A simple example of failing to do so and only considering the first level cause-effect:
"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".
Here's another one:
Caribbean plantation owners were tired of their relentless war against field rats – the rodents were eating into their precious sugar cane crops. Come 1872, a chap called W.B. Espaut had an original idea: why not bring over a few Indian mongooses – those unpretentious mammals known as enthusiastic rat hunters? Espaut travelled to India, had some mongooses captured and brought them to Jamaica. The problem – it soon turned out – was that the mongooses did not just kill rats; they killed birds, ate eggs, insects, useful reptiles, even small deer fawns. True, the mongooses also hunted and killed lots of rats; but they did not kill them all. In fact, the rodents continued to multiply – and so did the mongooses. Worse, both rats and mongooses carry a disease called leptospirosis, which can be lethal to humans. To cut a long story short, rather than getting rid of one pest, the hapless Hawaiians ended up with two.
I believe we encounter second-order thinking in mundane day-to-day activities too which are generally categorized as 'instinct'; Say we drop the key under the table and we know before hand that we would hit our head if we get up under the table and so we crawl back(Or may be we've hit our head earlier and it becomes reinforcement learning?).
Then there are tasks which are totally dependent upon multi-order thinking like a game of chess (or) most other brain games.
I wonder if we could create a system to collect different second-order thinking decisions for different day-to-day activities to serve as a decision making tool powered by collective human knowledge?
The Jamaican example "grabbed the attention of Hawaiian sugar cane planters, who also suffered from the rats. Bringing mongooses to Hawaii as natural pest exterminators seemed such an elegant idea. "
Or think chess - 'first order thinking' would make a move that merely escapes mate, or puts you in a position where another move immediately could be a great one; 'second order thinking' considers what the opponent will do from there (probably disallow the great move or threaten it back); etc.
Also, it's often practical to ignore 2nd order and higher terms, because then you have a linear function - something really easy to work with. Therefore, "2nd order effects" have effectively become synonymous to "non-linear effects".
Why does this remind me of Abbot and Costello?
"If y, then z" is second-order reasoning.
I’m not sure if this a false etymology, but it’s how I’ve always understood the term and I’ve met others who understand it this way as well.
I think the origin may be from linear regression with polynomial terms, which is very common in the medical sciences and social sciences. Terms like X1 x X2 are called interaction terms in that context and coefficients are often treated as quantifying the impact of a term on the result. Strictly speaking, the analogy would then be with any multivariate polynomial approximation, not just Taylor series.
Root cause analysis is a different thing.
A -> (caused) B
C -> D
When B and D occur (within a window) -> Error
It is that connection between B and D that needs to be discovered.
In the causal graph of entities interacting in a system, considering one element of the system, second-order thinking corresponds to considering effects on neighbors of that element which are caused by changes to that element itself.
Higher order thinking is a trap phrase for people who want to sound deep by filling in details on the fly from their imaginations in the clothing of science
Nothing evidence based supports any of this
To me this implies that thinking on a higher order is somewhat about stepping back and viewing the construct from a meta position. E.g. instead of thinking about how to address an imidiate problem by applying a bandaid, one order higher would be to think about the root causes and deal with the root of the problem. Even one order higher would be to think about which culture or systems of thinking allow for the good solving of such problems etc.