Do we want to encourage mindless risk taking?

last SG · 2003-07-30T22:28:56+00:00

Bear, I take it that CSJ is Chee Soon Juan? He is something of an embarrassment to the psychological community. What, exactly, happened?

Gedanken SG

Hi, Atobe, my apologies for taking so long to respond - the people at the office actually expected me to do some work today! Mr. Green Anyway, it is always a pleasure to engage in some proper debate. It is all too easy to add one-liners to a topic or to go off-topic altogether, something that I am often guilty of myself!

Is there any formula in making the decision to take a calculated risk? Well, if I were to take a stab at defining a formula, it would be something like:

Decision index = (Utility of risk X Likelihood of success) / Cost of risk

where the decision index would be some level at which one decides to take a risk, while the utility of the risk is the value of the result if things go right. The cost of the risk is the loss in the result when things do not pay off and also the amount of lost effort in taking the risk.

Of course, the values placed with any of the elements of the equation are subjective. A person may have a tendency to overestimate the cost of the risk or underestimate the likelihood of success. The key is really to get Singaporeans to make their estimations more realistic - the acknowledgement of "kiasuism" in Singaporeans is an indicator of their skewed estimations in this respect.

The unfortunate situation is that Singaporeans are generally not brought up to be risk-takers. At school we are brought up to shut up and listen. In the very first lesson I taught at secondary school, I started off by firing questions at my students, in order to gauge their progress within the syllabus. I swear that when the questions stopped, I could hear a pin drop. At that point I laid down the law in my class - if I asked a question, my students were to take a stab at giving an answer. As long as some reasoning could be provided for the answers, no answer was to be labelled as stupid, by the other students or by myself. Within a week I had my students actively engaging in the lessons, but then other teachers came along and attempted to instruct me to keep my classes silent. I am afraid that my response to them was not very polite.

The convention in teaching is that students are expected to be quiet and listen, and only do something when they are instructed to do so. This policy tends to follow them much through their lives, and they have the initiative trained out of them. Getting back to the topic, the key here is that initiative always involves an element of risk, because it deviates from the tried and tested. I find it entirely feasible that our "kiasuism" is a reaction to the way we live our lives according to tight restrictions. After all, it is only human to try to get what one wants by all means necessary if what we want is normally disallowed. Singaporeans may therefore be no less of a risk-taking people than any other, and the difference is only that we do it in petty, annoying and dysfunctional ways.

But again I digress - sincere apologies.

The key point in Lee's article is that if one is going to take a risk, there needs to be a point to it. To put it flippantly, with parachuting, it is a way of getting from A to B. With bungee jumping, however, you never quite get to B. Mr. Green

As an extension to the above point, one would need to know when to take a risk, and equally if not more importantly, when not to take a risk. If I could get a battalion to their objective safely and quickly enough by road, why would I want to risk a parachute deployment?

Apparently this post is too long, so I shall have to split it.

Gedanken SG

Now where was I? Ah, yes...

Probably one of the most important things that I learnt from the Commandos is when to switch off. When we were not required to do our thing, we were absolute sloths ( I remember being almost two hours ahead of schedule for a LRRP deployment once - we stopped in the middle of a pile of dense vegetation, laid down a groundsheet and had a few games of blackjack Mr. Green ). More importantly, we learned never to take unnecessary risks - there would be enough time for risk-taking when the action started.

Admittedly, one risk I took that did not pay off was upon enlistment. I was not a particularly enthusiastic enlistee, and going into the vocational interview, I had a rather stern-looking sergeant ask me, "So, do you want to go into Commandos?". Hoping to show him an attitude that he would disapprove of, I asked him if I had a choice and when he said no, I said, "So what the f*** are you asking me for?". I only found out to my chagrin over the next two and a half years that this was exactly the attitude they were looking for. Mr. Green

Once again dragging myself back to the topic, I will try to address your question of how one comes up with a formula to determine what constitutes calculated risks and what constitutes recklessness.

I think that there are two key differences between risk-taking and recklessness. First, there is the amount of preparation involved. I had no real problem with parachuting because the ground training over two weeks more than made sure we knew the drill and that we checked and double-checked everything. I would be leery of taking a civilian course where the training is covered over the space of a few hours, and where the safety procedures and preparation are, in my opinion at least, inadequate.

The other difference lies in the reason for taking the risk. If there is no reason to take a risk, it does become something of an indulgence. Coming back to Lee's reference to motor sports, the best comeback I can provide to that is to quote three-time Formula 1 world champion Sir Jack Brabham: "I never drive any faster than it takes to win a race.". If you already comfortably leading a race, why push the car so hard that you could end up breaking something and losing the race? On the other hand, if you are lagging behind, you may as well push it and see what happens.

There is a third factor which is something of an interaction between the first two - how much of a risk do you take? The masochist in me loves being in a tight corner, because I can then play it like I have nothing to lose because, well, I have nothing to lose. However, if the situation is comfortable, I tend to avoid shifting the pieces that are already in place - there is no point in wrecking things when I have no need to. To take a risk for the simple sake of it, to get an adrenaline rush, is the opposite end of the scale to "kiasuism"; one approach is as mindless as the other, and both equally lack function.

To tie all of this back to the topic of Remaking Singapore, the problem here is that in Singaporean society, you are expected to not rock the boat - yes sir, no sir, three bags full is the way to go, and independent thought tends to get you marked as a loose cannon on deck. Obnoxious, recalcitrant gits like yours truly generally persist on doing things their own way, but speaking from experience, that does not make life easy for them in Singapore. When they decide that they have had enough and find greener pastures, where their ability to come up with fresh ideas is encouraged, the government labels them quitters. The sad reality is that Singapore is set up to drive away the people best equipped to take the country into the league into which its economy has grown.

On the other hand, we would not be well served by the knee jerk reaction of tying to go to the other end of the scale. That is like plunging a freezing man into boiling water. Certainly, Singaporeans need to be less timid than they are presently, but going back to the equation I cited above, if one were to consider taking a risk, a few questions need to be asked:

1. What stands to be lost if the risk was not taken?
2. What stands to be lost if the risk is taken?
3. How do 1 and 2 weigh up against each other?
4. What proportion of the risk is controllable?
5. What backup measures are there should things not go according to plan?

If the loss is greater when the risk is not taken, and if there are measures already in place to control the situation if things go wrong, by all means go ahead and take the risk. But if there is no point to it, i.e. the answer to 1 is of too low a value, taking the risk would not be the smartest thing to do.

In the situation against the Guardsmen, the recommended course of action in training, if you remember your BMT, would have been either to execute an ambush drill or to fall back in leapfrogging pairs. Because we were outnumbered almost three to one, either course of action would not have had good results for us - in the case of falling back in pairs, we would have effectively been outnumbered five to one. My calculation at the time was that they saw four of us and could not know how many had gone behind the bush ahead of us. From my experiences with Guardsmen (this was my third exercise against them), I expected them to know the drill as well as I did, which meant that doing the tried and tested was something they would likely have been ready for. Again from my experience, the drawback of the Guardsmen was that they rarely deviated from the drill, and I was prepared to take the risk that the Guards' leader would not think as I did. Upon these considerations, I decided to propose this plan to my team, and it worked. It therefore fit the definition of a calculated risk.
A true calculated risk will most likely not match the average person's definition of a risk. The philosophy behind taking a calculated risk is to ensure that the cards are stacked firmly in your favour. Gather as much knowledge of the situation as you can and work out the process so clearly that you can see it happening. Fortune does not so much favour the bold as it does the bold and prepared. A calculated risk is not a question of going, "If I do this, then this will happen, and then this will happen.". Instead, it would be more like "If I do this, these two things might happen. In case of the first event, I can do this, and in case of the second event, I can do that", and so on and so forth, following a branching structure that covers all possible contingencies.

In the case of parachuting, the sequence would be, "If I look up and see a fully open canopy, everything is fine and I can prepare for a landing. However, if I look up and see a partially open canopy, I cover my reserve, pull the ripcord, grab the reserve canopy and throw it out in front of me as far as I can so that it does not get tangled in the main canopy. On the other hand, if I see no canopy at all, I just pull the ripcord. If nothing works, I grab my ankles, pull my legs up to my chest and kiss my precious ass goodbye.". Mr. Green

Well, you get the idea - cover all contingencies before you decide to do something where the outcome is not given. That is a calculated risk.

laser51088 SG

"As young people, we are willing to take risks but only for causes we think are worthy. But there are no viable alternatives." Fantastic. . . I agree totally absolute, expresses my view PERFECTLY.

PAP sux, but the opposition sux worse

I still believe, like I said somewhere else previously:

An opposition political party that wants to succeed in Singapore must consist of members who have built up their own lives well AND already be known to the public outside of Politics.

The opposition politician can be a well-known leader in the business sector or a wel-known leader of an NGO or other organisation, but he has to be known OUTSIDE politics. But he or she alone will not gain the confidence of the masses. He or she must be surrounded by men or women of equal calibre AND good public credentials.

A party of such people will have the confidence of the people. Contesting during elections must be carried out as the current opposition parties are doing. Limit themselves to a few constituencies. Singaporeans may not like the PAP, but the confidence of the masses still lie in the PAP and the opposition party must respect that. By competing only in selected few constituencies, voters are assured that the PAP remains in power and will be more willing to elect an opposition party politician or politicians.

Assoc. Prof. Lee Wei LIng herself comes from a sheltered environment and thus may fail to realise that some people do have unique or different hobbies and take part in more adventurous activities on a regular basis simply because it is their passion. I feel that risk taking begins with activities that involve risk. Prof. Lee has failed to consider bungee jumping enthusiasts, and instead only chosen to look at 1-off bungee jumpers. While there are risk, it is certainly not a mindless risk, especially for enthusiast.

A willingness to take risks for the sake of one's passion is very important to me.

I agree with her that only calculated risks are worth taking. But I disagree that anything can ever be a mindless risk. Whether a risk is a mindless one or not is relative to the person taking the risk. If a bungee jumper has decided that the fun, thrill and excitement of bunjee jumping is worth him taking the risk, then that is a calculated risk. If a businessman decides to open a shop in China because everyone else is doing the same, that is NOT a calculated risk.

An example of how our beliefs and passion justify our taking of risks is commandos who don the red beret because they believe that what they are fighting for is worth defending. However, if a person becomes a commando only because it looks and sounds cool to be one, then that is not a risk that is justified nor calculated.

my two cents

Gedanken SG

Hmm - some good points here.

Originally posted by laser51088:
An opposition political party that wants to succeed in Singapore must consist of members who have built up their own lives well AND already be known to the public outside of Politics.

The opposition politician can be a well-known leader in the business sector or a wel-known leader of an NGO or other organisation, but he has to be known OUTSIDE politics. But he or she alone will not gain the confidence of the masses. He or she must be surrounded by men or women of equal calibre AND good public credentials.

A party of such people will have the confidence of the people. Contesting during elections must be carried out as the current opposition parties are doing. Limit themselves to a few constituencies. Singaporeans may not like the PAP, but the confidence of the masses still lie in the PAP and the opposition party must respect that. By competing only in selected few constituencies, voters are assured that the PAP remains in power and will be more willing to elect an opposition party politician or politicians.

The advantage of the PAP over the opposition is that it has had a demonstrated record of being right more often than it has been wrong. As the Bear has pointed out, the infighting between Chee and Chiam has done their party no good. Why would we trust a party that cannot even sort out their own problems, much less that of the nation at large?

Assoc. Prof. Lee Wei LIng herself comes from a sheltered environment and thus may fail to realise that some people do have unique or different hobbies and take part in more adventurous activities on a regular basis simply because it is their passion. I feel that risk taking begins with activities that involve risk. Prof. Lee has failed to consider bungee jumping enthusiasts, and instead only chosen to look at 1-off bungee jumpers. While there are risk, it is certainly not a mindless risk, especially for enthusiast.

A willingness to take risks for the sake of one's passion is very important to me.

I agree with her that only calculated risks are worth taking. But I disagree that anything can ever be a mindless risk. Whether a risk is a mindless one or not is relative to the person taking the risk.

Perhaps "mindless risk" is a bit of a misnomer. Nonetheless, I have outlined the problems with the taking of risks for its own sake in my reply to Atobe.

An example of how our beliefs and passion justify our taking of risks is commandos who don the red beret because they believe that what they are fighting for is worth defending. However, if a person becomes a commando only because it looks and sounds cool to be one, then that is not a risk that is justified nor calculated.

That seems a bit black-and-white. I fit into neither of those categories. I treasured my time wearing that beret because a) I was allowed to delight in the mischief that I had hitherto been castigated for at school, b) I was given the leeway to do the job in the best manner that I personally saw fit and c) we were treated as professionals in the most true sense of the word.

My two cents, in the vain hope that it holds its value better than the rupiah or the ringgit. Mr. Green

Atobe SG

Hi Gendaken, it is difficult to stay connected when yanked out of the comfort of our environment to some remote island living out of a container cabin. My apologies for disconnecting the flow which you have so nicely created.

You are quite a colorful character, commando trained psychologist, with a background in teaching too; little wonder that our SAF has been reputed to be a bunch of motivated new kids on the block especially with guys like you around.

Have you ever considered entering the Political arena ?

After placing my post, the thoughts of how I will respond to my piece if it had been placed by someone else I realized that one could actually come up with a formula in calculating the risk of ones action. You certainly have put it quite nicely.

However, reflecting on this formula, I asked if anyone would actually run through such a process of evaluation before taking any decision towards any action.

Some actions are second nature and contain as much risks, and accidents do happen when one take for granted the actions in performing daily chores and become careless.

Will this careless action be seen as reckless action, or simply inattention ?

When in an urgent emergency or pressing situation that is confronting anyone, will one also take the leisurely pace of reviewing the formula to evaluate the risks ?

In most cases, when time permit a deliberate decision, as when one decide on switching career, or embarking on a new enterprise, I believe that this evaluation process will follow the manner in which you have illustrated.

Bungee jumping can be seen as a Sport, as much as BMX bicycles competitions, motor cross racing, in-line skate stunts, boxing, wrestling, surf boarding, scuba diving, or any other form of sports that involves the human body to any kind of possible injury or death when events turned awry.

By being involved in such sports, does it determine one of reckless action for failing to meet the minimum standards of objectivity ?

What about the human endeavor in sailing across the oceans alone, and challenging mother nature in the open sea ?

If we follow Associate Prof Lee Wei Lings line of thought, the very idea of sailing across the oceans alone, in a small sailing craft will be mindless recklessness.

The torturous period of loneliness, or the dangers of sailing into a rough storm, will hardly give anyone an experience of an adrenalin rush.

It is little wonder that in Singapore, there are little individual or team efforts in any form of risk taking whether in the area of sports, adventure, or enterprise.

At least not until the team effort to conquer Mount Everest, and the successful walk to the North Pole by a Singaporean (ex-Malaysian Citizen).

Could this be due to the general attitude of Singaporeans to be cautious, and most of us carry a view that most activities are dangerous, and hence to participate in it will be stupidly reckless ?

So, why try ? Better to watch others, then ourselves die while trying.

Could this explain for the Singapore Authorities playing the role of nanny to prevent Singaporeans from injuring ourselves ?

So it is better to prevent the gathering in Public in any numbers larger then Two Persons (so ban public gathering without license), ban any sports activities that will injure the Participants (so ban BMX stunt competition), ban Bar Top Dancing so as to prevent sudden deaths from any possible outcome.

With over protective guiding hands, Singaporeans have always been made to feel secure that the correct decisions will ALWAYS be made for them by a supposedly benevolent One-Party Ruled State.

After more then 38 years of a nanny State Environment, suddenly now, with the pressures of new economic reality, Singaporeans are now pushed to be risks takers; to venture beyond our shores, to be adventurous, to think out of the box.

Sadly, many remain averse to this idea, afraid of a new environment of unfamiliar joblessness, unprepared for retrenchment as one near the vulnerable age of 40 plus.

This general Singaporean attitude of kiasi-ism is largely a result of 38 years of the Governments own kiasi-ism of a population turning against them; hence their need to control almost every aspect of Singaporean Life.

It is unfortunate, but we do not need the likes of Assoc Prof Lee to put her two cents worth with her contribution concerning mindless risk takings.

While all risks need not be taken mindlessly, one has at times to step into the unknown in a mindless manner as Indianna Jones did when he took one step into a chasm, only to reveal a bridge, that allowed him to cross.

At times, one has to trust in one's own instinct and experiences.

Gedanken SG

Hi, Atobe. Hmm - I cannot imagine that a container cabin would constitute particularly civilised living. My commiserations. Sorry for taking so long to post a response work has kept me rather busy of late.

I toyed around with the idea of politics at university, but I took a calculated risk. Mr. Green The party that asked me to run was not very well organised, and I declined their invitation to run for elections with them. Instead, I stuck around as an advisor to the party and helped design their campaign. The key element that I designed into their campaign was to bring under public scrutiny the lack of action on the incumbent student union president's part, and sure enough, it worked and we won the election. On the day the results came out, I warned the new president that the challengers in the next year's election would have seen this and would use the same tactic on her, and so she should spend a certain proportion of her time out and about, being seen by the student population to be doing something. Sadly, she did not take that bit of advice and spent most of her term behind locked doors in a legal battle with the union manager instead. As a matter of course, she lost the next election.

By that time, I had decided that politics was not an activity that I wanted to be involved in for a number of reasons. First, the personalities that I had to deal with were ruled more by their hearts and gonads than they were by their heads - that made working with them difficult, if not impossible. Second, there is only one hard and fast rule of politics: you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. My time is much better spent on things other than dealing with this factor. Finally, I suppose that this is the influence of the Commandos, but I take invisibility to be my most powerful weapon. During this president's term, I used my influence with the student union to get the academic staff to revise some of their policies, in particular instituting a "three strikes and you're out rule" that applied to students who disrupted lectures. The academic staff were terrified of student union action if they threw students out of lecture theatres, and so I brokered a very quiet agreement between the union and the staff to respect the three strikes rule. If a student was thrown out of the class after three warnings, the union would not back the student's complaints. After brokering that deal, I had my head of department pretty much at my beck and call. Mr. Green If I was visible, my actions would have been under so much public scrutiny and interference that I would never have been able to get anything done.

Ultimately, after a year of experimentation, I decided that politics was not really my thing, and decided to leave it to people with bigger egos. Besides, my current role has me traipsing between Melbourne and Los Angeles, with a few other countries thrown in down the track, and I rather like the current setup.

I read through Lee's article again, and I can see how the polemic tone of the article could raise adverse reactions. Being one of those who believes in Ernest Hemingway's claim that "Auto racing, bullfighting and mountain climbing are the only true sports - the rest are just games", I was annoyed at Lee's treatment of racing. That, however, was more a case of poor writing and choice of analogy than anything else. Factoring all of that out, the key point still makes sense.

In my opinion, the key statement here is "The former kind of risk-taking behaviour is what we want to encourage. Only if we have enough of such men and women will we be able to compete with the rest of the world as venture capitalists, scientists, etc.". It is not so much that there is anything wrong with bungee jumping or motor sports (although the poor standard of Lee's writing does seem to point things in that direction), but that the propensity to take risks for its own sake may not only be inapplicable, it may be hazardous.

One of my favourite movie quotes comes from Ronin: "Lady, I never walk into a place that I don't know how to walk out of". It encapsulates the spirit of calculated risk-taking: never allow yourself to get into a dead end. Whenever I supervise an Honours student's thesis (this is the first year since 1998 that I have not taken a student on), I question their research design before they even begin to try to propose it. I take them through every step of the process from beginning to end and ask them what they expect to happen at each stage. After that I ask them what they would do if the expected result did not eventuate. Every single time, my students get stumped by the second question, because they fail to come up with contingency plans and develop options for themselves in the event that something goes wrong. Some students have listened and learned to plan accordingly; these are the ones who eventually understood the reason for having to produce a thesis. A few did not listen; they all passed, but their results could have been much better.

What stood out about this latter group of students was that they were firmly stuck on the idea that their thesis must be earth-shattering. My response to them was invariably that such a goal is fine, as long as it does not come at the cost of the basic obligation to produce a piece of research that is as close to technically perfect as possible. Again, an adage in motor racing is, To finish first, first you must finish (it seems rather odd that many of these truisms come from the sport that Lee pans). The students who did not keep this operating principle in mind ended up committing errors that first-year undergraduate students would not have been forgiven for, all because they were too busy trying to prove that they had found the Holy Grail of their field. The old phrase ho kwa bo ho chia perfectly characterizes such theses; at face value they showed great promise, but once the markers looked into the detail, the deficiencies in the research showed up even more clearly against the intention of the study.

This is not to say that I discouraged my students from doing anything special with their research; I simply ensured that they were aware of the basic requirements to be fulfilled before they got on to the fancy stuff. The last thesis I supervised is a prime case of this. A month into supervision, I looked at the concept of the study and realized that it was in fact an attempt to conduct a Masters thesis within the constraints of an Honours thesis. I knew that it would go one of two ways: it would be a brilliant victory if it worked, or a complete disaster if it did not. Over the next six months, my mission was to constantly pull my student back to the essential principles of research design and statistical analysis, making sure the product was not technically flawed in any way. Ultimately, it worked my student got First-Class Honours, and would probably have gotten the highest mark in the class had she not handed the damned thing in a week late.

- continued in next post -

Gedanken SG

The difference between this last student and the others is that she understood and accepted, albeit reluctantly, the fundamental requirement of calculated risk-taking: before you go out and do anything extraordinary, make sure that all of the ordinary bases are covered.

Writing a thesis is not a matter of making a split-second decision; it is, however, no less a matter of making a timely decision, because a false move could take months to fix. One of the lecturers who sends her students my way has specifically said that she does so because of my reputation for forward planning, by which I ensure that costly mistakes do not occur down the track, in the course of bending every available rule to push the students performance envelopes.

This highlights the nature of calculated risk-taking as a happy medium that needs to be struck. On one end of the scale we have the mentality that goes, "Oh, no, we must not deviate from the ordinary; let's stick with what has worked in the past". On the other end, we have, "This is boring - let's do something completely different". The danger of the first approach is that at the rate business, and indeed life in general, progress these days, standing still guarantees that you will go backwards; on the other hand, throwing out the baby with the bathwater by invalidating things that genuinely work is equally unwise.

To tie all of this back to Lee's point, I would not necessarily decide to exclude somebody from my team if he bungee jumps. However, if this individual was so addicted to the rush of bungee jumping that he went out of his way in other arenas to get the same rush, I would have grave concerns about how he would affect my team's work. I certainly would not want some cowboy coming along and derailing a carefully laid strategy simply for the thrill of it.

In the course of writing this post, I have realized (to some embarrassment) that we have in fact glossed over one of the basic tenets of this discussion. Going back to Remaking Singapore, are we talking about risk-taking, or are we in fact talking about lateral thinking, of which risk-taking is a part?

Captain Roger Courtney, RN, said to recruits of the Folboat Section of the Special Boat Squadron in 1942, Are you TOUGH? If so, get out. I need f***ers with intelligence.. Being gung-ho is not all it takes to conquer new frontiers. It is only part of the equation under the aegis of lateral thinking, so that workable solutions may be devised for problems that arise. To generate a novel thought, one must have the willingness to risk deviating from the tried and tested; keep in mind, however, that this willingness is subservient to the goal of generating the optimal solution. Coming up with a new approach for the sake of novelty may lead one to miss the point of the entire exercise, which would make it a wasted effort and would jeopardize everything that had hitherto been carefully established.

Atobe SG

Hi Gendaken, from your very interesting post, you certainly show that you are one of those few individuals who have your life under control.

You should reconsider providing your expertise and experience to any one of the Opposition Parties, as they certainly do lack willing and calculated risk takers to provide them with back-up research, objectivity, and sense of direction in the execution of their goals.

In any case, from your travel pattern, I doubt if you will be able to make it.

Concerning politics are for those with a super ego complex - I am not so certain about this, although the "super ego" may raise its ugly head at a much later stage when one has arrived at a certain stage when one is widely recognized internationally; and this will require the person to be conscious of the pitfalls when the super ego blind other alternative views.

To be in politics, a person will need certain degree of purpose, commitment, and strong sense of dedication; as well as a large amount of sacrifice to ones own interests.

It is admirable that our Singaporean Opposition Politicians have made that sacrifice, some at tremendous costs to themselves and their families a result of miscalculated risks, or mindless risks to satisfy egos ?

Is there any price for one's ego ?

I believe that those who have taken up the cudgel and enter politics, have done so with a personal feeling of disgust at the present political scene, and have taken up politics to change the situation with whatever dent they can make on the determined politics practiced by the Ruling Party.

While some Opposition personality may not have the finesse in delivery, one should not condemn and dismiss the person in disgust; but perhaps engage the person so as to improve the situation - so as to allow that person to be more effective in the desire to represent others at the national level.

In surgically removing the other factors surrounding the conditions that formed mindless risk takings, you have certainly presented calculated risk takings in a more acceptable and reasoned approach of facing Lifes challenges.

It is interesting the manner in which you have peppered your posts with some lines taken from past movies seen and books read, and I certainly see that we have arrived at some common ground on several points.

There will always be risks in any human endeavors, from the simple activity that a child first set out to learn to ride a bicycle, to his constant desire to ride the bicycle just to get away from his school work, to the change of his preference from bicycle to skate boarding, to stunt skate boarding, and graduating onwards to motorbikes and cars.

Should we inhibit or moderate or monitor the child in his gradual advancement towards a higher skill on wheels ? Or should we encourage the child to take risks and assist him to graduate from one skill to another by giving the best environment to learn those skills much as what is being done in the SAF ?

There will come a time that one has to set loose the individual to allow him to step out and learn to exercise his decision making ability, learning from the errors of his own decisions, and savoring the tastes of success.

I will certainly agree with you that any psychotic types - (intended to be more derogatory term than medical) - that need regular spikes of adrenalin surges will be tough to work with.

Perhaps the ability to evaluate situation, decision processes, and decision making can be nurtured into an individual, and at the end what is within the persons make-up will see how much of that nurturing will remain to assist him further in his Life.

Towards this end, it will be dependent on Psychologists, like you, to develop systems and programs to help parents and educators in developing or refining such skills.

At times I wonder what makes some individuals so highly motivated in any enterprise business, or politics, or personal - despite encountering so many failures and remain faithful in ones ability and purpose; while some others will give up at the first failure and never to reconsider into the same activity again.

Mindless recklessness at work for those who persist ?

Gedanken SG

Well Atobe, the reason why I keep things under control is that it allows me the freedom to run a few things on the ragged edge! Mr. Green Apologies, by the way, for taking so long to post it has been a busy week.

In general, I certainly do not dismiss members of the opposition in disgust, but I do not have enough faith in what I see at present. As I mentioned before, I treasure my invisibility because scrutiny interferes with my goals. I would have to take a very carefully calculated risk if I were to back any member of the opposition. Such an individual would have to be savvy enough to understand the rules of the game, intelligent enough to use those rules to advantage and canny enough to maintain my invisibility. I can see no such person in Singapore's political scene. For the moment, the situation is not set for such an endeavour.

Speaking of endeavours, you are right in saying that almost every action we perform carries a certain amount of risk, and my philosophy has always been to minimise, if not eliminate that risk, in order to ensure success. I have often been found out on a limb, literally and figuratively, trying to achieve things that many others wrote off as being impossible or too complex. Certainly in my younger years, I had my fair share of failures, often with spectacular results. However, underlying all of those adventures was the sense that the formula was intrinsically right, even though some variables were off the mark. Along the way in secondary school, I developed for myself what I fondly call the Boeing school of life: you visit the site of the accident and pick through the wreckage, working out what went wrong and how to prevent it from going wrong again. After that, never revisit the crash site.

I cannot speak on the behalf of others about what drives others to persist despite repeated failures, but I can clearly remember what set me on that path. I was in Primary 2 when a test result showed my IQ to be 142. These days, of course, I know that the figure has little real meaning, but it was a rather heady experience for an eight-year-old, and from that point on, nobody could presume to tell me anything that did not entirely make sense to me. To some extent, the obnoxious eight-year-old lives on - I refuse to believe that something is impossible until I find it out for myself.

The next milestone was the day of my passing-out parade. That evening, I sat in my room staring at the beret in my lap and a thought occurred to me: up to that point, I had been running about trying to prove something, but I had neglected to consider what I was trying to prove and who I was trying to prove it to. From that point, I decided that I had to be my own compass, and working out how that was to be achieved has been my biggest challenge to date.

I am fortunate in that I have experienced the influence of a number of individuals who had met this challenge before I did. I watched and learned from them, and right now I know enough about it to use those lessons for myself, but I have as yet not learned enough to pass those lessons on. Perhaps it is one of those things that one has to see rather than hear.

There is a certain freedom in being able to define one's goals for oneself, but it comes at a price. Nobody is there to answer your questions and you become your harshest judge, one that you cannot walk away from, ignore or berate into submission.

A case in point comes from this week. There is a project that I am working on at the moment, and for the life of me I could not understand my boss' vision of how it has to be done. My boss can be quite an abrasive individual (as Americans are wont to be), but I have already told him that he has to try much harder if he wants to upset me. Mr. Green What did annoy me, and what kept annoying me until I got the answer, was that I did not have a clear enough understanding of what was required of me, to the point that I could almost instinctively take the correct course of action. Along the way, I think I got my boss to tear some of his hair out, because I kept getting it wrong. I could have simply gone with exactly what he prescribed, but that was not satisfying I knew what worked, but I did not know how it worked so I kept working at defining the underlying principles until I got it right. I have been in this sort of situation plenty of times before, and until the problem was solved, I was continuously harangued by that harshest of judges myself.

Should we inhibit children from taking risks so that they can learn? Certainly not. That said, I think a modicum of resistance should be applied, so that at very least these children can be prepared for they naysayers they will inevitably encounter in the wider world. Given the general tendency for people to react to environmental influences, perhaps the psychotic (in the non-medical sense Mr. Green ) risk-takers could be from environments on either end of the inhibition scale. They could have been so inhibited that they now have an extreme reaction against any constraints, or on the other end of the scale, they may never have been aware of the existence of such constraints in the first place. As with most things, inhibition needs to be applied in moderation.

As you suggested, the ability to take calculated risks by properly evaluating situations and making logical decisions is something that I believe can be nurtured. This of course raises the question of what the key elements in such a nurturing process would be. I will have to think about this one for a while and see if I can come up with a cogent theoretical framework within which such a process could be carried out.

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