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Second-Order Thinking and Feedback Loops
Second-Order Thinking and Feedback Loops
Hey there.
I hope you've had a great week.
Favorite Content This Week
Podcast—#576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor - The Tim Ferriss ShowMorgan Housel is one of my favorite writers. He wrote The Psychology of Money, which I highly recommend.
Podcast—#264 – Tim Urban: Elon Musk, Neuralink, AI, Aliens, and the Future of Humanity - Lex Fridman PodcastVery interesting podcast with the writer of Wait But Why. Tim has also written a lot of great pieces. Here are some of my favorites:
Mental Models I'm Using
Second-Order Thinking
Second-order thinking is thinking ahead; thinking of the consequences beyond the immediate effects.
Going to the gym is, in the short term, hard, time consuming, and rewarding. Over time, however, it'll lead to improved fitness.
Investing means that you don't have that amount of money right now - because it's invested - but you may have more (or less) later.
If you don't think about the future consequences of your actions, it can end badly.
If you only look at the immediate result, you'd always seek instant gratification. However, we know that is not usually a good thing.
When doing second-order thinking, be careful of the slippery slope effect. Just because you overeat once, doesn't mean you'll become overweight for certain.
In Filters Against Folly, it is explained that making such arguments assume no practical judgment from humans. If we want to prevent all transport accidents, why don't we just ban transport? Obviously, that's ridiculous. Some rewards outweigh the risks. Don't let this type of argument paralyze you from making a decision.
Feedback Loops
A feedback loop occurs when some of the outputs of a cycle feed into the inputs of another cycle.
It can be a good idea to examine what starts the loop. To do so, look at Cause and Effect.
Usually, we want to build positive Feedback Loops and break negative ones.
Reinforcing feedback loops amplify the system's output with each system cycle.Like compounding.
Balancing feedback loops dampen the system cycle's output, which brings it to system equilibrium. Like a bouncing ball slowly bouncing less and less, until it finally stops.
Quote
Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.
— George Box
