of just giving out antibiotics for infection. On some island, someone wanted to eradicate mosquitoes. They poisoned the mosquitoes, which all died. Small animals ate they poisoned mosquitoes and they died too. This went through several layers, almost like the Biblical plagues (deconstructed and analyzed by modern science on some TV show). Those sorts of things influence my concept of the body's relationship to disease. I don't accept the mental model that "Well, just add antibiotics to the mix and voila! All better now!" We know antibiotics kill gut flora. We know gut flora are critical to our digestion and even help provide certain nutrients. We know that killing gut flora not only screws up digestion, it also promotes the overgrowth of Invaders like E. Coli. Yet we currently do not have a policy of making sure to remediate what antibiotics do to the body. We assume the gut will just repair itself over time without active intervention. Some individuals know to at least eat yogurt, but doctors do not give out handouts with recommendations for "The Post Antibiotics Diet." And then we kind of shrug if someone "mysteriously" develops serious and chronic gut issues. Broader society also seems to fail to understand the gut as the foundation of the immune system.

aphextron 8y ago

This closely mirrors my own thesis on genius. There are first level, direct thinkers. This is the lower 50% of all people, although everyone is capable of it. It is direct and without irony, sarcasm, or self reflection. Think slapstick comedy, or superhero movies. The second level is in 4th wall breaking, analogy, simile, anything which takes "getting" the joke beyond the purely visual. Most people who consider themselves "smart" fall here. About the 50th to 90th percentile of intelligence/creativity. Third level is hard to describe with words by it's nature. It's all about indirection. Not making an analogy, but taking the analogy for granted and riffing off of that. Most truly genius artists, comedians, musicians, scientists, etc. live at this level. Think the comedy of someone like Dave Chappelle, the music of Bob Dylan, or scientists like Stephen Hawking. The fourth level is unattainable for humans as a constant state. The very best third level people can just barely get glimpses of it, and bring those glimpses back down for us to see. These are our all time great works of art, and generational scientific breakthroughs. Picasso, Bach, and Einstein are the archetypes here. But what we (the second level masses) are able to see is just a projection, like a 3 dimensional representation of a 4 dimensional shape. The effect is still mind-blowing, but unless you're at that 3rd level it's impossible to really conceive its' true nature. Genius is in the ability to translate those brief fleeting glimpses of the 4th level by a 3rd level person into something intelligible by the 2nd and 1st.

disqard 8y ago
You should check out the concept of the "SOLO Hierarchy" by Raymond Lister.
goatlover 8y ago
> It is direct and without irony, sarcasm, or self reflection. Think slapstick comedy, or superhero movies. RDJ/Tony Stark would like a word with you.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Irony, sarcasm, and self reflection at the context of the movie, not the character. RDJ/Tony Stark's "Irony, sarcasm, and self reflection" are still a flat description of an ironic, sarcastic etc character. Not irony, sarcasm etc superimposed on the design/presence of the character itself within the movie.

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago

While I agree with most of this, this can also lead to a kind of "analysis paralysis". I've seen a good number of "first order thinkers" succeed because they just plow through stuff, and when the indirect consequences appear that they didn't originally think about, they plow through that, too.

revskill 8y ago

So, most of Robots are smart ?

keyle 8y ago

Just make sure though that you don't end up in 'paralysis by analysis'. Sometimes, the bullish people that don't overthink things end up in far greater situation (through a rollercoaster) than if they just sat there and pondered about all the consequences.

DubiousPusher 8y ago

I'm not sure how much I agree with this article. In my opinion, most people's practical problems don't come from an inability to consider the later consequences of an action. They're either things completely beyond our control or they come from an inability to discipline ourselves to do the responsible thing given the consequences. People don't take the easy road because they're dumb. They take it because the hard road is hard. And as far as I can tell, gaining or building discipline oneself is nearly impossible. (To be clear, I'm not some hard core libertarian that thinks everyone has made their bed and therefore should sleep in it. I think the struggle to conform one's life to productive positive decisions is ubiquitously difficult and just telling people their problems are their own fault has probably never helped a situation.) Regarding less daily matters like foreign policy, I actually think this kind of second order thinking is a trap. It's the pride that goeth before the fall. It leads us to believe problems that are too complex, too variable and too opaque are within the grasp of our rationalim if only we think hard enough. Robert McNamara didn't advise Kennedy and LBJ deeper and deeper into the Vietnam war because he lacked second order thinking skills. He did so precisely because he had like 10th order thinking skills.

pitaj 8y ago
> To be clear, I'm not some hard core libertarian that thinks everyone has made their bed and therefore should sleep in it. I think the struggle to conform one's life to productive positive decisions is ubiquitously difficult and just telling people their problems are their own fault has probably never helped a situation. Not super relevant to the topic at hand, but I am a very hardcore libertarian, and I have to say that this is not an accurate representation of libertarian views. It's not your fault, this seems to be a common misconception among many, even some of those who call themselves libertarian. Libertarian philosophy does indeed stress personal responsibility as a part of voluntary interactions with others. However, this doesn't mean that a person's status is deterministic. Many of people's problem are not their own fault: hell, many of the problems are caused by the state, which is why we hate it. The problems that aren't caused by the state (scarcity, some inequality, externalities, etc) ate very difficult to solve, and state attempts to fix them usually result in even worse outcomes. To bring it back around to second-order thinking, it's very important in politics especially to be able to see these unforseen consequences of political action. First-order thinking is how we end up with things like the PATRIOT Act and other emotionally-driven policies.

NicoJuicy 8y ago

So, to put it in a meme: https://youtu.be/CkdyU_eUm1U https://youtu.be/CkdyU_eUm1U ( not really a smart movie - dude where's my car, but it thought about that the entire time)

JoshCole 8y ago

This article reminds me of tree searches. One of the results we've found in various AI related investigations into the playing of games is that a good policy selects the action which maximizes the value of a future state. A good value for an action corresponds with where that action would eventually leave the agent. The article points out that a person will get better results by expanding the tree out to a depth beyond one. This is usually true. Interestingly, humans are real time and so we also experience contexts in which this is not true. Expansion takes precious time. Thus, one of the cognitive biases which sometimes steers us away from more optimal answers.

jjk166 8y ago

This isn't second order thinking. Deciding to eat a salad when you're hungry instead of a candy bar because you value health over immediate satisfaction is discipline, not intelligence. You're still thinking linearly about the costs and benefits of the decision, you're just placing more emphasis on the longer term costs and benefits. Second order thinking refers to holistically looking at a situation to see emergent behaviors, which allows the intelligent to see things that are not intuitive. Second order thinking would be choosing a salad when you're hungry so that salad becomes associated with relieving hunger, thus making it easier to choose salads going forward, which will create a positive feedback loop keeping you on your diet. It's the self-interaction of the decision that makes it qualitatively more complex than first order thinking.

jonnycoder 8y ago
The first thing I thought of in that salad example was to understand why I am hungry. Am I hungry because I’m really just thirsty and need water? And am I not drinking enough water because I chose coffee twice in a row earlier this morning? It’s more like I evaluate in historical choices and need to give more thought to upcoming choices.
rahulrrixe 8y ago
But he gave a thought to leave chocolate and take Salad. How do you think this got triggered in his brain. Discipline comes after you have formed rules by seeing it's effect either by you or learning from others. Second-order thinking is too abstract: some time thing which is obvious for you might not be for other e.g. binary search is not always a good option, it can be obvious to you (here you are an intelligent person with acquired knowledge) and for novice to this concept; their second order thinking would be to find out what Binary Search is and then why not it is always good to use it. I think second order is trying to convey to look beyond what you have good in your first glimpse and try to connect dots. I haven't done much study on it but that what I get from it.
- raxxorrax 8y ago
  I agree with the previous poster that the example given is pretty bad, even if choosing a most trivial case was the goal. Perhaps it is a good idea to associate health and intelligence, and to achieve that it would require higher order thinking. Still skeptical though. Intelligent people probably lead statistics in being healthy, but extrapolating a correlation would be primitive first order thinking, no?

coconut_crab 8y ago

I think it is just one skill of critical thinking, why stop at second order when third order thinking is even better?

ludston 8y ago
You have an opportunity to practice second order thinking in regards to using second/third order thinking here.

eismcc 8y ago

Interesting article. While there may be nature/nurture arguments here, IMO, first order thinkers are trained to be that way by society and markets. Someone who doesn’t think ahead is more “useful” as a consumer. Someone who doesn’t think ahead and question, gets along with others with less friction.

henryw 8y ago

The first quote by Ray Dalio is from his most excellent book https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Life-Work-Ray-Dalio/dp/1501124021 https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Life-Work-Ray-Dalio/dp/150... I've listen to the section for personal principles on audible 5 times now, and I will probably keep repeating it at least a couple times a year.

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teekert 8y ago

"For example, consider a country that, wanting to inspire regime change in another country, funds and provides weapons to a group of “moderate rebels.” Only it turns out that those moderate rebels will become powerful and then go to war with the sponsoring country for decades. Whoops." Unless you want to make it look like a beneficial regime change but your actual wish is long term destabilization of a region ;)

radosc 8y ago
To stimulate sponsoring country's economy and cement electoral choices in the face of a common threat.
- teekert 8y ago
  Indeed, but you can hide behind your 1st order thought, play dumb and get the vote of the 1st order thinkers.
karmakaze 8y ago
> long term destabilization of a region That's not the final order thought--it doesn't show 'what's in it for me?' There's got to be another 'why?'

mmiliauskas 8y ago

Here is my attempt at second order thinking -- where did he pull out that odds of success exponentially depending on "second order thinking" graph?

WheelsAtLarge 8y ago

Another way to say this is to evaluate the consequences of your actions. Good advice but don't confuse people by renaming it.

dalbasal 8y ago

I think people are generally good at 2nd order thinking, and thinking within complex systems with multiple causes, effects and subsequent effects. Especially so if we're immersed and experienced in a field. We are bad at thinking this way in groups, relatively. We're especially bad when these groups are political. If we're deciding on arming rebels, the political dynamics are the 2nd order effects that dominate thinking, not the war... especially if it's a small foreign war that's unlikely to reach home. The rebel field commander has no problem recognising these strategic dynamics.

mjburgess 8y ago
I don't know that this is true. I meet quite a lot of utopians (which are 1st order thinkers!), who assume the stated goal of a policy will be its effects. Perhaps this is about knowledge. In domestic situations where you know how to casually infer to more distant effects, 2nd order is easier. In politics, 2nd order is hard because people know very little and need to know very little (in their daily lives).
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  Politics is the poster entity for this. Stupid 1st order: Making jails as bad as possible will deter criminals which will make everyone safer. Good 2nd order: That doesn't work. How about we try rehabilitation and cutting the social and economic causes of crime? Evil 2nd order: You're a snowflake. Of course it works. [I know it's nonsense, but I'm going to lie to you for profit.] How are the shares in my prison services company doing today? Stupid 1st order: See! The authority agrees! We're right! 3rd order: So... how do we deal with the evil 2nd order people? Everyone else: Why are you creating imaginary problems? Let's get back to the real issues!
  - DATACOMMANDER 8y ago
    But the “stupid first order” proposition is correct. If our policy was to brutally torture people for even the most minor infractions, and we enforced it very well, no one would ever commit a crime unless they were extremely confident that they could get away with it. The problem is that this “cure” would be much worse than the disease.

dillondoyle 8y ago

In politics I've heard higher order thinking called 'running the traps.' Would love to learn of a way to apply derivatives or higher order thinking to polling and the decisions I make in my work. Take Trump in 2015 if voters were less likely to say they support Trump in polling which 2nd order affected Clinton campaign malpractice to not campaign in MI etc, which gave Trump election.

js8 8y ago

I am not against "higher-order thinking" but in my experience it often leads to wishful thinking and self-deception. Especially political arguments are prone to disagreements on higher order effects (as opposed to effects that are directly observable and measurable). For example, take basic income. Opponents of basic income argue that it will lead to inflation (second-order effect) and it will have no effect. Proponents of basic income argue that it will lead to higher velocity of money (second-order effect) and it will have positive economic effect. Often the magnitude of second-order effects is not clear (often they are large sums of small numbers, and somewhat non-linear), and this leads to disagreements even among reasonable people. It's very easy to see 2nd order effect of some type and not another. So I would be cautious to rely on it too much. (This is also partly a reason why I am in favor of empiricism as opposed to rationalism - humans often have bad intuitions when we just think about things.)

mjburgess 8y ago
Yes, there is this common reverse problem: If we allow X to speak, his ideas will spread and Y will be harmed. So banning X is best. But why not: Banning X will cause a back reaction in X supporters and spread X's message leading Y to be harmed. Or any other of a number of possibilities. There is a fallacy of "hypothetical higher order danger justifies first order violence (/action)" -- where the higher order thinking is mostly ideological fantasy.
- Retra 8y ago
  Often that fallacy is argued on the basis of artificially reduced complexity. "Some first order actions can be justified by higher order danger" is often transliterated as "this first order action is justified by higher order danger" precisely because it drops all the subtlety and pretense for higher-order reasoning that the original speaker intended as an unspoken follow-up. People often seem to allow others only the luxury of starting a thought, but never finishing it.

tiku 8y ago

My second order thinking holds me back in some ways, because when I think of something new, immediately I start thinking of ways why it would not work etc.

rygxqpbsngav 8y ago

This is closely related to 'Chaos theory' too. There is a great correlation. "Small differences in initial conditions yield widely diverging outcomes for dynamical systems" My interpretation is that second order thinkers see unconventional things of how a dynamic system behaves to fine tune it initially and intervene when it's moving in wrong direction to drive it in the direction that yields desired results. > What do the consequences look like in 10 minutes? 10 months? 10 Years? 1 > Extraordinary performance comes from seeing things that other people can’t see. Although experience plays a key role, the second order still have to think that aren't yet experienced by them based on the patterns they can recognize.

karmakaze 8y ago

Temporal thinking is something that needs to be exercised. It's relatively easy to think 'what if', 'and then what' but much harder to think these through when each next level overwrites the previous one, it's not a matter of adding up the effects of static layers. Successive effects invalidate former ones to varying degrees. It's really just running thought experiments, but running them deeper and simulating for longer time periods. The most visual demonstration of most of these talking points is in the game of Go. Being able to 'read' the board is seeing the good/bad outcome of a world of possibilities. The other really good comment made was about quantifying second order effects. Being able to imagine higher order effects without being able to estimate them leads to analysis paralysis.

keepmesmall 8y ago

3rd order thinkers see direct causes, indirect causes, direct effects and indirect effects, which establishes the need for setting up an internal feedback loop to strengthen the causes classified as direct (coming from within) and to power the process of distinguishing between direct and indirect causes. Without this feedback loop the experience of indirect causes results in an experience of loss of agency. 1st order thinkers know what they do, 2nd order thinkers know what they do to others, 3rd order thinkers know what they want to do. I'm leaving an interpolation which is both obvious, crucial, trivial and infinitely deep to the reader.

markdog12 8y ago

1st order thinking dominates our politics and economics. And worse, there's no incentive for 2nd order thinking from our politicians, since the electorate doesn't go beyond 1st order. Further, pre-existing assumptions are usually backed by 1st order thinking, but not 2nd. Not a bad little book promoting 2nd order thinking in economics: https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson/ https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson/

humanrebar 8y ago
> 1st order thinking dominates our politics and economics. At least in U.S. politics, we have a surplus of second order thinking. We can't get mundane immediate compromises made because people are worried about identities, factions, and trust issues, which are all second order concerns. For instance, it's not controversial to think that H1B visas are a mess, but legislation on specific immigration reform tends to get stymied by the desire for comprehensive immigration reform. Why not just fix one immigration problem? Because immigration proponents and restrictionists do not trust each other that the piecemeal reforms they want will be passed the next time around. The same pattern comes up in plenty of other controversial issues such as abortion, tax reform, and lately judicial appointments.
- bena 8y ago
  I think it's a tactic. Politicians use whatever order thinking is most convenient to promote their ideas. nth-order thinking is great for debate because you can use increasingly tenuous connections to justify your position.

timwaagh 8y ago

infinity-order thinking: hanging all the self-improvement gurus from the highest tree.

photon_lines 8y ago

OK, so to follow up with the author of the piece and to maybe throw in a little 2nd order thinking into this equation: “Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform” - the author makes a broad claim that all smart people use second order thinking to outperform those who aren’t smart. Questions: What makes the author credible, and what data / research does he/she have in order to support the claim? He/she cites Howard Marks as an example, but is Howard Marks really enough to support the claim for such a broad and generalized statement? What about the fact that even people who try to think deeply tend to get it wrong often-times, which has been shown to be true over and over again? Example: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-hazards-of-confidence.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-h... That’s not to say that I disagree with the premise – I think that in general, this piece puts forward a hypothesis that smart people are deep thinkers who think critically and deeply about the effects of their decisions, while those that aren’t so smart might not put such an effort in. There is some truth to the statement the author puts forward, but by no means is this the differentiating factor between smart people and the not-so-smart. I’m not an expert in this field either, but I’ve read a lot of stuff from Feynman, Einstein, and the geniuses of the field, and I find that some of the things which differentiate them from the rest are: 1. Deep curiosity. They were incredibly interested in finding out how things work / solving a problem. 2. Persistence: They worked hard to achieve what they wanted to achieve and didn’t give up. 3. They used their visual cortex / visual systems a lot. Tesla for example would have live simulated conversations with other people and build things inside of his head. Einstein is in the same boat - he would spend hours trying to visualize concepts. This makes total sense from my perspective. We have a heck of a lot more capacity to process information using our visual cortex than other areas in out brains. We can process something like 10 million bits per second vs. a much lower capacity in other brain areas. When you read silently for example, you're only processing around 45 bits per second. Apologies for the long write up here – I guess I might be over-analyzing things a bit, but I just don’t really see the point of this article, nor do I see it pointing out the real differentiating factors between those that are ‘smart’ and those that aren’t, and I think the author is making a very broad statement and doesn’t have any data to support his/her claim. Howard Marks also by the way is not a class above other investors. He still uses a value-based approach in a time where the value based strategy doesn’t really guarantee maximum returns. It doesn’t mean that he isn’t bright – he definitely is. I just don’t think that this presents enough evidence or data to support the generally broad claim made in the article.

kjbfojbejib 8y ago

Slightly off-topic: what app is used to create low-fi sketches like the illustration in this article? I'd love to use these in my product work.

23d 8y ago
You could make images like these easily with Krita on most platforms or Procreate on an iPad/iPhone.

omega3 8y ago

There is a famous saying in chess which captures this: "If you find a good move, look for a better one".

indweller 8y ago

Has anyone read the book "The Most Important Thing", which is mentioned in the blog? If so, can you give a review of it?

Nemi 8y ago

Another way to look at Second-Order thinking is whether someone can understand C pointers intuitively. Joel Spolsky once wrote that understanding pointers is an aptitude, and I believe he was right. It is the same concept as second-order thinking - being able to follow several layers of indirection. Recursion and regular expressions fall into this group as well. I find otherwise very bright individuals that don't have something in their brain that allows them to grasp these concepts. I think it is how the brain is wired, like good hand-eye coordination or fast memory recall (aka being witty). Just because your brain is good at one of those traits doesn't mean you are good at all of them.

balena 8y ago

BS alert

bartimus 8y ago

So you're successfully applying 2nd level order thinking on your job. Other's don't do it. You're working towards your goal. Achieving your 2nd level order thinking successes. But the rest of your colleagues don't understand what you're doing. They don't see your vision. They live in the 1st order thinking world. To them your choices don't make sense. They don't understand how the successes came from the 2nd level choices. They'll say: "Why are you eating a salad? You're hungry! Take a chocolate bar! It has much more calories so it will better solve your problem." You try to explain. They don't get it. They wave it off like some ridiculous story. How can you effectively sell your 2nd order thinking ideas to 1st order thinking people?

termau 8y ago

This is interesting, I'm pretty sure we all do this to a large extent, I would say one thing that I've noticed when everything was going sideways was I learnt that in the absence of a good viable outcome doing nothing was a very effective strategy. Not without its risks either, but in some cases my act of doing nothing allowed what I had done to progress (where I knew it would not have a detrimental impact and couldn't see any path forward that was effective, I just circled the wagons and waited. Surprisingly effective.