- 1st order thinkers primarily see causes and *direct* effects.
- 2nd order thinkers frequently see causes and their *indirect* effects.
I guess that seems like a reasonable idea.
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.
You have to split the title, which is marketing mumbo jumbo, from the article, which is fundamentally talking about decision making.
Smart decision making and persistent work is the X and Y axis of achievement.
Decision making (which broadly includes subjects like efficiency, policy, systems, problem solving, and design thinking) is the heart of efficiency gains for large organizations (not necessarily individuals, although there really shouldn't be a separation between the two).
Generally speaking, decision making falls into 2 categories - prioritization and policy. Prioritization is deciding what best to do out of the given options, and while policy (systems building) is building ecosystems that enable activity or work output.
2nd order thinking is the necessary requirement for policy/systems building. However, there's a lot more skills needed to enact good policy decisions, so this is just scratching the surface on the subject.
>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
Whilst I admire determination, enthusiasm and persistence; if none of the ideas had come to fruition or contributed anything meaningful, it could have been misconstrued as gish gallop. It probably requires second-order thinking just to manage such a scenario, which is not uncommon.
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 behaviors, which allows the intelligent to see things that are not intuitive. Second order thinking would be choosing a salad when you're hungry so that salad becomes associated with relieving hunger, thus making it easier to choose salads going forward, which will create a positive feedback loop keeping you on your diet. It's the self-interaction of the decision that makes it qualitatively more complex than first order thinking.
There are first level, direct thinkers. This is the lower 50% of all people, although everyone is capable of it. It is direct and without irony, sarcasm, or self reflection. Think slapstick comedy, or superhero movies.
The second level is in 4th wall breaking, analogy, simile, anything which takes "getting" the joke beyond the purely visual. Most people who consider themselves "smart" fall here. About the 50th to 90th percentile of intelligence/creativity.
Third level is hard to describe with words by it's nature. It's all about indirection. Not making an analogy, but taking the analogy for granted and riffing off of that. Most truly genius artists, comedians, musicians, scientists, etc. live at this level. Think the comedy of someone like Dave Chappelle, the music of Bob Dylan, or scientists like Stephen Hawking.
The fourth level is unattainable for humans as a constant state. The very best third level people can just barely get glimpses of it, and bring those glimpses back down for us to see. These are our all time great works of art, and generational scientific breakthroughs. Picasso, Bach, and Einstein are the archetypes here. But what we (the second level masses) are able to see is just a projection, like a 3 dimensional representation of a 4 dimensional shape. The effect is still mind-blowing, but unless you're at that 3rd level it's impossible to really conceive its' true nature. Genius is in the ability to translate those brief fleeting glimpses of the 4th level by a 3rd level person into something intelligible by the 2nd and 1st.
A cleric in 1200 might have said that the masses could never read, and that illiteracy will always be a feature of our society and that it is natural. Yet, here we are today, all reading. Maybe Einstein’s talents can really elude nearly everyone, but don’t short change your fellow human. If you do, you will be all the worse off for it.
The lack of second order thinking seems to be the essence of what ails modern medicine.
"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.
Second order thinking was thought further by Hans Jonas [1], a philosopher known for his contribution to environmentalism. In his book "The Imperative of Responsibility"[2] he argues that because of our technological breakthroughs (e.g. medicine) it's so easy to make impacts beyond your control that thinking through whatever you do has to become the core of a new ethic.
A significant amount of medical academia is definitely concerned with upstream causes, especially since a great deal of overall mortality these days is from cancers and heart disease, where impeding the upstream causes can have a large affect on overall mortality rates. This in some ways contrasts with a perspective where people fall ill primarily to infections and it is primarily the role of medicine to identify and cure those.
Even when an upstream cause for an issue is infective, (for example the young adult deaths from Rhuematic Fever in my country, New Zealand), there are many further upstream causes such as the level of insulation in housing, socioeconomic deprivation, the level of access to primary care physicians, access to transport, etc.
A crucial issue is whether the healthcare and economic system are geared to encourage or discourage addressing the most strongly associated upstream causes that are identified. In countries with established government-funded healthcare systems, options like public health campaigns and legislation are considered as tools that can potentially be brought to bear on these issues. In other countries where government-funded healthcare is not a norm, these options are less emphasised. In a system oriented towards private healthcare, often the approach leans more reactive than proactive, eg likely to be initiated as the response to a costly court ruling.
Or if someone is an overweight, depressed shut-in, the treatment will be antidepressants and gastric bypass - when what they really need is a therapist/PT/buddy who plays sports and drags them out of the house to play squash. The medical system is not currently equipped to handle solutions like that.
The inability to account for second-order effects seems to be a chronic failure of the large-scale systems we build. I wonder if it's because specialization means that nobody understands or is in charge of the big picture. A old-fashioned generalist "village doctor" would understand the context of your existence because they were also in your social circle, while a modern GP's role in your life is highly abstracted. Or take capitalism - if you're mono-focused on making Widgets, then you neither know nor care that Widgets are causing trouble somewhere else in the world, and you will fight viciously against anyone telling you to make fewer Widgets.
This reminds me of Frédéric Bastiat and his essay "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen". Nicely formatted at http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html
The article notes that "It’s often easier to identify when people didn’t adequately consider the second and subsequent order impacts." That failure to consider the second order impacts is what Bastiat refers to as "That Which is Not Seen"
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.
>> I think people are generally good at 2nd order thinking
>> We are bad at thinking this way in groups, relatively.
Wow! This seems to answer a long-standing question I have had. I think I can now work out the mathematics of this, given appropriate amount of time. I think this is it! Thanks.
+ 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.
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.)
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.
A good book on the topic is "Thinking in Systems" by Donella Meadows [1]. It's a catalog of common system patterns and how they behave to give you some tools to answer the "then what?".
1st order thinking dominates our politics and economics. And worse, there's no incentive for 2nd order thinking from our politicians, since the electorate doesn't go beyond 1st order. Further, pre-existing assumptions are usually backed by 1st order thinking, but not 2nd.
> 1st order thinking dominates our politics and economics.
At least in U.S. politics, we have a surplus of second order thinking. We can't get mundane immediate compromises made because people are worried about identities, factions, and trust issues, which are all second order concerns.
For instance, it's not controversial to think that H1B visas are a mess, but legislation on specific immigration reform tends to get stymied by the desire for comprehensive immigration reform. Why not just fix one immigration problem? Because immigration proponents and restrictionists do not trust each other that the piecemeal reforms they want will be passed the next time around.
The same pattern comes up in plenty of other controversial issues such as abortion, tax reform, and lately judicial appointments.
> The ability to think through problems to the second, third, and nth order—or what we will call second-order thinking for short—is a powerful tool that supercharges your thinking.
Clearly it should be called higher-order thinking.
I would be quite happy to see these kinds of concepts rolled into one.
Looking back, most times I heard "higher order thinking" at school, I feel like they meant "thinking at a higher level of abstraction" (as I would describe it now).
You could make an argument that the kind of "nth derivative thinking" identified here is similar though.
"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 ;)
Just make sure though that you don't end up in 'paralysis by analysis'.
Sometimes, the bullish people that don't overthink things end up in far greater situation (through a rollercoaster) than if they just sat there and pondered about all the consequences.
I love to do this, keep iterating on n-th order thoughts, figuring out emergent behavior etc etc (systems mapping is actually a quite useful technique to do this) but at some point you need to scale it back down to the 1st order to actually get things done.
It's fun to fantasize where the industry will be heading 10-30 years from now, but figuring out what needs to be done tomorrow is more important.
Honest question, just for the sake of respectful debate, not trying to be obnoxious:
Can you actually derive emergent properties from nth-order thinking? I think they're both fascinating topics, but when I think about emergent properties of human biology, I struggle to imagine how I could have derived them from nth-order logic. To me, emergent properties seem like something you have to observe first, not something that you can reach from any kind of reason. Emergent properties are so awe-inspiring precisely because you can't predict them when you go down a level or two.
The best way to exercise second order thinking is to play turn based games like chess or even magic the gathering. You can’t be good at those games without considering actions several turns ahead and aggregating a tremendous amount of knowledge about the game, and you get almost immediate feedback on how good your thought process actually was.
Temporal thinking is something that needs to be exercised. It's relatively easy to think 'what if', 'and then what' but much harder to think these through when each next level overwrites the previous one, it's not a matter of adding up the effects of static layers. Successive effects invalidate former ones to varying degrees. It's really just running thought experiments, but running them deeper and simulating for longer time periods.
The most visual demonstration of most of these talking points is in the game of Go. Being able to 'read' the board is seeing the good/bad outcome of a world of possibilities.
The other really good comment made was about quantifying second order effects. Being able to imagine higher order effects without being able to estimate them leads to analysis paralysis.
So you're successfully applying 2nd level order thinking on your job. Other's don't do it. You're working towards your goal. Achieving your 2nd level order thinking successes.
But the rest of your colleagues don't understand what you're doing. They don't see your vision. They live in the 1st order thinking world. To them your choices don't make sense. They don't understand how the successes came from the 2nd level choices.
They'll say: "Why are you eating a salad? You're hungry! Take a chocolate bar! It has much more calories so it will better solve your problem."
You try to explain. They don't get it. They wave it off like some ridiculous story.
How can you effectively sell your 2nd order thinking ideas to 1st order thinking people?
Another way to look at Second-Order thinking is whether someone can understand C pointers intuitively. Joel Spolsky once wrote that understanding pointers is an aptitude, and I believe he was right. It is the same concept as second-order thinking - being able to follow several layers of indirection. Recursion and regular expressions fall into this group as well. I find otherwise very bright individuals that don't have something in their brain that allows them to grasp these concepts. I think it is how the brain is wired, like good hand-eye coordination or fast memory recall (aka being witty). Just because your brain is good at one of those traits doesn't mean you are good at all of them.
[+] [-] busyant|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] spyckie2|7 years ago|reply
Smart decision making and persistent work is the X and Y axis of achievement.
Decision making (which broadly includes subjects like efficiency, policy, systems, problem solving, and design thinking) is the heart of efficiency gains for large organizations (not necessarily individuals, although there really shouldn't be a separation between the two).
Generally speaking, decision making falls into 2 categories - prioritization and policy. Prioritization is deciding what best to do out of the given options, and while policy (systems building) is building ecosystems that enable activity or work output.
2nd order thinking is the necessary requirement for policy/systems building. However, there's a lot more skills needed to enact good policy decisions, so this is just scratching the surface on the subject.
[+] [-] SquishyPanda23|7 years ago|reply
The key is not just sticking to things, but also having enough taste to know when to drop a problem.
[+] [-] johnnycab|7 years ago|reply
Whilst I admire determination, enthusiasm and persistence; if none of the ideas had come to fruition or contributed anything meaningful, it could have been misconstrued as gish gallop. It probably requires second-order thinking just to manage such a scenario, which is not uncommon.
[+] [-] agumonkey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigbadgoose|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjk166|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aphextron|7 years ago|reply
There are first level, direct thinkers. This is the lower 50% of all people, although everyone is capable of it. It is direct and without irony, sarcasm, or self reflection. Think slapstick comedy, or superhero movies.
The second level is in 4th wall breaking, analogy, simile, anything which takes "getting" the joke beyond the purely visual. Most people who consider themselves "smart" fall here. About the 50th to 90th percentile of intelligence/creativity.
Third level is hard to describe with words by it's nature. It's all about indirection. Not making an analogy, but taking the analogy for granted and riffing off of that. Most truly genius artists, comedians, musicians, scientists, etc. live at this level. Think the comedy of someone like Dave Chappelle, the music of Bob Dylan, or scientists like Stephen Hawking.
The fourth level is unattainable for humans as a constant state. The very best third level people can just barely get glimpses of it, and bring those glimpses back down for us to see. These are our all time great works of art, and generational scientific breakthroughs. Picasso, Bach, and Einstein are the archetypes here. But what we (the second level masses) are able to see is just a projection, like a 3 dimensional representation of a 4 dimensional shape. The effect is still mind-blowing, but unless you're at that 3rd level it's impossible to really conceive its' true nature. Genius is in the ability to translate those brief fleeting glimpses of the 4th level by a 3rd level person into something intelligible by the 2nd and 1st.
[+] [-] pferde|7 years ago|reply
"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
[+] [-] DontGiveTwoFlux|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatlover|7 years ago|reply
RDJ/Tony Stark would like a word with you.
[+] [-] disqard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xenihn|7 years ago|reply
2nd Level - Bojack Horseman
3rd Level - Moral Orel
4th Level - Xavier: Renegade Angel
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|7 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] mschuller|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Jonas
[2] https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo59...
[+] [-] pryce|7 years ago|reply
Even when an upstream cause for an issue is infective, (for example the young adult deaths from Rhuematic Fever in my country, New Zealand), there are many further upstream causes such as the level of insulation in housing, socioeconomic deprivation, the level of access to primary care physicians, access to transport, etc.
A crucial issue is whether the healthcare and economic system are geared to encourage or discourage addressing the most strongly associated upstream causes that are identified. In countries with established government-funded healthcare systems, options like public health campaigns and legislation are considered as tools that can potentially be brought to bear on these issues. In other countries where government-funded healthcare is not a norm, these options are less emphasised. In a system oriented towards private healthcare, often the approach leans more reactive than proactive, eg likely to be initiated as the response to a costly court ruling.
[+] [-] dTal|7 years ago|reply
The inability to account for second-order effects seems to be a chronic failure of the large-scale systems we build. I wonder if it's because specialization means that nobody understands or is in charge of the big picture. A old-fashioned generalist "village doctor" would understand the context of your existence because they were also in your social circle, while a modern GP's role in your life is highly abstracted. Or take capitalism - if you're mono-focused on making Widgets, then you neither know nor care that Widgets are causing trouble somewhere else in the world, and you will fight viciously against anyone telling you to make fewer Widgets.
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomuchequate|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alan-crowe|7 years ago|reply
The article notes that "It’s often easier to identify when people didn’t adequately consider the second and subsequent order impacts." That failure to consider the second order impacts is what Bastiat refers to as "That Which is Not Seen"
[+] [-] seleniumBubbles|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] alok-g|7 years ago|reply
>> We are bad at thinking this way in groups, relatively.
Wow! This seems to answer a long-standing question I have had. I think I can now work out the mathematics of this, given appropriate amount of time. I think this is it! Thanks.
[+] [-] mjburgess|7 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] evrydayhustling|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rygxqpbsngav|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js8|7 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] mjburgess|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hcarvalhoalves|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-Meadows/dp...
[+] [-] fogetti|7 years ago|reply
Socrates kept asking questions. That was his defining characteristic. We know how that went...
[+] [-] pojzon|7 years ago|reply
Very often men who were ahead of their times were prosecuted for being right.
[+] [-] markdog12|7 years ago|reply
Not a bad little book promoting 2nd order thinking in economics: https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson/
[+] [-] humanrebar|7 years ago|reply
At least in U.S. politics, we have a surplus of second order thinking. We can't get mundane immediate compromises made because people are worried about identities, factions, and trust issues, which are all second order concerns.
For instance, it's not controversial to think that H1B visas are a mess, but legislation on specific immigration reform tends to get stymied by the desire for comprehensive immigration reform. Why not just fix one immigration problem? Because immigration proponents and restrictionists do not trust each other that the piecemeal reforms they want will be passed the next time around.
The same pattern comes up in plenty of other controversial issues such as abortion, tax reform, and lately judicial appointments.
[+] [-] blattimwind|7 years ago|reply
Clearly it should be called higher-order thinking.
[+] [-] ausd123|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_thinking
I would be quite happy to see these kinds of concepts rolled into one.
Looking back, most times I heard "higher order thinking" at school, I feel like they meant "thinking at a higher level of abstraction" (as I would describe it now).
You could make an argument that the kind of "nth derivative thinking" identified here is similar though.
[+] [-] ilaksh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teekert|7 years ago|reply
Unless you want to make it look like a beneficial regime change but your actual wish is long term destabilization of a region ;)
[+] [-] karmakaze|7 years ago|reply
That's not the final order thought--it doesn't show 'what's in it for me?' There's got to be another 'why?'
[+] [-] radosc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keyle|7 years ago|reply
Sometimes, the bullish people that don't overthink things end up in far greater situation (through a rollercoaster) than if they just sat there and pondered about all the consequences.
[+] [-] vincentmarle|7 years ago|reply
It's fun to fantasize where the industry will be heading 10-30 years from now, but figuring out what needs to be done tomorrow is more important.
[+] [-] kaycebasques|7 years ago|reply
Can you actually derive emergent properties from nth-order thinking? I think they're both fascinating topics, but when I think about emergent properties of human biology, I struggle to imagine how I could have derived them from nth-order logic. To me, emergent properties seem like something you have to observe first, not something that you can reach from any kind of reason. Emergent properties are so awe-inspiring precisely because you can't predict them when you go down a level or two.
[+] [-] empath75|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] T-A|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contingencies|7 years ago|reply
Risk -> Risk 2210.
[+] [-] karmakaze|7 years ago|reply
The most visual demonstration of most of these talking points is in the game of Go. Being able to 'read' the board is seeing the good/bad outcome of a world of possibilities.
The other really good comment made was about quantifying second order effects. Being able to imagine higher order effects without being able to estimate them leads to analysis paralysis.
[+] [-] bartimus|7 years ago|reply
But the rest of your colleagues don't understand what you're doing. They don't see your vision. They live in the 1st order thinking world. To them your choices don't make sense. They don't understand how the successes came from the 2nd level choices.
They'll say: "Why are you eating a salad? You're hungry! Take a chocolate bar! It has much more calories so it will better solve your problem."
You try to explain. They don't get it. They wave it off like some ridiculous story.
How can you effectively sell your 2nd order thinking ideas to 1st order thinking people?
[+] [-] Nemi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idlewords|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peteradio|7 years ago|reply