Second-Order Thinking | Hacker News Reader

Second-Order Thinking

fs.blog

488 pointsirsagent249 comments

This article, and some of the comments here, seem to confuse "second-order" with "long-term".

Long-term just means doing the same analysis far out into the future: "If I spend less on maintaining software product $LEGACY, I will save money. If I continue to do this, I will save more and more money by each passing month."

Second-order means discovering neighbouring causal links. "If I spend less on maintaining software product $LEGACY, I will save money. I will however also have to prioritise which bugs I fix. This will lead to some bugs that would be fixed today not getting fixed. That might mean that some users of $LEGACY move to a competitor. In turn, it costs more to acquire new customers than to retain old ones, so just maintaining the same customer count while dissatisfying customers until they quit will cost more money than by trying to make existing customers happy.

"Quitting $LEGACY customers will however lead to fewer bugs being discovered in $LEGACY, meaning the reduced maintenance budget might be sufficient again. However, quitting customers doesn't only force me to spend more to re-acquire similar number of customers – it might also be negative for marketing, so it becomes harder to acquire new customers, thus having a non-linear effect on the customer replacement costs.

"Decreased maintenance of $LEGACY might make some developers happier, but signal to others that we are not serious about the lifecycle of our product. This might result in them not putting in as much effort to make maintenance easier in future products, which will increase the maintenance demand in future products. Thus, insufficient maintenance efforts on $LEGACY may lead to increasing maintenance demand, which leads to insufficient maintenance efforts, which leads to increasing maintenance demand, and so on."

As the last parts of that hint at, what's really important is not all the neighbouring causal links, but those that lead to nonlinearities and feedback cycles. By mucking about with things in a stable system, in particular when there are nonlinearities and feedback cycles involved, you can accidentally create an unstable system that wants to drive itself into the ground.

I am not particularily familiar with the connotation of the term second-order-thinking, but to me it implies the somewhat mathematical meaning of it. The first order might be some value (e.g. a voltage) and the second order might be the rate with which that voltage changes and the third the rate with which this rate changes etc.

To me this implies that thinking on a higher order is somewhat about stepping back and viewing the construct from a meta position. E.g. instead of thinking about how to address an imidiate problem by applying a bandaid, one order higher would be to think about the root causes and deal with the root of the problem. Even one order higher would be to think about which culture or systems of thinking allow for the good solving of such problems etc.

It's simply about looking further down up the casual chain, not stopping at the initial cause-effect: thinking about the effects of effect themselves (and, in third order, the effects of the effects of the effects, and so on).

A simple example of failing to do so and only considering the first level cause-effect:

"The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased".

Here's another one:

Caribbean plantation owners were tired of their relentless war against field rats – the rodents were eating into their precious sugar cane crops. Come 1872, a chap called W.B. Espaut had an original idea: why not bring over a few Indian mongooses – those unpretentious mammals known as enthusiastic rat hunters? Espaut travelled to India, had some mongooses captured and brought them to Jamaica. The problem – it soon turned out – was that the mongooses did not just kill rats; they killed birds, ate eggs, insects, useful reptiles, even small deer fawns. True, the mongooses also hunted and killed lots of rats; but they did not kill them all. In fact, the rodents continued to multiply – and so did the mongooses. Worse, both rats and mongooses carry a disease called leptospirosis, which can be lethal to humans. To cut a long story short, rather than getting rid of one pest, the hapless Hawaiians ended up with two.

"Simpsons did it": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuiK7jcC1fY i wonder at what point does game theory comes into play instead of second order thinking?

Great examples.

I believe we encounter second-order thinking in mundane day-to-day activities too which are generally categorized as 'instinct'; Say we drop the key under the table and we know before hand that we would hit our head if we get up under the table and so we crawl back(Or may be we've hit our head earlier and it becomes reinforcement learning?).

Then there are tasks which are totally dependent upon multi-order thinking like a game of chess (or) most other brain games.

I wonder if we could create a system to collect different second-order thinking decisions for different day-to-day activities to serve as a decision making tool powered by collective human knowledge?

Hawaiians? I thought the second story was set in Jamaica.

It is. I snipped some parts of the story to simplify it for the comment, and left out an important step:

The Jamaican example "grabbed the attention of Hawaiian sugar cane planters, who also suffered from the rats. Bringing mongooses to Hawaii as natural pest exterminators seemed such an elegant idea. "

Maybe this is actually the fourth-order effect.

No. It's "one and a half order" thinking, where you leave out half of the story, but the story still works for your brain.

'order' has many meanings in mathematics, and I'm not sure of the best metaphor that is actually called an order there, but when people talk colloquially about 'second order effects' etc. IME they mean something like a vertex v2 (doing something) in response to a change to v1, where there exists a vertex vj and edges (v1, vj) & (vj, v2) - and implicitly no edge (v1, v2). Higher 'orders' similarly extending the chain.

Or think chess - 'first order thinking' would make a move that merely escapes mate, or puts you in a position where another move immediately could be a great one; 'second order thinking' considers what the opponent will do from there (probably disallow the great move or threaten it back); etc.

IMHO, the figure of speech "n-th order" generally comes from Taylor series approximation, where n-th term is indeed expressed using n-th derivative. Also, if the series converges, the higher order terms will become smaller, thus the practice of approximating the reality up to n-th order term.

Also, it's often practical to ignore 2nd order and higher terms, because then you have a linear function - something really easy to work with. Therefore, "2nd order effects" have effectively become synonymous to "non-linear effects".

I really doubt this is where "nth order" comes from colloquially.

There are many examples in physics, for example: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/310875/second-or...

Yes, but physics is not colloquial. Most people are unfamiliar with physics.

This is what I've always assumed as well. The feeling of "things that usually don't matter but may explode (if it turns out the series doesn't converge)" seems to fit the expression pretty well.

Higher order functions have nothing to do with derivatives however.

However, regular types do: "The Derivative of a Regular Type is its Type of One-Hole Contexts"

[0] http://strictlypositive.org/diff.pdf

E = mc^2 is a notable example.

I think it’s simply order of events. If you do N, N+1 will happen

That's what I described - v1 leads to vj, which leads to v2.

I think it roughly amounts to “thinking through the implications of the implications”.

I think that's 3rd order, actually.

Why does this remind me of Abbot and Costello?

https://youtu.be/sShMA85pv8M?t=64

"If x, then y" is one implication, so that's first-order reasoning.

"If y, then z" is second-order reasoning.

Wouldn't "if x, then y because z" be second order?

As I see it, z is a different type than x and y. It’s the causal arrow linking x to y. The existence of a second causal arrow would make it second-order.

In a way, I think you and your parent are both right. The missing link is that the analogy is based on multivariate series. First order deals with each variable in isolation. X1, X2, X3, . . . Second order contains interaction terms like X1 x X2 (The X1^2 can be thought of as a self interaction.) Third order would consider interactions between three variables and so on.

I’m not sure if this a false etymology, but it’s how I’ve always understood the term and I’ve met others who understand it this way as well.

I think the origin may be from linear regression with polynomial terms, which is very common in the medical sciences and social sciences. Terms like X1 x X2 are called interaction terms in that context and coefficients are often treated as quantifying the impact of a term on the result. Strictly speaking, the analogy would then be with any multivariate polynomial approximation, not just Taylor series.

The best, simple, metaphor I can think of is playing out a chess game in your head. As in, you make a move, and see how the scenario changes, and predict the opponents moves. In chess, it's just 2D and one opponent or agent. In the real world you need to weigh many possible agents, estimate their motivations, and predict their responses. This way you can visualize the cascading effects of a decision.

You are stepping back and looking how your decision consequences will impact the network of causes and consequences that exists on the real world.

Root cause analysis is a different thing.

Which often involves second order effects.

A -> (caused) B

C -> D

When B and D occur (within a window) -> Error

It is that connection between B and D that needs to be discovered.

The connotation of the term second-order refers to systems-thinking principles.

In the causal graph of entities interacting in a system, considering one element of the system, second-order thinking corresponds to considering effects on neighbors of that element which are caused by changes to that element itself.

Math isn't characterized by unmeasurable magic phrases

Higher order thinking is a trap phrase for people who want to sound deep by filling in details on the fly from their imaginations in the clothing of science

Nothing evidence based supports any of this

You’re mixing up derivatives (rate of change) and approximation (order).

I don't know if this is quite the model the article describes, but I say this is at least a similar and equally useful model.

You are on the right track. Second order means second derivative. So, if we are predicting future positions, using acceleration in addition to velocity will always be better. Second order is much more difficult because in more than one dimension you have to consider how every pair interacts.

I think people just interpret "future" very differently. For some "future" does include your second and third paragraph, since it is also a potential causality down the line. For others, it's only first paragraph example. Future for some is a branching tree, for others just a linked list.

I popped in to say much same. But the statistician in me thinks about it such that 2nd order thinking and longer term impacts often coincide due to the time it may take 2nd order impacts to play out. But in some systems, 2nd order impacts happen on short timeframes. So I’d describe it as a correlation between 2nd order and long term thinking.

This is a good analogy .. many of the comments in this thread that are confusing 2nd order thinking with long term thinking are clearly just thinking of iterating 1st order thinking along the time line.

The problem I have with exploring neighbouring causal links is that when overdone it can lead to analysis paralysis.

I often get stuck simulating too many different branches in possible futures and casual links to the point of slowing down my present capabilities.

My GF calls it overthinking, and not in a good way.

Perhaps I just need a bigger brain with more processing power.

I’ve seen the analysis paralysis happen as well, but I think the key is to also assign likelihoods/severities upside downside to the analysis, you can usually quickly triage what to focus on from there (or as I often find the nice you’ve bounded the range of likely outcomes, pick the one one that fits your risk tolerance (e.g. do I take the train for an almost guaranteed 3hr trip, or do I try and outsmart the traffic and either be right and have a 2hr trip, or be wrong and have a 4hr trip)

This. I've received consistent feedback (from mentor, from family, etc) to do less second-order analysis. It can be very productive in some specific scenarios, especially when I used to do initial architecture; but these days, it's a complete analysis paralysis. Moving from technological architecture to people leadership / client relationship management, second order thinking brings up so many pros and cons for each action, with insufficient data to weigh the balancing.

I've taken to using a sort of internal version of "disagree and commit" - I have the little mental debate with myself, arrive at an ambiguous juncture, then pick an option (at random if necessary) and go all-in on it. If it turns out I was wrong there's usually still time to course-correct.

Delaying or not making a decision is a choice itself, one that is almost always inferior to the options you're stuck between.

Yep, fail fast is often going to have a superior resolution time than time spent in deep analysis.

Plus you get more experience making decisions, more experience making quick decisions, and more problem-solving experience that way.

I agree. I believe it is not that second-order thinking is unhelpful, but rather that it is only useful when applied wisely. The challenge is knowing when and how to apply it, and of course having the tool kit necessary to do this kind of thinking.

Leveled thinking is common in competitive games, for obvious reasons. There's no better illustration of what you're talking about than the poison scene in Princess Bride:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMz7JBRbmNo

The way I've heard most competitive gamers talk about the line between leveling and tail-chasing is to play at level 2:

Level 1: The obvious strategy

Level 2: Strategy that beats the obvious strategy <-- Default to this level

Level 3: Strategy that beats level 1

The problem is, if you're playing in a competitive environment, everyone knows about leveling, so you may actually gain more edge by picking a strategy randomly. I've heard competitive Magic player Huey Jensen would make random plays when he was behind on the chance he could throw his opponent off and trap them in leveling second-guessing.

I think it requires balance. Seems to me like the more you can consider the better decision you can reach, but there is a point where thinking more is negative value, and you must decide.

“The instant of decision is madness”

-Kierkegaard

You can use a mind mapping tool and limit your expansion radius. I've had some success with that.

or the opposite - in ML terms more brain will likely just introduce overfitting - while less brain makes way for some neat generalization that is quick and works just good enough ;)

In SRE roles I've been in it's often second-order issues that plague software. In many ways, things boil down to process and what value/principles each process delivers and operates on. Misalignment in that space can be causal to a great number of things. Explaining second-order issues tends to be difficult as well, mainly because due to their nature there's often incomplete data to work with, so solving them is often piece-meal.

I wonder whether this is an example that in part also might cause us to question the utility of second/nth-order thinking? Because the more distant causal links are also estimated with more and more uncertainty (and necessarily so, insofar as uncertainty compounds across causal links), to the point where it becomes hard to weigh highly uncertain distant consequences against relatively certain near consequences?

It boils down to "actions have consequences," some of which may be unfavorable. And those consequences have other possible consequences. It grows exponentially. So you need to figure out how to anticipate these consequences.

I would expect a Venn diagram of 1st order thinking vs unintended consequences, to have more overlap than a 2nd order thinking vs unintended consequences.

Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One by economist Thomas Sowell[0] explores this in good detail, applying it to political and economic policies, in his book.

Housing policies, medicare and today's problem of defund the police can be better analysed if the framework of second-order thinking is used to view the pros and cons of such policies and their subsequent ramifications.

Second-order thinking is a great mental model to have and helps us address some of the cognitive biases that get in our way when making choices.

To me this form of thinking is evident in chess, the evaluation necessary to make a single move gets us to look at the consequences after the third and fourth move before a final decision is made.

I believe when the time allows for it we should really consider the future ramifications of our actions before making a move.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Applied-Economics-Thinking-Beyond-Sta...

Ironically, a lot of economics sound-bites are all about ignoring first order effects in favor of questionable second order effects.

I'm mostly thinking here about deficit spending discussions, where it's popular to inject worry about second-order effects creating a drag on the economy, e.g., crowding out. Meanwhile, it completely ignores the fact that the first-order effects are almost always all positive for the economy, e.g. more spending directly translates to higher GDP. (Plus, there are second-order effects that are positive for the economy as well.)

So yes, by all means try to understand the second-order effects, but don't let yourself get hoodwinked by people who want you to miss the first-order effects.

Well, logically the second order negative effects of deficit spending must overcome the beneficial first and second order effects on large enough scales.

Otherwise we could just deficit spend ourselves into perpetual prosperity.

There's a subtlety here, though. It should be obvious that too much deficit spending has negative second order effects overwhelming the first order ones. (An extreme form of this: imagine having the government trying to spend quintillions each year -- that's clearly not going to work without some massive inflation.)

It is not at all self-evident that the same is true for all deficit spending, even on an infinite time horizon.

Consider, for example, that central banks typically aim to have a ~2% rate of inflation in the long run. Given that, why would it be harmful to forever have a level of deficit spending that keeps the real value of the government debt constant in the long run? Or, ignoring inflation but assuming economic growth, that keeps the ratio of government debt to GDP constant in the long run? Why would that be harmful?

(Note: If the government was able to successfully run a balanced budget indefinitely[0], both of those quantities would approach 0 in the limit; some long-run government deficit spending is necessary to keep them constant.)

And yes: the stronger claim, which I also support, is that deficit spending is an important ingredient for our prosperity, because it acts as a sort of "prime mover" for pushing up society's overall level of wealth. (As usual, there's a balance to this. Too much of a good thing etc.)

[0] There's a lot of historical evidence which suggests that this is impossible anyway because it becomes self-defeating. Balanced budgets ultimately cause or at least contribute to recessions, which cause a budget deficit via reduced tax income and increased social services spending.

Yeah I agree, when I said 'large enough scales' I was referring to the amount of deficit spending in a fixed time, not how long that spending lasts.

One thing to remember here is that the only reason for us to even tax is to reduce the deficit. If we didn't care about the deficit we could just eliminate all taxes and make 100% of government spending deficit spending.

Some of this is because the first order effects have come and gone, and media is going to try and focus on the most current and relevant things. As you move through a timeline, second order effects will turn into first order effects and we will come up with a new set of second order effects.

Given that, I totally agree with you on the sentiment.

Another similar book is "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt [1]:

> From this aspect, therefore, the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate hut at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Underst...

Came here to post about Hazlitt and you've beaten me to it.

Came here to post about Sowell and you've beaten me to it. I can't remember the exact quote but he's said that economics is just asking "and then what?".

Yep, for foreign policy as well [1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/henry-kissinger-is-worried-abou...

The same concept is the gist of a lot of 'Basic Economics', also by Sowell.. Good intentions are not enough. Solutions to one problem will always create incentives for others to exploit.

Good intentions get votes, and with any luck you can blame any negative downstream effects on your successors.

After subtracting the cost of the book, and time wasted times minimal wage, I highly suspect the average wealth generated by reading it is negative.

Is this your assessment of books like Human Action by Mises? It took many months for me to work through both works.

Would you say the same for the books by Spivak or Resnick? What about a college degree?

Have you read it? What were your criticisms.

I've read the marketing article posted to HN, and it sounds silly. First order ... second order ... same as all the other motivational nonsense.

What are the inputs to this framework? Are we going "What happens if we defund the police?" in isolation or are we asking what happens if we take the money from the police and put it into housing, into medicare, into other social programs? The answers you arrive at might be different.

In fact if we extrapolate that line of reasoning out to the capitalist substrate of our economy we might find some surprising second, third+ order effects.

> or are we asking what happens if we take the money from the police and put it into housing, into medicare, into other social programs? The answers you arrive at might be different.

There's two different questions. Combining the two will give you both answers you'd expect, not one or the other. And there's way too much going on to try and tackle both at the same time.

You could say "defund police marginally increases crime" and "increasing housing greatly reduces crime" but to what extent? And within what timeframes? Defunding the police could provide outcomes immediately, but to provide housing to a point where crime is reduced would most likely be a slow strong growth thing, that will take a generation or two to come about.

I'm not saying it's unimportant to look at both, but looking at them separately will be more realistic, and thankfully money is such an abstract resource that things can be separated like that.

> "We can find some surprising second and third order effects"

I think we don't quite want surprises when it comes to the safety and livelihood of many, and their generations.

It takes centuries to grow a forest and only a day to burn it down.

As far as I know one of the arguments for defunding the police is that the police is used as a way for those with the ability to change things to externalize the consequences of their actions.

When for example a lack of housing leads to an increase in crime a well funded police prevents those who could increase housing from being affected by the crime and they will therefor not increase housing. Especially as they get many benefits from poverty like cheap labour, a decrease in competition and larger premiums on attractive real estate.

So yes I would say they are thinking about the second-order effects. At some point I might read some of Thomas Sowell's writings but from what I've seen so far he honestly seems more of a theologist than a scientist to me.

Aaaand third order thinking is skimming this and knowing it's about as deep as the conversation I tried to have at a bar three hours ago when I explained I was just playing "devil's advocate" to someone who was already playing devil's advocate.

Whenever I get desperate enough to start a blog full of deep thoughts that only gets posted here, watch out HN.

Indeed. Unfortunately the article lost me when I saw the graph of "extent to which you consider second order and subsequent consequences" vs "odds of success".

Aren't totally meaningless graphs the best though? ;) You're just bitter because you're already fourth order thinking... you assessed the whole thing as a dumbass waste of time.

Also, never show people graphs when /ok, never mind

especially when the graph has a slope so you can calculate the derivative as an example of 2nd order thinking.

Which, by the way, seems to be heading towards infinity, which isn't right at all.

I generally skip articles from Farnam Street. Once I saw the source, I already knew what the comments would be. ;)

Yeah I like Shane, but FS seems it has too narrow a focus and he has tried really hard to squeeze every last drop out of these mental models.

FS articles are deep in a shallow way, kinda like if Aristotle directed the "Avengers" (movie)... hehehe.

What’s the problem with FS?

Their podcast 'The Knowledge Project' is essentially a book tour for authors flogging their new book 'Framework/Mental Models to achieve X'.

Modern day magic beans to make you smarter.

It's like Tim Ferris, filtered for the "intellectual" topics. Yawn

Yeah, I think that about sums it up. I started listening to Tim Ferris years ago because there were a few decent episodes, but I hit a breaking point after one-too-many horrendous episodes.

I discovered FS a couple years ago and have enjoyed some of them, but I'm very close to unsubscribing from this one. There have been a lot of low quality episodes as well as some negative quality: goofy web3 technobabble.

y'know goddammit that's it. I'm gonna start a blog and cross post every day to HN and tell you all lots of really amazing observations about life you never even thought of before.

Just kidding hahshahah I'd never do that

edit but only because I'm lazy

Cynicism is not a substitute for wisdom.

What? Wisdom is expensive! If you're fresh out of wisdom, or just low on cash, you can TOTALLY use cynicism 1:1 in most recipes.

Or Worcestershire sauce. Everything tastes better with Worcestershire sauce.

How cynical!

A healthy skepticism can be a useful way to avoid vacuous thinking.

Skepticism requires critical thinking and engagement. You can't be a proper skeptic about something without taking the time to understand the domain you're being skeptical of, approach it in good faith from first principles as much as possible, and accept criticism in kind.

Most people just won't bother, because cynicism and snark provide a better endorphin hit, and the internet has trained people to associate that feeling with likelihood of correctness (what Stephen Colbert called "truthiness" back in the day.)

the first things skeptics should be skeptical about is skepticism itself: are they right in being skeptical about what they are skeptical about?

The first thing skeptics question are sentences which begin with

>> the first things skeptics should be skeptical about

from there I guess we just migrate up to talking shit about bloated blog posts where one dude mumbles his observations about deep thoughts.

If in their analysis, they come to the conclusion that they shouldn't be skeptical, does that make them the best skeptic or the worst?

the best if their skepticism is carefully done.

Yes, I completely agree. The author should have applied it to his "odds of success vs extent to which you consider second order and subsequent consecuences" graph and saved everybody the time.

I use the predictive horizon model. It's not that there's a clear division between first order and second order thinking, it's that some people's ability to model consequences covers a narrow area, a few people can model successfully much further out, and a tiny minority can make astounding predictive leaps that reach far into the future.

It's a continuous variable, not a Boolean.

But it means most of the population literally cannot see consequences that seem obvious to someone with a wider reach.

Asking "and then what" won't change this, because if your modelling ability is poor you'll just get a longer list of wrong predictions.

It's a mix of native ability (IQ helps, but it's not a sole determinant), domain specific experience, and experience with synthetic thinking - the ability to filter and combine multiple trends, as opposed to purely analytical thinking which usually looks at one or two.

In human terms, my older brother who I learned to code from (he left me his TRS-80/100 and the BASIC manual when I was 8, plus some Springsteen tapes, and gave up programming to become a federal prosecutor) told me:

Your problem is you can never look two weeks into the future. Which is now exactly the same thing I think about kids a decade younger than me. It's true, but they're not dumb, they just have to live awhile.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” - Søren Kierkegaard

>It's a continuous variable, not a Boolean.

My take on this: It's a multi-dimensional ordinal variable across the permutation of all possible domain combinations in which you can develop domain experience and synthetic thinking. The state space is so large that it looks continuous but on the other hand it's still ordered into stages/levels when looking at a smaller subset of domains in which cognitive development can happen. In effect it's not just having a wider horizon but having the right combination of horizons against which to synthesize for the given problem. Which isn't always obvious(to outsiders of the "correct" perspective) until it's hindsight.

I call it the minority report problem.

My favorite example: The cobra effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

"The term cobra effect was coined by economist Horst Siebert based on an anecdote of an occurrence in India during British rule. The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased"

this is a type of article and thinking that is appealing to people because its very easy to understand, and appears useful. theres no barrier to entry here because theres no corpus of knowledge required or demonstration of skill. just say something that sounds kind of coherent and simple, that probably reinforces what people already believe.

it might seem overly negative to care about this. maybe it is. but this website describes itself as "Brain Food. A weekly newsletter packed with timeless insights and actionable ideas from a wide range of disciplines." its selling the idea that you can gain something from reading 45 second articles that say hardly anything. this kind of stuff is for people who are too lazy or dont have enough time to learn something for real, and i think its worse than useless

Conversely, there is a type of person who thinks everything worth knowing must require investment on behalf of the learner.

It's not surprising this type of person is very common among the highly educated: school indoctrinates us with this belief.

For these people everything is a struggle.

They may even miss opportunities to easily pick up simple but useful ideas or skills because they have a closed mindset.

These are two perspectives from two people, one of whom had perhaps heard of this approach before, and one who perhaps had not.

The key distinguishing factor here in continuing education is not what you describe, though. As you become more educated, you realize there are more approaches to anything than you can functionally know at any one time, much less use.

This article essentially suggests you simply consider more consequences. Both useful in concept (if you’ve never thought of it), and totally useless in advanced practice due to the complexity of the system and your inability to predict the future accurately due to the nature of complexity.

The thing that is really under-appreciated by the less educated is the incredible amounts of information available in the written word that can be had with additional critical reading comprehension training and experience.

It was obvious before we got to the totally made-up success vs second-order thinking chart that this article was low effort and no substance. Quoting Ray Dalio was an early red flag. After the chart it was just sort of funny.

I think you'd be interested in this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32335165

This just in from the eggheads: actions have consequences.

I think it’s more likely that what Smart People actually have isn’t some supernatural common sense that allows them to iterate over cause and effect to a greater degree than Joe Stupid, but rather a set of specific domain experience and knowledge that allows them to infer that particular effects follow particular events about which they are reasoning.

I once had a project manager that didn't do second order thinking at all.

He saw our current state and the finish line. To him there was just one simple step between now and completing the project called "just do all the stuff".

I tried explaining the Coastline Paradox[0] to him but it just didn't stick.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox

I have no idea whether this applies to your manager, but I find that a fair bit of seemingly overly simplistic management is actually, to use the terms of this topic, carefully tuned second-order thinking. It goes like this:

1. Devs are natural overthinkers, prone to analysis paralysis and to feature/quality creep.

2. If we remove nuance from the conversation about planning, this causes frustration with the devs because they're feeling unheard (1st order effect, a common complaint on HN)

3. However, it sets a culture of "just shipping", trying to find corners that can be reasonably cut, making sure that problems that are hard to explain to the dumb boss aren't really simply too small to matter (or too far in the future), etc. This increases agility in the longer term and might be worth the initial frustration (second order effect).

I'm sure many managers who stop at 2 and don't care about the adverse effect. Just ship the features so I get my bonus, you nerd. That's bad. But there's just as many who use overly simplistic reasoning as a tool to nudge a culture into a particular direction, and it's not always easy to tell at the beginning which of the two is going on. As a natural overthinker, I find this a worthy skill to cultivate and I'm impressed with people who can do it well.

> I tried explaining the Coastline Paradox[0] to him but it just didn't stick.

Just keep repeating yourself. At one point someone will come with this great idea about the coastline paradox, and everyone will get it.

Happend to me a few times. Don't know how many times I stole someone elses idea like this :D.

no no.. that's why those guys make the big bucks. Turning creative/intelligent work into blobs that can be measured and priced is a highly paid job reserved for a certain type of exceptionally dopey, incapable jackass.

well I guess that's why he's a manager...

> This just in from the eggheads: actions have consequences.

Everyone can understand that actions have (first-order) consequences. The problem is that most people stop there. But consequences also have consequences, those are second-order consequences. And you can follow the reasoning to nth-order consequences.

The better game players (chess for example but can applied to anything) simply go deeper in the search tree and try to average out all outcomes... that's what higher-order thinking is. You go deeper in the tree and you backtrack.

This is not higher-order thinking (insofar as such exists). The search tree is first-order -- in a sufficiently complex game that the search tree cannot be fully examined, the heuristics necessary to perform at a high level without the need to explore the search tree are the second order. The third order is left as an exercise to the reader.

> I think it’s more likely that what Smart People actually have isn’t some supernatural common sense that allows them to iterate over cause and effect to a greater degree than Joe Stupid, but rather a set of specific domain experience and knowledge that allows them to infer that particular effects follow particular events about which they are reasoning.

Don't forget the ability to snag readers by attributing their success to a simple rule that anybody can absorb in two minutes.

In my experience it's because they have both that they are able to do so.

what's the difference between domain experience and iterating over cause and effect?

Surely this is just 'thinking', instead of acting on impulse or gut-feel.

Second-order thinking is thinking about thinking. eg, If we have a decision to make, first order thinking is analyzing the situation and making the decision. Second order thinking is deciding how to go about analyzing the situation, how to arrive at a decision, how to measure the outcome, etc.

The way Ray Dalio describes it in "Principles" is very helpful in my opinion. He says whenever you are trying to solve a problem, rather than just doing it you should imagine you are trying to build a machine to do it. And if you are trying to perform a task you should imagine you are writing the script for a movie in which the task is performed.

The advantage of this second-order thinking is then you have a different frame of reference. You can for example compare the actual outcome to the script of the movie you imagined before. You also have more obvious agency and different choices. When you are designing your machine you are making concious choices and evaluating your options more specifically than if you are just plowing ahead with the obvious route. The machine analogy also means you can focus more on how you make the task automated, sustainable etc. So for example in tech rather than just doing a job, you write a script so next time the job becomes trivial, or (better) you automate the processes so you don't need to do the job again.

Ooh, interesting. Up until now, I'd just imagine myself solving the problem manually, then describe that with code. I'll try to imagine building a machine to see how it feels

For me, building a machine is identical to writing code.

I can’t really see a difference.

I personally don’t see a difference either. Dalio isn’t a programmer - he’s an asset manager who just tries to think in a systematic way. One of the reasons I like this analogy is that it resonates with me as a programmer.

Second order thinking would be thinking about processes, rather than the situation.

So if you have a problem like in the article, you don't like the current government. First order thinking is fund the rebels. Second order thinking is thinking about which countries have had good outcomes from government change and which countries had bad outcomes, which countries had a gradual power turn over, which countries end up friendly to you. By quantifying what outcomes are most favorable and finding out the prerequisites, we can then formulate a policy that is consistent for many cases.

Then you can eliminate first order thinking, since you have already done a better job in the general case and you can clearly see funding the rebels is far outside the parameters of your general policy, so it's a waste of time or worse.

>> First-order thinking is fast and easy.

Most definitely not. Thinking about the processes and long term effects takes a deeo understanding of things, time to properly think it through, experience to get it right and constabt adjustments. So basiy the opposite of fast and easy.

Pretending to practice second -order thinking is fast and easy. As is writing a short blog about it.

> Most definitely not. Thinking about the processes and long term effects takes a deeo understanding of things, time to properly think it through, experience to get it right and constabt adjustments.

Isn't what your describing second-order thinking though?

For example — "I'm hungry therefore I'll order a takeaway" is an easy decision, if you ignore any second order effects & consequences (e.g. impact on your health/finances).

It's layering in second (and third, fourth) order effects that requires the time to think through, experience, etc.

Agree, it's usually thinking about the consequences, things that don't seem clear directly that makes second order thinking hard.

Why would you write a long blog about it? The whole concept was explained in one paragraph. Everything after that is just trying to make the idea more appealing.

This is just "long term thinking". I would say the article isn't worth reading. But at least, it's a good reminder to focus on thinking about the long term consequences of actions/decisions.

Indeed, and in many ways it leads to holism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holism

In my day job, I encounter a lot of suggested solutions from my team and colleagues that will not succeed for various reasons.

Just because we will not discover those failures until after the implementation in a couple of weeks does not make my better solutions "long term thinking".

Long term thinking is "will this solution that will work perfectly fine right now, still be the right solution in 2023"

Whether or not "long term thinking" is what you say it is, I don't think the article does a good job of providing any real value. The author is getting confused between "long term" and "second order" thinking. The concept of "second order thinking" seems to just mean "thinking about the indirect impact of one's actions" which seems hardly book-worthy to me.

Not necessarily. It describes 2nd order and above in contrast to the immediate effects of a decision. The 2nd order effect may be in 5s time or even immediate but not a direct consequence of the original action.

how is that not long term thinking?

It is long term thinking. But long term thinking is not necessarily 2nd order thinking. It's basically good long term thinking, where you don't just come up with a plan that addresses a problem, but you also enumerate all the secondary effects, and the effects of those effects, etc. Any good long term thinking would do that, but it's not always clear if people really have thought it through.

If someone says ban ICE vehicles so that we might have better air quality and reduced rate of climate change, have they taken into account what the economic, cultural and political ramifications of such legislation would be? They might have, someone might have, but definitely not everyone has. Who had "Texas secedes from the USA" on their list of possible outcomes of their long term plan for addressing climate change?

It is but it isn't? Followed by some banter about illegals.

This comment in it's blind ignorance is a godsent gift to people of a leftwing political bias...

I don't follow, what do you mean? Is there blind ignorance in my comment?

edit: oh you mean you don't understand how something can be a superset of something else without being the same set. So I'm saying there's long term thinking with 2nd order thinking, and there's long term thinking without 2nd order thinking.

Some second order thinking might involve long term thinking but my understanding of what is commonly meant is:

Long term thinking is termporally based, what will X look like in Y amounts of time

Second (or third) order thinking, is based on response to consequences or changes. Could be over a long term, or over a short term.

This seems pretty straightforward but you seem to take issue with it. I'm curious what you think is being messed up by people using these definitions?

Because second order can also be immediate, it just may not be a direct intention of the action.

I... If we're going to argue the temporal component of planning you better not look back over the last 3 years...

> > The 2nd order effect may be in 5s time

> how is that not long term thinking?

What does "long term" mean to you ... 5s (i.e. 5 seconds) is pretty short term to me.

Long term being further down the line, i.e. net result in 5 years is still the same regardless of how quickly things evolve.

I'd argue that because happens in 5min that's an immediate effect regardless of if it happens after something or not. How is there any higher order evolution to that?

Are you trying to argue that people can't cope with time in a plan therefore it must be a higher order thinking to understand the rapid evolution of something?

No, time has nothing to do with it, only the length of the causal chain. That's why it's not really "long term" thinking even if higher order effects might sometimes not be felt immediately.

Thanks for the TL/DR

This is a first-order article on second-order thinking

Important, but our knowledge of higher order consequences will usually be more uncertain and plagued by ambiguity, where we don't even know the probabilities involved. My guess is that this can be a recipe for indecision and paralysis, i.e. you need to apply n-order thinking to the decision process itself, with humility about what you know, what you can know, and your own biases, which likely will have a bigger effect the more uncertain situation you are in.

what are you talking about? the waterfall method is the only way to go

This is just an advert for some guy's book, isn't it?

After a short intro, the first sentence is: "In his exceptional book, The Most Important Thing, Howard Marks explains the concept of second-order thinking, which he calls second-level thinking."

The book is linked to Amazon and it looks like it is an Amazon Affiliate link.

The Most Important Thing is a great book. I prefer the non-annotated version.

If you're a value investor and haven't yet encountered it, it is a great and accessible read. I've given a number of copies to friends.

He provides examples, a thorough logical argument, and practical advice without a single ad in between. I don’t know why you would say that.

Second order ad. :)

I'm curious how they wrote 3 volumes about that - has anyone read it?

the result of the 1st book is you need to read the second

It’s not actually. What is the point of this comment?

At first order it isn't, but at second order it is.

Predicting the future is notoriously hard and most of the time impossible.

Merely thinking about second or third order consequences is not sufficient if the predictions can't be reality checked.

The mental models we use are rarely good enough for that, unless you're playing a complete information game like Chess.

This is why "gradient descent" is so powerful and widely used intuitively.

IMO the problem is the perception that fast thinkers or fast decision makers are smart folks. I know a lots of people who would not give instant answers to problems, they will be always "I will come back to this, let me think through". They give much better solve, but take time. But we are surrounded by people who want fast solutions.

You have to define 'better'. If an entity can process their OODA loop faster than competing entities, they will have an advantage.

I agree with you that people who are quick to talk in meetings can sometimes incorrectly come across as smarter, but I caution you to completely discount speed.

As an aside, the entity that understands the original formulation of the OODA loop (not the ridiculous circle shaped one) and can find ways to trigger the positive feedback loop (contained within the original diagram) in the mind of their adversary can gain an advantage as they both saturate the opponent's bandwidth and simultaneously take them away from their goals. My understanding behind the original intent of the OODA was to be able to strategically exploit that weakness.

Yes, no Bias is good either.

A great book, if you're interested in complex systems and feedback loops is Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3828902-thinking-in-syst...

If you like that and it really resonated with you, you might also find a lot of value in Drift Into Failure and Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts

I've found the more I go down the rabbit hole on these particular topics, the faster I'm able to spot problems at a system wide scale in realtime and (try) course correct.

I just commented with the exact same book suggestion! Do you have any other suggestions on the same area?

See my reply to the parent for suggestions that compliment and build on that knowledge in a practical way

> Second-order thinking takes a lot of work. It’s not easy to think in terms of systems, interactions, and time.

Experience helps a lot, there. After having your ass handed to you a few times, second-order thinking basically becomes automatic.

Just sayin’…

”Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.”

-Attributed to Nasrudin, but made famous by Will Rogers

Did someone just make a serious blog post to describe thinking. One that is deadpan not philosophical and supposed to (by the authors view) be helping people?

If this is new to people it would explain 99% of the most horrific security vulnerabilities I think I've seen in recent years.

Yes. The world around you starts to make more sense when you realize that second order effects are virtually never considered by the majority of people. A sizeable portion of them are not even capable of doing so.

Hah, jokes on you! Second-Order thinking is what I use to torture my own brain and underperform.

Ok, here's a real comment about Second Order Thinking.

When trying to reduce my adiposity (lose fat mass), I get hungry. Everyone talks about diet and exercise. No one really talks about hunger. Dieticians talk about satiating foods - food that fills you up, but that is only one aspect. Last year I decided I need to find another way to experience hunger. Learning about this has greatly helped my efforts to get healthy. I highly recommend "The Hungry Brain" and some time with a Cognitive Behavior Therapist if you have had repeated difficulty in losing weight. Tell your therapist you want to change your relationship with food and learn how to handle the sensations of hunger. These are easy words to say, but to really change your learned behaviors takes a lot of time and effort.

also there's a difference between hunger and appetite, is there not? And with appetite (at least for me) what I mean mostly is wanting to have something sugary. However, whenever I give in to it, it gets even harder to stop then (not just in the minute, but also an hour later or two). Which is why eliminating the first step (giving in once) is the most important part... at least thats what I'm finding out right now. (I wanted to keep eating like a tiny amount of sweets but... really, the body craves too much then. Better to stop full-stop.) I noticed that black tea, black coffee and apples (yes, they have natural sugar I know) reduce my apetite for sweets. Very helpful (although caffeine is its own kind of drug).

Yes, that's my experience too. Controlling your food environment is critical. Your brain will remember that you have snacks nearby. The farther away they are, the easier it is to forget them. I did a mental exercise where I put 3 jelly beans in front of me, and I tried to notice when I ate them. The first 3 or 4 times, I didn't notice at all. I only noticed when they were gone and I wanted another one.

I think sugar is a triple threat as far as hunger and appetite goes:

1. When you start to eat sugar, you want to eat more. Very sweet things were relatively rare, on an evolutional time scale, this is a completely natural response. There is strong research behind this idea.

2. If you have a high-sugar snack with low protein and low fiber, then your blood sugar spikes and then drops. That blood sugar drop feels terrible and the only way to 'fix' it is to eat sugar. Some people may be able to wait it out, but that can be dangerous in some cases. I'm not a doctor, talk to your doctor about how to handle hypoglycemia. Obviously it is best to not have a hypoglycemic episode in the first place. This is a well known metabolic process.

3. I don't know if there is research on this, but in my experience after I have high sugar snacks multiple days in a row a "monster" wakes up and my appetite gets very strong.

I do eat processed sugar still, but I limit it to one or two things a day.

My problem with n-order thinking are in-grained pessimism, and lots of imagination.

Perfect recipe for never doing anything.

Isn't realizing and dealing with the risk of procrastinating when n-order thinking about a problem then a classic example of n+1-order thinking?

Something to keep in mind, something often forgotten by those folks in meetings that are always “no, no, nope” to just about everything. Different personalities do it for different reasons, sometimes just to show how smart they are for seeing a negative second order consequence.

Regardless if why such a person does it though the thing to remember is that a negative second order impact is not at all a show stopper that prevents the initial action. The key to overcoming “no” people is precisely why you want to be a second/third order thinker: understand the negative n-order impacts and have a mitigation plan for them.

Nothing stops the “no” person faster than if you can preempt them completely or respond to their objections with “Sure Bob, you make a fantastic point. I’m glad you mentioned that because it allows us to cover a solution I have planned that we can review right now without having to take things offline and delay action on this.”

I’m sure some HN’ers may abhor the need for that sort of soft politicking and personality management but a diplomatic approach along these lines let’s both you and the “no” person keep face with less risk for confrontational dialogue, especially because Bob can be seen as a useful contributor as well.

(And yep, confrontation isn’t inherently a bad thing to be avoided at all costs, but the consequences of it are complicated and not always predictable. If Bob objects further without good cause, sure, roll out the pointed questions and firm requests for concrete reasoning.)

Suggested model: Feynman diagrams.

Many people have seen these squiggly little diagrams of subatomic physical processes, such as for example x-ray radiation scattering off of an electron. Each individual diagram has an order, related to the number of nodes in the diagram.

In one domain of physics, quantum electrodynamics, each higher order contributes a smaller incremental amount of accuracy to the calculation. Roughly, one might imagine first order gives 90% accuracy, second order gives 99% accuracy, third order givers 99.9% accuracy, etc. In this world, you don't expect the second-order processes to blow up in your face. (technically, this is due to small coupling constants)

However, in other domains (quantum chromodynamics, which describes processes inside the proton, neutron, quarks and gluons etc.), the second-order processes can be just as, if not more, influential than first-order processes. Now you have a problem if you ignore second-order processes, as the first order calculation might only give you 10% accuracy, the second gives 20% accuracy and so on.

When second (or third) order processes are not insignificant, that's where they can return to bite you in the seat if you ignore them, aka 'blowback'. The difficulty then lies in determining whether or not such second order processes have this potential effect in the system of question.

Everyone does strategic planning multiple steps down the road to some degree, whether they have a high IQ or not. For some gifted people it is easier. But not something anyone can avoid in daily life.

So the article is silly as far as that goes.

I think that making a habit of consciously reviewing your assumed consequences _is_ a bit of wisdom.

But the article is conflating IQ and that habit.

Also, I think the biggest difference maker in strategic planning is usually in the amount of relevant experience in a domain.

That was quite possibly the most shallow article I’ve ever read about thinking deeply.

Thinking in systems, their interactions, feedback-cycles and causal dependencies is a very important and underdeveloped skill for any person, regardless of profession, since we all live and have to make decisions in an increasingly messy/complex/interactive environment. I believe second/nth-order thinking can help with that.

From my personal experience I can recommend the free online course “Introduction to Complexity” since it helped me develop a better understanding and intuition about these things: https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/144-introduction-... and also the book “The Art of interconnected thinking” from Frederic Vester (I am not sure if this is the correct translation, the German title is: “Die Kunst vernetzt zu denken”). But there are of course many other great resources to learn about complexity and systems thinking.

It is also increasingly important to think beyond our own (ideological, disciplinary, conditioned, etc.) “tunnel”, because many problems in the real world have multiple dimensions to them, just like there is not only black and white, not only grayscale, but all the colours of the rainbow. It is convenient to stay in one dimension (e.g. our own profession, a paradigm/worldview, a conceptual framework) because it makes us feel confident and secure. Often we can afford to do so if the implications of our decisions stay within the boundaries of our “tunnel”. But this is most often not the case in complex environments and being ignorant about those other dimensions can lead to miscommunication and failure to address the concerns of our clients, relationships, etc. So I would recommend not only nth-order thinking, but also multi-dimensional thinking (which may be included in the former, but should be emphasized more strongly I believe).

> ... we all live and have to make decisions in an increasingly messy/complex/interactive environment.

Sorry for isolating this one aspect from the rest of your post.

But this is IMO a very important yet too seldom discussed aspect of our modern societies.

What's the outcome of fixed (more or less) cognitive capacity brains being confronted with ever increasing complexity of society?

Can it be a favourable outcome?

Part of thinking ahead or to second or third order is being realistic about the range of outcomes. This article characterizes outcomes as "good" or "bad", but realistically almost any scenario is going to generate results in a broad grey area of trade offs including what might be good or bad depending on framing and points of view.

One should always strive to consider side effects as far as possible, but there are obviously limitations. The number of effects to consider increases exponentially with the order of thinking. Weighing them against each other becomes harder as well, as the scope increases and effects may no longer be tightly tied within the same domain. Probabilities necessarily become part of the equation, and they only become fuzzier the higher the level. A sufficiently high order of thinking becomes essentially to predict butterfly effects.

Not that this makes the task impossible, within some scope. Games like Chess have a similar kind of chaotic unpredictability, yet people get really good at thinking many moves ahead and ignoring dead-end paths. Higher order is better, as far as you can be confident. But the real world is huge, and full of unknowns, so higher order conclusions will be as highly up for debate.

Albert Einstein said, “Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them”; he also likely was the main reason the US became aware of the need to enter the race to create nuclear weapons. [1]

At some point problems become impossible to avoid, especially if you’re biased [2] — though in the end, at a given scale, most problems (and their solutions) become as predictable as watching a man falling through the air. [3]

- Second-order thinking is not result of being smart, but not being lazy, biased, egotistical, etc.

_________

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein–Szilard_letter

[2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=Va5T2KcYiOw

[3] https://youtu.be/XRr1kaXKBsU?t=49

Not sure why this article needs to reinforce antiquated social constructs like "sm*rt people" to get its point across. "Sm*rt People" are like 10x programmers- a fantasy formed to justify inequities derived from the hegemony we are are complicit in perpetuating. Nobody is sm*rt intrinsically, they simply have unfair access to experiences, resources, culture, education, and genetics that give them a temporally maximal average problem/solution response aptitude. You are not a sm*rt person or a d**b person, we are all just people, with completely equal capacity to do great or bad things. We must take great care to tolerate others and be sure to excise this cancer of bigoted, Black/white, exclusionary, non-nuanced, traditional thinking from our society. Bigots watch out, you are on the wrong side of history!

Is this supposed to be deep or something? That seems on the contrary extremely shallow and devoid of any insight.

Well, it is Farnam Street…

Totally r/iamverysmart vibes

I dislike this framing because it frames thinking and planning ahead as next-level intelligence when it's patience and wisdom masquerading as smartness.

A better spin would be, "Stupid? Use this one weird trick (thinking, planning, and acting long-term) to outperform smart people every time!"

Can we just call it systems thinking and not make up a new word for it? Seems like a very strange fs.blog to begin with that is a very loose definition with little substance.

The book Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows is an excellent guide to help you with “long term thinking”.

I'm currently reading "Thinking in Bets" by Annie Duke. I find her paradigm for decision making more accurate than this model.

1) She explains the physiology / psychology that leads to group think.

2) She proposes that decision-making is a spectrum. That there are - like poker, her profession - always knowns and unknowns.

3) She also has a solution for fighting groupthink and improving your post decision learning process via forming a truth-seek group.

Finally, I don't feel smarter === second-order. In fact, smartness is more likely to create a bias such that you'll act too soon due to overconfidence in your smartness.

Instead, second-order is about thoroughness, patience and the willingness to consider the full spectrum of possibilities. You don't have to have an above average IQ for that.

A lot of times I face the problem that others can't grasp what comes intuitively to me. Sometimes years later they let me know that I was right. But most of of them don't remember any more.

E.g. 30 years ago I had a lenghty discussion with my fellow electronics engineering classmates. I predicted then that in the future computers will consist of a single chip that comes with everything necessary and is going to be individually configurable for each customer. The others could not even imagine something like this happening. If we look at smartphones (ARM) and modern computers (Apple Silicon) this is exactly ehat is happening. Apart from power supply, interfaces and storage, everything including GPU and Ram is on one chip.

I think this sounds like using a Markov process to model a current state and reachable states, at two steps away, and tryimg to assign transition probabilities between them. The flaw I see in this approach is that one has limited sensing (don't really know the true state of things) and likely a large number of possible transitions to other states that are outside of one's influence or ability to predict. But I guess it may work well in limited domains, with few variables/agents and it's probably better to give it some thought rather than ignoring it completely.

This is not a new idea, there was a management fad in the nineties around understanding higher order effects and how they applied to businesses. The book everyone manager had to read back then was "The Fifth discipline" by an MIT professor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Discipline

(It's actually a pretty interesting read, as far as management books go)

> A lot of extraordinary things in life are the result of things that are first-order negative, second order positive.

These are the hard cases. It's easy to consider second order effects if you have your solution, you just have to do it. Solutions often come way easier if the first order effects are positive. But if they are negative you are much less likely to even entertain that solution. Even if the higher order effects positives far outweigh the first order negatives.

Zeynep's Law: "Until there is substantial and repeated evidence otherwise, assume counterintuitive findings to be false, and second-order effects to be dwarfed by first-order ones in magnitude."

https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1478766408691556353?s=20&t...

Isn't second order effects quite common and observable in software systems, in history, in economics and everything?

Yes. Zeynep isn't saying "second order effects don't exist". She's saying "don't overthink it".

Consider the public health nightmare we've been stuck in for the last three+ years. Instead of giving direct and useful guidance, people worry about how people will react to guidance and make second order arguments against the basic guidance that would actually help.

Yes, but those are still the exception. The rule is that higher order consequences are small or nonexistent.

The problem is that, there are so many of them that for any decision you will get many of those exceptions worth looking at.

My first thought was: "What then?" - the question the author would like us to always ask - is implied in what game theory investigates, including a solid mathematical theory for accounting wins and losses (example: repeat prisoner's dilemma, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO3-796fGv8 - free video).

I usually just call this "bothering to think". The initial gut-level 'thinking' is really just pattern-matching.

This seems kind of...silly. Something that is taught to us all through our lives, since we were toddlers.

Are there any studies for this conjecture?

The whole article can be summed up to :

1. Think of something 2. Return to that thought from time to time 3. Repeat

To me it is seems as the author is using new term for already known stuff not unlike the famous replacement of conscientiousness whit grit by Angela Duckworth.

I would say first-oder thinking replaces reactive thinking and second-oder replaces proactive or anticipatory thinking.

A book I just finished that explains this quite well is Thinking in Systems: A Primer.

It touches on systems, modeling, nonlinearilites, etc.

I saw someone suggest another book on economics. Are there any other books people recommend for systems and multi-order thinking?

Misses that people might not be incentivized to do any higher order thinking. It isn't always in someone's interest to consider higher order and more complex outcomes. "Simple" often tends to be quite popular.

Very similar to the core concept of this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

A fancy name for an age-old (and still ways better) concept: system thinking

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the message was lost.

For want of a message the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

What makes Farnam Street especially disappointing is that every time I see "fs.blog" I expect it to be about Free Software, not GOOP for Rationalistics.

I too believe in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things and am currently searching for a missing cat

Second order is good but I think if there's too much n-th thinking level it will become overthinking lol

> For example, consider a country that, wanting to inspire regime change in another country,

I would propose a different observation regarding international affairs which is that it is simply a problem space above human capacity to solve. I say this because I believe this author is incorrect that the people making foreign policy decisions are not thinking "smart enough". I believe they spend a good deal of their time "gaming out" their decisions, building computer models which justify their decisions and contemplating exactly the kind of second and third order consequences they're talking about.

Rather the problem is precisely their logification of the problem. They are too smart and get caught up in their own labyrinth of logic. A lot of the bad choices countries have made over the years could be stopped by some very basic first order thinking. Things like, 99% of the time contributing to violence in a country is bad and leaves the people there more extreme and more violent. (Yes I grant you fighting Hitler was good.)

The Rand Corporation's failure over the years to provide good outcomes is almost a perfect example of how an attempt to build a better diplomat has utterly failed. In my opinion there are just classes of problems which in practical terms are unsolvable and it is wise therein to take direct action on the few things you can be certain of and scrupulous about the rest.

Errors being highly profitable for certain people probably doesn't help matters either.

Is it me, or does everyone here have a different definition of what n-th order thinking means ?

A) second order thinking sounds clever so we all agree it's good,though we're unsure what it is B) my way of thinking is advanced and clever Ergo C) second order thinking is the way I think

The other part of this second order thinking is to make sure to ask WHY. And keep asking it.

Flagged for pretentious banality.

If I do x, y and z may happen. Isn’t this thinking we learn in fifth grade?

Is this the same as high discount factor gamma in reinforcement learning?

Is this problem worth solving? What can I do to create the most impact?

The word here is: Strategy

Like the 2nd order effect of a modal popup while I'm reading?

And yet another article explaining us how to be smarter

Thinking can be sterile, unless it leads to making real life choices. Then, when choosing, so-called second-order thinking can only be fruitful if all ramifications are explored, level by level, which is almost impossible, as other forces opposing your own are simultaneously at play. In that context, self actualization will drain one's forces and lead to defeat, not counting all other people's life that may be crushed in the process.

A better way may be to always make the best, highest choice possible. Always aiming for the grandest, most elevated and most valuable choice possible, considering all variables, thoroughly solving every problem as they come. That comes with a cost, but the benefits are infinite.

I found "odds of success" chart hilarious.

Are these great mental models book worth the time?

Thinking n moves ahead as its usually called

I stopped here:

> It’s often easier to identify when people didn’t adequately consider the second and subsequent order impacts. 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.

The author is talking about thinking, and then uses a country to illustrate his point.

But... countries don't think! People think (animals too, to varying extents, perhaps plants) but not countries! Countries are a human CONCEPT. Its more possible that a stone could think than a concept!

This is -1 thinking in my book.

>countries don't think! People think

“People don’t think, their neurons think”

Is this the same as derivative thinking?

insightful!

Next up,

Modeling: What Engineers Use to Outperform

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