Live data from Hacker News

Second-Order Thinking

fs.blog

61–70 of 266 posts

Re: Second-Order Thinking

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Second-Order Thinking

#63

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.

Cynicism is not a substitute for wisdom.

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

Re: Second-Order Thinking

#65
post #36

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

Re: Second-Order Thinking

#67
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.

Re: Second-Order Thinking

#68
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.

Re: Second-Order Thinking

#69
post #38

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 m…

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.

Re: Second-Order Thinking

#70

Quoted post unavailable.

Humility essentially the core virtue of Christianity, as well as active recognition of pride as a sin.

If you dig deep, you’ll find that pride is the root of virtually every evil.

I’m only pointing this out because of the perception of Christianity that you mention in your post. There’s a very big difference between what Reddit claims is Christian behavior and what the Bible actually claims.

https://www.readnotmisled.org/p/the-is-it-christian-litmus-t...

Post reply on HN