It's a fun essay, but because of the way it's written, a reader could easily confuse "second order thinking" with "understand why a decision was made before planning on changing it." I think the author distinguishes them, but the reader might not notice the distinction because of how it's written.
Here's how I would distinguish these two ideas (hopefully the author would agree, but no guarantees):
* Second-order thinking is the ability to understand the impacts of the impacts of a change. If you're playing a chess game, looking only 1 move ahead (just looking at the impacts) means you'll lose against even a mediocre player. The better you can foresee later impacts, the better the decisions are likely to be. In the real world, there aren't a limited number of moves and no one knows all state, so you can't really look ahead multiple stages for all possibilities. Nevertheless, trying is really important. The close says: "The first step before modifying an aspect of a system is to understand it. Observe it in full. Note how it interconnects with other aspects, including ones that might not be linked to you personally. Learn how it works, and then propose your change."
* "Chesterton's Fence" is a useful rule-of-thumb to get at least a sliver of second-order thinking. Basically, if someone else did something, make sure you understand why they bothered to do it before you undo it. That exercise will help give you a bigger picture & may reveal something important that you hadn't considered.
At least, I think those are some of the points the author is trying to get across. If I've totally misunderstood things, I'm sure someone here will correct me :-).
This is exactly what I was thinking. I was intrigued by this idea of second order thinking, but after finishing the article I didn't think that I had seen an example of it.
Here's how I would distinguish these two ideas (hopefully the author would agree, but no guarantees):
* Second-order thinking is the ability to understand the impacts of the impacts of a change. If you're playing a chess game, looking only 1 move ahead (just looking at the impacts) means you'll lose against even a mediocre player. The better you can foresee later impacts, the better the decisions are likely to be. In the real world, there aren't a limited number of moves and no one knows all state, so you can't really look ahead multiple stages for all possibilities. Nevertheless, trying is really important. The close says: "The first step before modifying an aspect of a system is to understand it. Observe it in full. Note how it interconnects with other aspects, including ones that might not be linked to you personally. Learn how it works, and then propose your change."
* "Chesterton's Fence" is a useful rule-of-thumb to get at least a sliver of second-order thinking. Basically, if someone else did something, make sure you understand why they bothered to do it before you undo it. That exercise will help give you a bigger picture & may reveal something important that you hadn't considered.
At least, I think those are some of the points the author is trying to get across. If I've totally misunderstood things, I'm sure someone here will correct me :-).