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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
> 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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!
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.
Sorry in advance, to be the goyim and ask: Do you have doubts in this privileged model of thinking, or you enjoy the power and then intellectualize the outcome.
Because we as the stupid ones can "hurt ourselves" and we need the "wisdom" of historically proven "chosen" people with higher IQ, moral ground and knowledge.
No, you are completely reading some bullshit sense of false superiority into what I said. Your comment is antisemitic but I'll address it as it stands as if you mean it honestly. I don't believe in any "chosen". I believe in what my people taught me, just like the Chinese believe in their own 5000 years of history, or the Czechs have pride for fighting back the Russians but I am not "chosen"...or better than anyone... every group of people have grandfathers who taught them how to survive and how to assess the world. That's all. I'm actually just sharing how I see it.. but I don't think I'm better than anyone else let alone it's my job to moralize, or feel power over anyone. I'm just here to express my opinion like everyone else.
By the way, can a Muslim have an opinion about Jesus? They sure do. Can a Buddhist? Yes. Well... the man was a Jew and most of the history of antisemitism revolves around Christians pretending he wasn't a rabbi. So this ain't chosen anything I'm just saying what it is... the man was a Jewish rabbi who rebelled in a few good ways against the Hebrew norms... he was a rebel and I admire what he said and did.
This is not scorn on goyim. Frankly if you want it? I don't know what you Romans are still doing worshipping a Jew what, in the year 2022, but that's between you and God
You are wrong, about me. My higher education is theological. I have read some old books. I have a lot of Jewish friends, which have the ability to avoid "antisemitic" label when faced with a constructive question. I put ethical principles above any form of religion. And with the time, my view on religions is growing more negative than positive. Humans essentially are all the same. We have similar needs and dreams, to live decently and enjoy friendship, love and harmony.
///
Goy can be used in a derogatory manner. The Yiddish lexicographer Leo Rosten in The New Joys of Yiddish defines goy as someone who is non-Jewish or someone who is dull, insensitive, or heartless.[22] Goy also occurs in many pejorative Yiddish expressions:
Dos ken nor a goy - Something only a goy would do or is capable of doing.[22]
A goy blabt a goy - "A goy stays a goy," or, less literally, according to Rosten, "What did you expect? Once an anti-Semite always an anti-Semite."[22]
Goyisher kopf - "Gentile head," someone who doesn't think ahead, an idiot.[22][23]
Goyishe naches - Pleasures or pursuits only a gentile would enjoy.[24]
A goy! - Exclamation of exasperation used "when endurance is exhausted, kindliness depleted, the effort to understand useless".[25]
It's essentially the same word as "Farang" in Thai, just means anyone foreign or outside the ethnicity. The same thing in Chinese translates to "barbarian". I believe Christians have words like "heathen" and "infidel" and "witch" but most of those carry much more viciousness than "goy". Goyim are nonjews. What people do with that or say about them is on them. To be clear, the antisemitic patt of your post was the inference that we all have some opinions about non-Jews, and that calling them goyim was somehow an inside joke. It is literally just a word for anyone not Jewish. You amplified your suspicion of it with your references here but... It means nothing more. Do some white people call black people N** ? Do some white people sit around a bar talking about Kikes? (they do - and I look and act country enough to have heard it a hundred times). Oh yeah and those kikes call us goys... heh. I swear, I've never seen white pride so fearful as when they start ruminating on that little word. But I promise it's mostly just a phrase meaning not one of us. The barbarian overtones are put on by people who don't understand... in order to say "look! they're talking shit about all of us in their funny Yiddish language!" We're not. But thinking we are is basically a conspiracy theory, and that's what makes it antisemitic. Does that make sense?
Everybody and their second cousin have been trying to call themselves the successors of the Romans, from the Byzantines to the Franks to the Ottomans to the Russians to Mussolini. (Edit: and, of course, the Pope) But I think this is the first time I've heard it as a pejorative.
I don't understand him and he's one of the most interesting figures of all time... and I say that without believing in his divinity. But I think the direct words are the truest part. If you can ever get your hands on the book "Jesus" by Henri Barbusse
.. it is a humbling version of the book told through his own words. Barbusse was a Christian socialist who thought Jesus was basically a communist... but if you look at a lot of what Jesus said, he was mostly a communist (at least compared to the Jews at the time who wanted to suppress his ideas). of course the Jews always have to be the bad guys in this story, even though our only sin was saying this guy wasn't the messiah. But I do personally think that a lot of what he had to say was good and necessary. It was just widely misunderstood which led to thousands of years of my people being slaughtered... but he did make good points about humans, forgiveness, charity and work.
<I've read the New Testament and I think actually it's the modern Christians who don't understand him.>
Exactly! I'm a former evangelical who could no longer stomach the way they have changed the interpretation of the New Testament to achieve their own means. I'm still a believer and consider ethics as the most important thing any human can achieve. When ethics and the rule of law go out the window humans always turn on each other.
> If you dig deep, you’ll find that pride is the root of virtually every evil.
I think we live in the tension between being big and being small in the world. If you're big and you have bad judgement, you'll cause more harm than if you're small and have bad judgement. But being small is also an act of self abandonment. At its extreme, its no life at all.
Far too many people I know have no idea how to take up space with the confidence that they have something valuable to add to the world. They have important ideas - but don't back themselves and don't pursue them. We're all worse off when that happens.
Whats the point in learning ethics if you keep yourself powerless anyway?
I think cowardice and timidity are much bigger problems in modern society than pride.
A related thing that seems unthinkable for many people now is how dynamic opinions are. Like, not intelectually, but from experience understanding that my world view currently firmly stands on a foundation that might very well fall apart some day... I feel that experience deeply shaped my character. Funnily, I think my opinions are now standing on even firmer grounds since I stopped expecting them to hold forever.
People talk about their opinion as if it was some static thing that was always like this and will always be. Completely unaware how their own opinion evolved throughout their life and might evolve if they allow too. Also completely unaware of how irrelevant their opinion is, except for the consequences that follow from acting according to it.
"[...] But that's just my opinion. [...]", as if anybody should care. And, as if protecting their world view from the debate that might rip it apart. As if that'd be a painful and scary experience. (No even talking about how people use that sentence in order to spread fear, anger or hatred.) As if they'd need to put their whole life into question if they'd changed some if their opinions.
Often I think in the past there were people that lived according to this wisdom. I am not sure to what extend that's true, but I do not often meet such people now. Even in intelectual spheres, where some people even might talk about wisdom like this it often feels hollow to me if they do.
One thing I find exceptional about your statement and also about a number of similar treatises of recent years is the seeming hopelessness of finding your own self clear of the endless subjectivity of others' conflicting opinions.
You may find it terrible, but I actually believe in objective reality. I believe I know good and evil when I see them... and I can do this without access to the supernatural or recourse to religion. I believe in better and worse outcomes for individuals and for societies. I believe some societies are better than others, because I've lived in 34 countries over 20 years and I can make honest comparisons about the pros and cons of each. Nowhere is perfect, but some actually are better -- objectively, if you believe that being expressive and embracing diversity and freedom of thought is a good thing. Personally I think good==complexity and evil==destruction, and so anything that kills life is destroying complexity that the universe demands, so is necessarily a kind of evil.
The Achilles heel of people younger than me is that they think opinions on the internet actually mean something... and the younger they are the less they seem to believe in the objective truth of the world. Call it the corrupting influence of Instagram, I guess. But I think it's due for a major backlash, because no one wants to have their morals dictated to them that way... and the objective world remains. It always remains. True things are true, false are false; evil is hypocrisy, and it's rampant. It is not a subjective, religious pronouncement.. it's a thing that is fucking right there.
Also your opinion strikes me as very Japanese... and to argue why individual rights are important or why you should develop strong, objective, even antisocial anti-government personal opinions is, on a Japanese level, an entirely different conversation from me trying to convince a westerner that objective reality exists and has ethics whether we want it to or not.
It's wonderful that you had (or have!) a close relationship with your grandfather, but please don't post religious slurs to HN. It leads to religious flamewar, which is the last thing we need here.
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.
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.
"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"
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.
265 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadSecond-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.
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.
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.
I can’t really see a difference.
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.
The book is linked to Amazon and it looks like it is an Amazon Affiliate link.
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.
> 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.
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?
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?
This comment in it's blind ignorance is a godsent gift to people of a leftwing political bias...
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.
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?
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Don't forget the ability to snag readers by attributing their success to a simple rule that anybody can absorb in two minutes.
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
Whenever I get desperate enough to start a blog full of deep thoughts that only gets posted here, watch out HN.
Also, never show people graphs when /ok, never mind
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
from there I guess we just migrate up to talking shit about bloated blog posts where one dude mumbles his observations about deep thoughts.
Just kidding hahshahah I'd never do that
edit but only because I'm lazy
Modern day magic beans to make you smarter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1. Think of something 2. Return to that thought from time to time 3. Repeat
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...
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/henry-kissinger-is-worried-abou...
> 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...
Would you say the same for the books by Spivak or Resnick? What about a college degree?
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.
Given that, I totally agree with you on the sentiment.
Otherwise we could just deficit spend ourselves into perpetual prosperity.
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.
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.
Perfect recipe for never doing anything.
> 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.
“People don’t think, their neurons think”
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...
Taking a single verse out of context to suit a purpose rather than reading all of the surrounding text is a pretty big problem.
Because we as the stupid ones can "hurt ourselves" and we need the "wisdom" of historically proven "chosen" people with higher IQ, moral ground and knowledge.
Right?
By the way, can a Muslim have an opinion about Jesus? They sure do. Can a Buddhist? Yes. Well... the man was a Jew and most of the history of antisemitism revolves around Christians pretending he wasn't a rabbi. So this ain't chosen anything I'm just saying what it is... the man was a Jewish rabbi who rebelled in a few good ways against the Hebrew norms... he was a rebel and I admire what he said and did.
This is not scorn on goyim. Frankly if you want it? I don't know what you Romans are still doing worshipping a Jew what, in the year 2022, but that's between you and God
/// Goy can be used in a derogatory manner. The Yiddish lexicographer Leo Rosten in The New Joys of Yiddish defines goy as someone who is non-Jewish or someone who is dull, insensitive, or heartless.[22] Goy also occurs in many pejorative Yiddish expressions:
Dos ken nor a goy - Something only a goy would do or is capable of doing.[22] A goy blabt a goy - "A goy stays a goy," or, less literally, according to Rosten, "What did you expect? Once an anti-Semite always an anti-Semite."[22] Goyisher kopf - "Gentile head," someone who doesn't think ahead, an idiot.[22][23] Goyishe naches - Pleasures or pursuits only a gentile would enjoy.[24] A goy! - Exclamation of exasperation used "when endurance is exhausted, kindliness depleted, the effort to understand useless".[25]
I found that study groups at church were the most beneficial for me because I hear a lot of perspectives that never crossed my mind.
There’s also a great book call The Bible from 30,000 Feet that gives great commentary on each book.
Exactly! I'm a former evangelical who could no longer stomach the way they have changed the interpretation of the New Testament to achieve their own means. I'm still a believer and consider ethics as the most important thing any human can achieve. When ethics and the rule of law go out the window humans always turn on each other.
I think we live in the tension between being big and being small in the world. If you're big and you have bad judgement, you'll cause more harm than if you're small and have bad judgement. But being small is also an act of self abandonment. At its extreme, its no life at all.
Far too many people I know have no idea how to take up space with the confidence that they have something valuable to add to the world. They have important ideas - but don't back themselves and don't pursue them. We're all worse off when that happens.
Whats the point in learning ethics if you keep yourself powerless anyway?
I think cowardice and timidity are much bigger problems in modern society than pride.
People talk about their opinion as if it was some static thing that was always like this and will always be. Completely unaware how their own opinion evolved throughout their life and might evolve if they allow too. Also completely unaware of how irrelevant their opinion is, except for the consequences that follow from acting according to it.
"[...] But that's just my opinion. [...]", as if anybody should care. And, as if protecting their world view from the debate that might rip it apart. As if that'd be a painful and scary experience. (No even talking about how people use that sentence in order to spread fear, anger or hatred.) As if they'd need to put their whole life into question if they'd changed some if their opinions.
Often I think in the past there were people that lived according to this wisdom. I am not sure to what extend that's true, but I do not often meet such people now. Even in intelectual spheres, where some people even might talk about wisdom like this it often feels hollow to me if they do.
You may find it terrible, but I actually believe in objective reality. I believe I know good and evil when I see them... and I can do this without access to the supernatural or recourse to religion. I believe in better and worse outcomes for individuals and for societies. I believe some societies are better than others, because I've lived in 34 countries over 20 years and I can make honest comparisons about the pros and cons of each. Nowhere is perfect, but some actually are better -- objectively, if you believe that being expressive and embracing diversity and freedom of thought is a good thing. Personally I think good==complexity and evil==destruction, and so anything that kills life is destroying complexity that the universe demands, so is necessarily a kind of evil.
The Achilles heel of people younger than me is that they think opinions on the internet actually mean something... and the younger they are the less they seem to believe in the objective truth of the world. Call it the corrupting influence of Instagram, I guess. But I think it's due for a major backlash, because no one wants to have their morals dictated to them that way... and the objective world remains. It always remains. True things are true, false are false; evil is hypocrisy, and it's rampant. It is not a subjective, religious pronouncement.. it's a thing that is fucking right there.
2+2=4
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32467495.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
"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"
If this is new to people it would explain 99% of the most horrific security vulnerabilities I think I've seen in recent years.