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Comment by jjk166 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

Nope, it is. Instead of sticking to a solution that only solves the immediate problem (hunger, first order), he changed the solution based on the adverse side-effects of going with the first solution (hunger solved, but health worsened, second order).

>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.

Nope, that's motivation engineering, which is orthogonal to second order thinking.

"Nope, it is. Instead of sticking to a solution that only solves the immediate problem (hunger, first order), he changed the solution based on the adverse side-effects of going with the first solution (hunger solved, but health worsened, second order)."

Yup. This just happens to be something that we get pounded into us (not without merit) a lot, so it's something that people understand fairly well.

Consequently, as a gateway into understanding higher-order thinking, it's really poor, because this "knowledge" has all but bypassed rational thinking at this point due to being repeated for us to the point that it's been internalized.

I'd say this is why the trivial examples are also uninteresting to people. If it's something obvious enough that everyone has figured it out, making it an accessible example, it also doesn't seem like higher order thinking.

Well, here's a non-trivial example, but still easy to follow, that describes second order effects quite well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

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.

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?

>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.

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.

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