9 ms·

Being a hedgehog is useful on the journey to domain mastery because sticking to frameworks saves you time and headache compared to not having any frameworks at

Being a hedgehog is useful on the journey to domain mastery because sticking to frameworks saves you time and headache compared to not having any frameworks at all. The 3 stages of domain mastery: Stage 1 - No knowledge or structure to approach a domain (everything is hard, pitfalls are everywhere) Stage 2 - Frameworks that are useful to approach the domain (Map to avoid pitfall areas) Stage 3 - Detailed understanding of the domain (in which you can move through pitfall areas freely and see where frameworks fall short) Hedgehogs are at stage 2. You move from stage 1 to stage 2 by adopting frameworks; hence, hedgehogs are seen as "thought leaders" because they teach the frameworks that lead MOST people to more mastery. Except when you're at stage 3, in which case frameworks lead you to more inefficiencies compared to your own understanding. All good decisions must be made by stage 3 persons, but ironically, training is most efficiently done by stage 2 persons. Hedgehogs get more limelight because 90% of the population is at stage 1 and values the knowledge of stage 2 (and can't grasp the complexities and nuances of stage 3). Many hedgehogs struggle to touch stage 3, and instead see stage 2 as mastery. This is compounded by the positive feedback loops of success - the frameworks save time, it gives them reputation, it allows them to save stage 1 persons from their ignorance, and it's the foundation of their current level and achievements. Frameworks are also convenient and broadly applicable to many problems; detailed domain mastery in contrast is difficult, time consuming, and highly contextualized. All of this makes it hard to move beyond stage 2 into stage 3.

wwweston 5y ago
This is pretty brilliant.
catlifeonmars 5y ago
This is a useful way to frame it. I would add here that stage 2 is the likely the most comfortable and that the migration from stage 2 to 3 has an embedded disincentive structure.
bombcar 5y ago
To be a good X you must follow the rules. To be a great X you must have followed the rules so well as to learn why they’re there and when they should be broken. Works for almost any X - writer, programmer, driving, etc.
- username90 5y ago
  To be great at X you have to write the rules.
  - xwdv 5y ago
    To be legendary at X you must go beyond X and invent Y, by creating a paradigm shift that echoes throughout your field.
  - mym1990 5y ago
    Not really, Messi is great at soccer, he didn't write the rules of the game, but he was able to do things with the tools available that no one thought possible. To be great you usually have to be creative.
    - quetzthecoatl 5y ago
      Messi can teach the ones who teach football. Not the best example. He was doing unbelievable things when he was a literal teenager. A surprisingly better example would be Cristiano Ronaldo. Ronaldo was absolutley frustrating to watch in his early career. It was someone trying hard to do flashy moves without any end product. He needed guidance, rules and structures. He also slowly transitioned from Winger to Forward/Striker. He is immensly talented, but no bigger talent than top talents in every era. Messi is on a different level. He is an all time great. Cristiano achieved what messi achieved because Cristiano is disciplined in a way that noone before is. The guy is 36 now and just topped goal charts in Italy.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - mym1990 5y ago
        I literally have no idea what you mean by 'Messi can teach the ones who teach football' but my comment was not an invitation to discuss who is better. The rules I am talking about are the ones like 'you can't kick the ball out of bounds', 'you have to score between the goalposts', 'this is a corner kick', 'this is offsides'. Neither Messi nor Ronaldo made those rules, but they are all time greats in their competency.
lhorie 5y ago
> detailed domain mastery in contrast is difficult, time consuming, and highly contextualized In its defense, it's also extremely intellectually gratifying
- Woodi 5y ago
  Also: often good knowledge allows to see similiarities in other domains - feels like mastery/intuition/domain inteligence :) - it allows to instantly grasp new concepts in new domains. Works like isomorphism in math.
  - kijowski 5y ago
    A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories. One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies. Stefan Banach
    - avindroth 5y ago
      Sounds like category theory.
JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
So frequently do I see the hottest new ECMAScript feature presented by one these folks on Twitter, and I'm thinking how out of the box, older browsers won't support it, and most junior developers don't have a great grasp on polyfills or transpilers. So the first thing I'm seeing is limitations in how I might use it in a production environment (or the small but non-zero work to update my tooling to properly support ES5), but most of these folks don't seem to develop in environments requiring older browser support, but in either case, the nuance always seems missed. It's a caricature of the depth that we sometimes need to dig into.
- asiachick 5y ago
  For the stuff I work on, if the user's browser can't handle it then it's 99% sure they are not my target market in the first place. Of course YMMV.
systemvoltage 5y ago
> All of this makes it hard to move beyond stage 2 into stage 3. Often, moving to the stage 3 is a waste of time and resources. There are a few cases if your business's main secret sauce is stage 3, but for most other things - commoditize and focus. I've seen so many teams and engineers trying to master stage 3 but no real business need and ROI. Engineers love mastering things but good leaders guide them in the right things to master and avoid getting addicted to useless stage 3 expertise.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  There is some value in it, you can become the guy people call in when their needs go beyond the standard framework. In the right situation this sort of work can pay handsomely.
- Tainnor 5y ago
  > commoditize and focus You say that as if there were any agreement about what that means. But the point of the article is that this is not true; you'll always find someone that insists on using technology (or technique) X for your project, only technology X will be different for each person. Moreover, X might be actually making the project harder to understand, longer to develop or have other significant downsides. The point of reaching step 3 is not necessarily to be able to develop your own custom solution (although that can be sometimes valuable), but to able to pick the right technologies for a given project given the myriad options available.
  - mwcampbell 5y ago
    Here's how I interpret "commoditize and focus": standardize on a well-established and popular solution that's known to be widely applicable, so you can focus on adding business value in your product. Don't go for the new shiny thing being promoted by thought leaders, but an old workhorse. Do it even though you know the old workhorse is suboptimal on one or more technical axes, because in the bigger picture, the third-party ecosystem, talent pool, and other correlates of popularity and maturity are more important. I've repeatedly failed to follow this approach myself and have come to regret it. As I mentioned the other day, I chose Pulumi over Terraform for infrastructure as code, because Pulumi is undeniably technically superior in some ways. I now believe that was a mistake. I'm trying to figure out how to implement the "commoditize and focus" approach when it comes to standardizing on a web application framework for my company. I believe the classic server-rendered, multi-page approach is the right one most of the time, so I'm talking about that kind of server-side web framework. I implemented our current product in Elixir using Phoenix, and I now believe that was a mistake as well. If we suppose that the top three server-side workhorse languages are Java, Python, and JavaScript via Node.js (as implied by the availability of a certain Amazon SDK for those three), then I should choose a popular framework in one of those languages. If I still try to hang onto technical merit within these constraints, then I suppose I should go with Java and Spring, since Java is statically typed and the JVM is high-performance. But Spring has such an enterprisey smell about it. If I go with what I already know, that would be Python and Django. But CPython has such awful performance, dynamic typing has known drawbacks at scale, and choosing something just because it's what I already know feels far too much like becoming old and set in my ways (I'm 40). And a strike against Spring and Django, as well as Rails and others, is that they require knowledge of a different language on the back-end than the one we already have to use on the front-end. So I guess I should go with Node.js. Maybe Express with a view engine like Pug? But to really take advantage of using the same language on both the front-end and the back-end (I don't shy away from complex front-end JS where it's needed), I should use an isomorphic framework, something like Next.js. But Next.js throws away web fundamentals like being able to submit a form the old way without JavaScript. And what about bundle size and performance on low-end devices? Yes, I'm supposed to hold my nose and tolerate mediocrity for the greater good, but should I even do that at the end-user's expense? And the better isomorphic JS frameworks (Remix, Marko, SvelteKit...) are too bleeding-edge. I don't know... So, you're right, there's no one right way to "commoditize and focus". Sorry for the wall of text; this thread hit too close to home.
orlovs 5y ago
I love this comment. IMHO would be perfect addition to original article
- spyckie2 5y ago
  Thanks
klft 5y ago
This ist a great framework to think about domain mastery. Thank you!
avindroth 5y ago
Also the social benefit of staying in stage 2 is strong. Stage 3 folks don’t mingle together easily, not just because there are less of them, but also because they have in some ways become themselves. It’s much easier for people to stick together when they believe in something together, whether it’s imperfect or not. And then some stage 3 folks make a new stage 2 thing and the cycle continues. But I think people don’t want stage 3 attainment by giving up the social buffer (which is very reasonable, as being a social animal in most cases is better life path than a lonely scholar/innovator). EDIT: I think what I am talking about applies better to spiritual/philosophical/psychological attainment, rather than technological. The effect is probably still there for less spiritual things like tech or writing, but probably less so.
- hef19898 5y ago
  I can subscribe to that.
Layke1123 5y ago
Wrong
edoloughlin 5y ago
But why should I trust your 3-stage framework?
- rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  What makes you question it?
iainmerrick 5y ago
Your response to this article about how contingent advice is usually better than universal advice is to propose a universal theory?
- spyckie2 5y ago
  I did notice the irony myself :) The article talks about contingent advice being better than universal advice only in stage 3. If you're not then universal advice is helpful. I think that holds true for most people and most subjects, including myself. Originally, I thought the article did a great job describing a common scenario that occurs usually in decision making and I wanted to describe my intuition on why I think it comes about. It's not really a universal theory, more my own digestion / explanation on the interrelation around hedgehogs vs foxes and my own interpretation of the issues that the articles describes.
  - iainmerrick 5y ago
    That makes sense! I just realised my reply may have come across as mean-spirited rather than the light joke I intended. Sorry about that.
    - spyckie2 5y ago
      no worries! It is rather ironic.
- bendbro 5y ago
  I'm sure there are contingencies that can make contingent advice worse than universal advice.
  - mtrower 5y ago
    Sure —- in situations where time is critical, for example, fast, suboptimal decisions can be more effective than slow, optimized decisions. So having something general drilled into your head can, in those cases, be preferable.
- 5y ago
krmboya 5y ago
What you've described suspiciously resembles the 'midwit' meme.
deepstack 5y ago
This is an excellent break down. Remind me a lot of the mithril comparison page: https://mithril.js.org/framework-comparison.html https://mithril.js.org/framework-comparison.html Definitely at stage 3, could also be the reason not as many people using it.
agbell 5y ago
I think this progression could make sense as a personal learning progression. The real world is probably more complex than this though. See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27468360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27468360 where the person mentions pressure to simplify advice and Tetlocks own work shows that the hedgehogs were the more famous and successful people. So some people may migrate backwards by simplifying a message for maximum impact.
sorbits 5y ago
While this progression may exist, it is not what I took from the article, nor the original idea behind the hedgehog classification. It is more about some thought-leader being keen on blockchains, machine learning, supply-side economics, or what have you, and looking at every problem/situation through the lens of wanting to apply this technology/policy to solve it, possibly ignoring the downsides/details/side-effects. The article gives the fictional example of a project “just needing a relational database” but the “domain expert” trying to push them to use SpringySearch because that can also work as a relational database (and because this hedgehog is sold on SpringySearch).
tomxor 5y ago
> Hedgehogs are at stage 2. You move from stage 1 to stage 2 by adopting frameworks; hence, hedgehogs are seen as "thought leaders" because they teach the frameworks that lead MOST people to more mastery. Except when you're at stage 3, in which case frameworks lead you to more inefficiencies compared to your own understanding. While interviewing recently, I've found a similar anti-correlation between general competency and people who focus on teaching frameworks and libraries. The more competent candidates basically don't do any teaching based on frameworks/libraries (but they might have experience mentoring individuals); whereas the candidates who focused on teaching frameworks specifically (often to groups) were the least competent - the more they focused on teaching the less competent they seemed to be! I found this kinda surprising and worrying, though my sample size is fairly small. To clarify, I know only so much can be evaluated in an interview, this is basic competency.
- breckenedge 5y ago
  There’s an old pithy quote about this that I won’t repeat here. I’ve seen the same results, but I also know that I may be totally underestimating their competency in an interview: I am not always competent to judge someone’s competency. Keep an open mind —teaching can become a skill trap like any other and it may take time for people to readjust if that’s no longer their primary responsibility.
- mattgreenrocks 5y ago
  Frameworks are not domain knowledge. They look good on a resume, but you're being hired to deliver software, not play with React all day.
mtberatwork 5y ago
Great post, adding that the vast majority of hiring is based around stage 2 which creates a feedback loop of resume-driven development.
vp8989 5y ago
This is absolutely spot on, great interpretation.
mattgreenrocks 5y ago
This also accounts for why you see such a noisy contingent of people clamoring for difficult things (ex: software architecture) to be reduced to a discrete process: it suits the way they are currently learning, avoids sunk costs in said learning, sidesteps the hard question of, "do I really know this?" and maintains the current social status quo. At stage 3, things aren't necessarily easy, but you have the skills to navigate much larger amounts of uncertainty than stage 1 or 2.
valand 5y ago
Domain mastery seems to be not as sequential as you stated. Stage 2 and 3 can happen at the same time. If one stays open to new idea while at the same time keeps asking why that idea can be good or bad, one can escape the stage 2 trap.

wwweston 5y ago

This is pretty brilliant.

catlifeonmars 5y ago

This is a useful way to frame it. I would add here that stage 2 is the likely the most comfortable and that the migration from stage 2 to 3 has an embedded disincentive structure.

bombcar 5y ago

To be a good X you must follow the rules. To be a great X you must have followed the rules so well as to learn why they’re there and when they should be broken. Works for almost any X - writer, programmer, driving, etc.

username90 5y ago
To be great at X you have to write the rules.
- xwdv 5y ago
  To be legendary at X you must go beyond X and invent Y, by creating a paradigm shift that echoes throughout your field.
- mym1990 5y ago
  Not really, Messi is great at soccer, he didn't write the rules of the game, but he was able to do things with the tools available that no one thought possible. To be great you usually have to be creative.
  - quetzthecoatl 5y ago
    Messi can teach the ones who teach football. Not the best example. He was doing unbelievable things when he was a literal teenager. A surprisingly better example would be Cristiano Ronaldo. Ronaldo was absolutley frustrating to watch in his early career. It was someone trying hard to do flashy moves without any end product. He needed guidance, rules and structures. He also slowly transitioned from Winger to Forward/Striker. He is immensly talented, but no bigger talent than top talents in every era. Messi is on a different level. He is an all time great. Cristiano achieved what messi achieved because Cristiano is disciplined in a way that noone before is. The guy is 36 now and just topped goal charts in Italy.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - mym1990 5y ago
      I literally have no idea what you mean by 'Messi can teach the ones who teach football' but my comment was not an invitation to discuss who is better. The rules I am talking about are the ones like 'you can't kick the ball out of bounds', 'you have to score between the goalposts', 'this is a corner kick', 'this is offsides'. Neither Messi nor Ronaldo made those rules, but they are all time greats in their competency.

lhorie 5y ago

> detailed domain mastery in contrast is difficult, time consuming, and highly contextualized In its defense, it's also extremely intellectually gratifying

Woodi 5y ago
Also: often good knowledge allows to see similiarities in other domains - feels like mastery/intuition/domain inteligence :) - it allows to instantly grasp new concepts in new domains. Works like isomorphism in math.
- kijowski 5y ago
  A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories. One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies. Stefan Banach
  - avindroth 5y ago
    Sounds like category theory.

JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago

So frequently do I see the hottest new ECMAScript feature presented by one these folks on Twitter, and I'm thinking how out of the box, older browsers won't support it, and most junior developers don't have a great grasp on polyfills or transpilers. So the first thing I'm seeing is limitations in how I might use it in a production environment (or the small but non-zero work to update my tooling to properly support ES5), but most of these folks don't seem to develop in environments requiring older browser support, but in either case, the nuance always seems missed. It's a caricature of the depth that we sometimes need to dig into.

asiachick 5y ago
For the stuff I work on, if the user's browser can't handle it then it's 99% sure they are not my target market in the first place. Of course YMMV.

systemvoltage 5y ago

> All of this makes it hard to move beyond stage 2 into stage 3. Often, moving to the stage 3 is a waste of time and resources. There are a few cases if your business's main secret sauce is stage 3, but for most other things - commoditize and focus. I've seen so many teams and engineers trying to master stage 3 but no real business need and ROI. Engineers love mastering things but good leaders guide them in the right things to master and avoid getting addicted to useless stage 3 expertise.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
There is some value in it, you can become the guy people call in when their needs go beyond the standard framework. In the right situation this sort of work can pay handsomely.
Tainnor 5y ago
> commoditize and focus You say that as if there were any agreement about what that means. But the point of the article is that this is not true; you'll always find someone that insists on using technology (or technique) X for your project, only technology X will be different for each person. Moreover, X might be actually making the project harder to understand, longer to develop or have other significant downsides. The point of reaching step 3 is not necessarily to be able to develop your own custom solution (although that can be sometimes valuable), but to able to pick the right technologies for a given project given the myriad options available.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  Here's how I interpret "commoditize and focus": standardize on a well-established and popular solution that's known to be widely applicable, so you can focus on adding business value in your product. Don't go for the new shiny thing being promoted by thought leaders, but an old workhorse. Do it even though you know the old workhorse is suboptimal on one or more technical axes, because in the bigger picture, the third-party ecosystem, talent pool, and other correlates of popularity and maturity are more important. I've repeatedly failed to follow this approach myself and have come to regret it. As I mentioned the other day, I chose Pulumi over Terraform for infrastructure as code, because Pulumi is undeniably technically superior in some ways. I now believe that was a mistake. I'm trying to figure out how to implement the "commoditize and focus" approach when it comes to standardizing on a web application framework for my company. I believe the classic server-rendered, multi-page approach is the right one most of the time, so I'm talking about that kind of server-side web framework. I implemented our current product in Elixir using Phoenix, and I now believe that was a mistake as well. If we suppose that the top three server-side workhorse languages are Java, Python, and JavaScript via Node.js (as implied by the availability of a certain Amazon SDK for those three), then I should choose a popular framework in one of those languages. If I still try to hang onto technical merit within these constraints, then I suppose I should go with Java and Spring, since Java is statically typed and the JVM is high-performance. But Spring has such an enterprisey smell about it. If I go with what I already know, that would be Python and Django. But CPython has such awful performance, dynamic typing has known drawbacks at scale, and choosing something just because it's what I already know feels far too much like becoming old and set in my ways (I'm 40). And a strike against Spring and Django, as well as Rails and others, is that they require knowledge of a different language on the back-end than the one we already have to use on the front-end. So I guess I should go with Node.js. Maybe Express with a view engine like Pug? But to really take advantage of using the same language on both the front-end and the back-end (I don't shy away from complex front-end JS where it's needed), I should use an isomorphic framework, something like Next.js. But Next.js throws away web fundamentals like being able to submit a form the old way without JavaScript. And what about bundle size and performance on low-end devices? Yes, I'm supposed to hold my nose and tolerate mediocrity for the greater good, but should I even do that at the end-user's expense? And the better isomorphic JS frameworks (Remix, Marko, SvelteKit...) are too bleeding-edge. I don't know... So, you're right, there's no one right way to "commoditize and focus". Sorry for the wall of text; this thread hit too close to home.

orlovs 5y ago

I love this comment. IMHO would be perfect addition to original article

spyckie2 5y ago
Thanks

klft 5y ago

This ist a great framework to think about domain mastery. Thank you!

avindroth 5y ago

Also the social benefit of staying in stage 2 is strong. Stage 3 folks don’t mingle together easily, not just because there are less of them, but also because they have in some ways become themselves. It’s much easier for people to stick together when they believe in something together, whether it’s imperfect or not. And then some stage 3 folks make a new stage 2 thing and the cycle continues. But I think people don’t want stage 3 attainment by giving up the social buffer (which is very reasonable, as being a social animal in most cases is better life path than a lonely scholar/innovator). EDIT: I think what I am talking about applies better to spiritual/philosophical/psychological attainment, rather than technological. The effect is probably still there for less spiritual things like tech or writing, but probably less so.

hef19898 5y ago
I can subscribe to that.

Layke1123 5y ago

Wrong

edoloughlin 5y ago

But why should I trust your 3-stage framework?

rad_gruchalski 5y ago
What makes you question it?

iainmerrick 5y ago

Your response to this article about how contingent advice is usually better than universal advice is to propose a universal theory?

spyckie2 5y ago
I did notice the irony myself :) The article talks about contingent advice being better than universal advice only in stage 3. If you're not then universal advice is helpful. I think that holds true for most people and most subjects, including myself. Originally, I thought the article did a great job describing a common scenario that occurs usually in decision making and I wanted to describe my intuition on why I think it comes about. It's not really a universal theory, more my own digestion / explanation on the interrelation around hedgehogs vs foxes and my own interpretation of the issues that the articles describes.
- iainmerrick 5y ago
  That makes sense! I just realised my reply may have come across as mean-spirited rather than the light joke I intended. Sorry about that.
  - spyckie2 5y ago
    no worries! It is rather ironic.
bendbro 5y ago
I'm sure there are contingencies that can make contingent advice worse than universal advice.
- mtrower 5y ago
  Sure —- in situations where time is critical, for example, fast, suboptimal decisions can be more effective than slow, optimized decisions. So having something general drilled into your head can, in those cases, be preferable.
5y ago

krmboya 5y ago

What you've described suspiciously resembles the 'midwit' meme.

deepstack 5y ago

This is an excellent break down. Remind me a lot of the mithril comparison page: https://mithril.js.org/framework-comparison.html https://mithril.js.org/framework-comparison.html Definitely at stage 3, could also be the reason not as many people using it.

agbell 5y ago

I think this progression could make sense as a personal learning progression. The real world is probably more complex than this though. See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27468360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27468360 where the person mentions pressure to simplify advice and Tetlocks own work shows that the hedgehogs were the more famous and successful people. So some people may migrate backwards by simplifying a message for maximum impact.

sorbits 5y ago

While this progression may exist, it is not what I took from the article, nor the original idea behind the hedgehog classification. It is more about some thought-leader being keen on blockchains, machine learning, supply-side economics, or what have you, and looking at every problem/situation through the lens of wanting to apply this technology/policy to solve it, possibly ignoring the downsides/details/side-effects. The article gives the fictional example of a project “just needing a relational database” but the “domain expert” trying to push them to use SpringySearch because that can also work as a relational database (and because this hedgehog is sold on SpringySearch).

tomxor 5y ago

> Hedgehogs are at stage 2. You move from stage 1 to stage 2 by adopting frameworks; hence, hedgehogs are seen as "thought leaders" because they teach the frameworks that lead MOST people to more mastery. Except when you're at stage 3, in which case frameworks lead you to more inefficiencies compared to your own understanding. While interviewing recently, I've found a similar anti-correlation between general competency and people who focus on teaching frameworks and libraries. The more competent candidates basically don't do any teaching based on frameworks/libraries (but they might have experience mentoring individuals); whereas the candidates who focused on teaching frameworks specifically (often to groups) were the least competent - the more they focused on teaching the less competent they seemed to be! I found this kinda surprising and worrying, though my sample size is fairly small. To clarify, I know only so much can be evaluated in an interview, this is basic competency.

breckenedge 5y ago
There’s an old pithy quote about this that I won’t repeat here. I’ve seen the same results, but I also know that I may be totally underestimating their competency in an interview: I am not always competent to judge someone’s competency. Keep an open mind —teaching can become a skill trap like any other and it may take time for people to readjust if that’s no longer their primary responsibility.
mattgreenrocks 5y ago
Frameworks are not domain knowledge. They look good on a resume, but you're being hired to deliver software, not play with React all day.

mtberatwork 5y ago

Great post, adding that the vast majority of hiring is based around stage 2 which creates a feedback loop of resume-driven development.

vp8989 5y ago

This is absolutely spot on, great interpretation.

mattgreenrocks 5y ago

This also accounts for why you see such a noisy contingent of people clamoring for difficult things (ex: software architecture) to be reduced to a discrete process: it suits the way they are currently learning, avoids sunk costs in said learning, sidesteps the hard question of, "do I really know this?" and maintains the current social status quo. At stage 3, things aren't necessarily easy, but you have the skills to navigate much larger amounts of uncertainty than stage 1 or 2.

valand 5y ago

Domain mastery seems to be not as sequential as you stated. Stage 2 and 3 can happen at the same time. If one stays open to new idea while at the same time keeps asking why that idea can be good or bad, one can escape the stage 2 trap.