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

  - 1st order thinkers primarily see causes and *direct* effects.
  - 2nd order thinkers frequently see causes and their *indirect* effects.

For what it's worth, the truly exceptional people I've met in life had a different quality.

* When most people are presented with a difficult/challenging problem, they soon give up.

* The most exceptional people that I've met just kept hammering away after the rest of us had stopped. Most of the time, they failed, but if you have some aptitude and you keep hammering, you have a better chance to make breakthroughs that the rest of us don't make.

Just as an example, I had worked for a company that used X-ray crystallography as a tool for drug-development. I would be in meetings with crystallographers where we discussed the technical problems they were having in trying to grow crystals. The crystallographers were all smart and talented, but when we had group meetings, there was only one guy who would float suggestion-after-suggestion-after-suggestion, long after everyone else had run out of ideas. I don't think he was any "smarter" than anyone else in the room, but he just could not shut himself off. He was relentless. He went on to make some important contributions to the field.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp...

Did Mark Zuckerberg know in 2003 that his dorm room creation would affect elections? Probably not, but I also wouldn't say it was impossible to predict.

A complex system is chaotic for sure, which definitely makes it hard to predict emergent behavior, but it's also not completely random. I wouldn't claim that you can figure out all emergent behavior beforehand but you can definitely reason about some emergent behavior just by doing some nth-order thinking and systems mapping.

One example that I thought of recently: Today most innovation with food is about innovating on logistics. It's all about getting your food faster and cheaper to your door. Let's say, in 5-10 years from now we live in a world where on-demand groceries are instant and cheaper than anything else, maybe even powered by autonomous drones or what not.

Would we still be going to restaurants and grocery stores? One emergent behavior may be that we get everything delivered with a snap of our fingers straight from warehouses and delivery kitchens. So is it wise to put all our money into Instacart and Doordash now that we know this? Maybe not, because what's the next step beyond delivery? What if there's a new technology to print your food, 20-30 years from now? Will Instacart and Doordash still be relevant in a world like that?

Emergent behavior would then be that innovation will be more about what you eat than when you get it (the innovation vector that we focus so much on today). The company that learns your taste profiles and can figure out exactly what you want/need will probably win in that scenario, so maybe companies that are solving logistics today (Instacart/Doordash) are not the companies that will win in the end (Google has a better shot when it comes to AI and data collection).

"I have an infection!"

"Time for antibiotics!"

Don't bother to ask "And then what?"

Some populations are given antibiotics so regularly that it isn't uncommon for them to develop antibiotic resistant infections and even lose their colon to E. Coli.

We are given drugs with a multi page handout covering side effects, the doctors take credit for short term improvement -- "Look! Your latest infection got better!" -- then blame your condition for long term decline. No one stops to wonder if it's the drugs -- even though in some cases we absolutely know the drugs caused X.