Comment by alphazard

> This seems like an arbitrary distinction.

Yes, it's like a dumb person trying to rationalize why a smart person made better decisions. The actual answer is that they considered more consequences, predicted consequences more accurately, and further into the future. But a dumb person not considering the infinitude of that situation might say "ahh it was the thing after the thing, if I just predicted one more step, I would have made the same decision".

When a person or thing is more intelligent than you, there's no way to distinguish one step ahead from n steps ahead. All you know is that they are making higher quality decisions. If you're doing second order thinking, you will be outsmarted by people doing third order thinking, and so on.