Sublime

Let’s look at two areas where second-order thinking can be used to great benefit: Prioritizing long-term interests over immediate gains Constructing effective arguments

“Lateral thinking or thematic thinking, the ability to take a lesson from one thing and transfer it to another, is one of the most important disciplines that any of us can cultivate.

It is the ability to think about your own thinking, to make judgments about your own judgments.

We know that, to solve difficult challenges, it is sometimes best not to seek a particular, prescriptive answer by reductive means, but instead to give people relevant skills and then trust them to find their way to an effective solution—one that can be altered and adapted as circumstances dictate. We can now see that by organizing our human system

identifying first principles: repeatedly asking “why?”

Second-order thinking, as valuable as it is, must be tempered in one important way: You can’t let it lead to the paralysis of the Slippery Slope Effect, the idea that if we start with action A, everything after is a slippery slope down to hell, with a chain of consequences B, C, D, E, and F.

how the mind of a great intuitionist such as Feynman operated. He, too, focused on principles first, building off examples that cut straight to the heart of what the problem represented rather than focusing on superficial features. His ability to do this was also built off an impressive library of stored physics and math patterns. His mental calcul