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Showing posts from August, 2020

COVID Edition: Proof of how a chain is only as strong as its weakest link

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Once upon a time, a few mistakes ago, there lived (and still lives) a man who decided to take the Pandemic very lightly. What happened to him? He contracted the virus. Not only that, he passed it on to his entire family (we live in India - so you can assume it was a joint one). His wife, brother, sister-in-law, children and parents. All of whom tested positive even though they've been staying home since the start of the year. That brings us to the question - So what? The point is, one person's recklessness can result in an entire family being affected by it, in the process rendering everyone else's efforts of try to stay safe a waste . The lockdown has been tough on everyone for some time and things have been abnormal (or should we say - the new normal) for longer than we expected. However, as sensible adults and citizens of a country we know (or rather hope) is trying do it's best in controlling the spread of the virus, we must take it upon ourselves to try as hard as

Second Order Thinking

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Very often it so happens that you encounter a problem and arrive at a solution which appears to be the most logical one - an outcome of the First Order Thinking.  Every action has a consequence. And every consequence has another consequence. The premise of  Second Order Thinking  is that every solution, if not evaluated thoroughly, will have a bigger consequence which has worse side effects than the original one, thus possessing the potential to mess up the ecosystem (imagine being asked to rework and made additions to a code which already works perfectly fine. What you will end up doing may not only give you the desired outcome but may also make more undesired changes to the output). Simply put, the prevention of this kind of a "screw up" is what calls for Second Order Thinking.  Let me give you two examples which lacked Second Order Thinking: