>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 or

>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. It seems to me that "holistically looking at a situation to see emergent behaviors" is still just linear thinking. What's being suggested is a "line of thought" that is longer than the average, but if your modus operandi is to make positive feedback loops for as many things as possible in your life, and/or be holistic, then it's no different from the first way of thinking that you illustrated. Whether or not someone thinks either way could simply depend on the degree to which that person is an extrovert/introvert. Sorry, not trying to seem snarky or anything. The dichotomy you presented here just seemed interesting to me, maybe because I'm the type of person who is predisposed towards finding patterns in things.