Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform (2016) • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by termau » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 9:56 AM UTC

This is interesting, I'm pretty sure we all do this to a large extent, I would say one thing that I've noticed when everything was going sideways was I learnt that in the absence of a good viable outcome doing nothing was a very effective strategy.

Not without its risks either, but in some cases my act of doing nothing allowed what I had done to progress (where I knew it would not have a detrimental impact and couldn't see any path forward that was effective, I just circled the wagons and waited. Surprisingly effective.

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

#142

Post by ignoramous » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 7:36 PM UTC

spyckie2 wrote: post #137

ignoramous wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I humbly presume that you are familiar with topic at hand, and so, if you please, can you elaborate more on 'scratching the surface' part? I'm genuinely curious about other aspects of policy/systems-building, as it were. Pointers to blog posts or books should be enough, as well. Thanks.

Sorry for the late reply. Many people have recommended and I agree, Thinking in Systems is a great primer. Here's an excerpt from the intro of that book: > So, what is a system? A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the…

Thanks a lot!

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

#143

Post by kqr » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:58 AM UTC

sizzle wrote: post #126

kqr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder if there is a way to train yourself to have the intuition for quickly lifting those less apparent mental constraints in all situation. Anyone have any thoughts on achieving this or resources. I recall some dual n back game posted from a website called gwern that supposedly helps speed up your recall time or how many items you can recall.

Doing mathematics is probably one way to train. Especially the counter-intuitive stuff, like higher dimensions, statistics, weird geometry, and such.