notes-misc-secondOrderCorrections

it's easy for an outside observer, who is only monitoring a discussion about a topic, to get the wrong idea. One way this can happen is that the informed participants can say "Let's do less of X", not because X is a bad thing to do, but because X is (to the informed participants) so obviously good that they are doing too much of it.

Example: if you are reading business advice, often you hear things like "Beware of X", "X is stifling", "If we'd only do less X, look at all the great things that could happen". However, often the reason they are saying this is because X is done a lot, and often the reason for that is that it has real value. If you take these advice at face value, you may end up not doing much X at all, which would be bad. What the advisors really mean is "We want people to do some X, but not as much as they typically do today"

Example: in the stock market, perhaps some company's stock crashes by 20%. You might think, oh, what a bad company, the CEO messed up, they did something wrong. But perhaps the company's stock had simply overshot in the past because the company is doing so well. The 20% may really be just a 'correction', not indicative of any mistake on the company's part (and likewise, when a company's stock goes up, it might just be a correction).