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

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

#81

Post by radosc »

teekert wrote: post #74

"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." Unless you want to make it look like a beneficial regime change but your actual wish is long term destabilization of a region ;)

To stimulate sponsoring country's economy and cement electoral choices in the face of a common threat.

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

#82

Post by croon »

kqr wrote: post #63
busyant wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> blindly hammering away on the wrong problem is a failure mode for many intelligent people. The key is not just sticking to things, but also having enough taste to know when to drop a problem. Agreed. In my original comment, I was trying to imply that those exceptional people did (ad you say) have enough "taste" to know when to stop, but I don't think I made that aspect clear. The crystallographer I was talking abou…

I think the deeper explanation here is that unusually clever people know how to locate the unquestioned assumptions and have no problem throwing them out. Or put another way, they ask questions of the form, "I know this sounds dumb at first, but hear me out. Why don't we..." Most problems come with a slew of constraints we take for granted, and then a set of constraints we consciously impose on the solution because w…

Couldn't agree more here.

I've been encountering this effect in rapid succession in the last couple of years as a new parent.

First few weeks: Everything is new and you have no firm assumptions other than what you've observed from the outside of other families, so you try to build a new model on how your child behaves, how you should react and the routines needed to function as a family.

A month in and every other month going forward for the next year: Everything you think you know about your child has changed, and all (most) assumptions about what works when comforting, putting to sleep, and feeding goes out the window and you start over building a new model.

Of course everything doesn't change, but this scenario of developmental changes has really ingrained the idea in me how easy it is to make assumptions (deliberately and not) that you assume are static truths. It has made me go back and reexamine everything from old wives tales I learned through osmosis as a child through my politics through technical decisions in my work.

Whether you consider Jobs, Musk, Wozniak, Brin, Page, etc creators/innovators or something, I think a lot if not most successful ventures has come from reevaluating assumed truths, ranging from the market, state of technology, or paradigms. I'm not saying you should throw out everything old, but merely that learning from history should be a scheduled process, not a one-off.

Sorry for the unwarranted rant, but your comment just resonated with my own experiences.

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

#83

Post by dalbasal »

I think people are generally good at 2nd order thinking, and thinking within complex systems with multiple causes, effects and subsequent effects. Especially so if we're immersed and experienced in a field.

We are bad at thinking this way in groups, relatively. We're especially bad when these groups are political. If we're deciding on arming rebels, the political dynamics are the 2nd order effects that dominate thinking, not the war... especially if it's a small foreign war that's unlikely to reach home.

The rebel field commander has no problem recognising these strategic dynamics.

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

#84

Post by dillondoyle »

In politics I've heard higher order thinking called 'running the traps.' Would love to learn of a way to apply derivatives or higher order thinking to polling and the decisions I make in my work.

Take Trump in 2015 if voters were less likely to say they support Trump in polling which 2nd order affected Clinton campaign malpractice to not campaign in MI etc, which gave Trump election.

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

#85

Post by js8 »

I am not against "higher-order thinking" but in my experience it often leads to wishful thinking and self-deception. Especially political arguments are prone to disagreements on higher order effects (as opposed to effects that are directly observable and measurable).

For example, take basic income. Opponents of basic income argue that it will lead to inflation (second-order effect) and it will have no effect. Proponents of basic income argue that it will lead to higher velocity of money (second-order effect) and it will have positive economic effect.

Often the magnitude of second-order effects is not clear (often they are large sums of small numbers, and somewhat non-linear), and this leads to disagreements even among reasonable people. It's very easy to see 2nd order effect of some type and not another. So I would be cautious to rely on it too much.

(This is also partly a reason why I am in favor of empiricism as opposed to rationalism - humans often have bad intuitions when we just think about things.)

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

#86

Post by mjburgess »

dalbasal wrote: post #83

I think people are generally good at 2nd order thinking, and thinking within complex systems with multiple causes, effects and subsequent effects. Especially so if we're immersed and experienced in a field. We are bad at thinking this way in groups, relatively. We're especially bad when these groups are political. If we're deciding on arming rebels, the political dynamics are the 2nd order effects that dominate think…

I don't know that this is true.

I meet quite a lot of utopians (which are 1st order thinkers!), who assume the stated goal of a policy will be its effects.

Perhaps this is about knowledge. In domestic situations where you know how to casually infer to more distant effects, 2nd order is easier.

In politics, 2nd order is hard because people know very little and need to know very little (in their daily lives).

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

#87

Post by mjburgess »

js8 wrote: post #85

I am not against "higher-order thinking" but in my experience it often leads to wishful thinking and self-deception. Especially political arguments are prone to disagreements on higher order effects (as opposed to effects that are directly observable and measurable). For example, take basic income. Opponents of basic income argue that it will lead to inflation (second-order effect) and it will have no effect. Propone…

Yes, there is this common reverse problem:

If we allow X to speak, his ideas will spread and Y will be harmed. So banning X is best.

But why not:

Banning X will cause a back reaction in X supporters and spread X's message leading Y to be harmed.

Or any other of a number of possibilities.

There is a fallacy of "hypothetical higher order danger justifies first order violence (/action)" -- where the higher order thinking is mostly ideological fantasy.

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

#89

Post by raxxorrax »

rahulrrixe wrote: post #69
jjk166 wrote: post #53

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…

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 pe…

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?

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

#90

Post by rygxqpbsngav »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #13

That is quite a lot of words to say "think a few steps ahead".

+ Look beyond the obvious and conventional and what it is saying that the second order thinkers see unconventional things that might sound absurd to conventional first order thinkers. And do it with good precision, otherwise, they might end up with failed results too.
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