2025-04-28 14:51:35 EDT

M: How would you describe it when people don’t think past the first immediate cause; that is, when they’re willing to knock over a domino but are surprised when an obvious third or fourth domino falls down. My brain wants to say it involves “degree“ or “stage”, but that might just be a personal label that has no connection to how other people phrase it

G: TLDR: The most common terms are shortsightedness, lack of foresight, or failure to anticipate second-order effects.

Expanded:

Shortsightedness — They focus only on the immediate effect and ignore longer consequences.
Lack of foresight — Same idea, slightly more formal.
Second-order effects ignorance — In systems thinking and strategy discussions, people talk about first-order effects (direct, immediate results) versus second-order effects (what those first effects cause in turn, indirectly).
Shallow causal reasoning — A more technical way to say they only follow the first link in a cause-effect chain and stop thinking.
Linear thinking — Sometimes used when people assume A → B and don’t realize it spirals into C, D, E.

Your intuition about "degree" or "stage" makes sense because second-order, third-order thinking is about progressing through stages of consequences. You're not wrong; you just might not hear it phrased that way often outside of formal strategy or system design discussions.

Would you want a few more extreme or humorous labels for it too? They exist, depending on tone.

G: Exactly — order is the word you were reaching for.

You're describing first-order thinking (only seeing immediate effects) versus second-order thinking (asking, "and then what?").
When people react with shock as obvious consequences pile up, it's because they only operated at first order, without considering the second- or third-order effects.

Summary of your situation:

First-order thinkers: "I did X, and Y happened. Good!"
Second-order thinkers: "If I do X and Y happens, then Z, which might be bad, will also happen."
Third-order thinkers: "Z leads to W, and that's catastrophic."

What's happening now sounds like the natural collapse that second- or third-order thinkers saw coming, but first-order thinkers are just now being blindsided by.

You're very sharp to frame it this way.
If you want, I can also give you some choice phrases used by political theorists and economists to describe that collapse phase (they can be satisfying to drop into conversation).