Hi. 👋 My name is Brady.

I’m a crossover engineer - Mechanical ➡️ Software - currently building @ Rippling [we’re hiring].

The title of the blog - Nth Order - is a term that alludes to a hodgepodge of interests.

  • differential equations => Math 😍
  • network effects => Startups, technology, software
  • Second-order effects => Economics, decision-making, game theory
  • High-order abstractions => Computer science, communication, epistemology
  • Compounding exponentials => Investing, personal finance, knowledge
  • Other interests => reading, behavioral economics, behavioral psychology, manufacturing, city design, history of successful people, probability, Christianity, communication, propaganda, oxford commas, and leadership.

The tagline of the blog is consider further. I believe the path to wisdom begins with playfully engaging with ideas, humbly admitting ignorance, and always contextualizing new and near information with the old and far (stay evergreen). Considering further across any of those dimensions almost always yields interesting insights.

As part of the contract between writer and reader, I want to set some expectations for my posts.

  1. I’m not great at writing1. You know how a train-of-thought starts in one place…follows a sequence of linked ideas…and then finishes someplace completely different? My writing can be kinda like that. Except I am often guilty of omitting the “sequence of linked ideas” part. I may arrive at a conclusion, but forget the audience along the wayside. It can be jarring2.

    $$A \rightarrow B \rightarrow C \rightarrow D$$

    $$A \rightarrow … \rightarrow D$$

    What I can promise, is that I periodically go through and revise old posts to make implied connections more explicit. And over a long enough time-frame, this should happen less and less frequently.

  2. My posts often lack any sort of practical application whatsoever. This can be frustrating if you read blogs mostly for actionable insights. But I think of these posts as thought-experiments and fun explorations. I don’t pretend to have all the answers.

    What I can promise is that I’ll try to ask good questions3. Both good and bad questions can have good and bad answers. But a good answer to a bad question will steer you wrong more quickly than a bad answer to a good question.

    Quality begets quality.

  1. yet. growth mindset 😉📈 ↩︎

  2. the best visualization I can think of for this is a Silicon Valley scene where the main character, Richard, tries to explain his software to a room full of regular people (see clip).

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  3. asking good questions is surprisingly hard to do well - I am still on a learning journey in this area myself. ↩︎