psychology Archives - Page 2 of 10

Mandates vs voluntary action

We all want to make the world a better place. And in Singapore, we’ve somewhat cultivated the idea that we need to force people to take the right action or they won’t. Often it is because they will point to others who have not done it and say ‘why don’t you ask them?’

The people who failed to bring their trays back to the shelves at the hawker centres before NEA’s mandate had excuses – they were busy, the cleaners had to have something to do, they forgot, and so on. But it was never clear enough that they ‘had to’ do it. Once the mandate and the penalties came, it was clear. As clear as day. So, mandates make requirements clear to a large extent. It makes people sit up and recognise they had to take some action. More so than the consequences of dirty hawker centers, or when you have to take over a messy table.

What can we learn from this that we can apply to climate change?

If we don’t feel hit by the experience of a messy, unclean hawker centre, it is even harder to feel like we need to take any particular course of action just because we have a few more hot days. After all, one could turn up the air-conditioning (which worsens the problem at the system level). So mandates are needed to help with the coordination. The direct consequences alone are insufficient because of externalities, so the government should step in to ‘make them feel the pain’.

Addicted to speed

I’ve taken to riding the bicycle more frequently and in the beginning, I’ve often sought to ride really quickly and reduce the time spent between points as far as possible. I basically wanted the bike to be almost my teleportation device. And the reason I preferred it over public transport was not just because it was cheaper, but that I could control where I wanted to go, and when – up to a certain extent at least.

But what is interesting is that I observed even if I was going at very high speeds, my commuting time hardly changed all that much. A couple of seconds, handful of minutes sometimes, but it requires you to maintain a high speed over long segments of the journey which may not be easy to achieve because of terrain changes, and need to navigate traffic.

And I thought about the formula that we learnt in Primary school:

Distance = Speed x Time

And if you rearrange it, then you get

Time = Distance/Speed

So, assuming the distance is fixed for every journey, the only way to reduce the time spent is to increase your speed. But because it is the denominator, if your speed is already relatively high, the amount of time you can reduce by increasing it by a little is really minuscule and perhaps often not worth it. And as a rider on a bike, you could probably calculate how much energy you need to exert to achieve a particular speed over flat ground, and work out the optimal trade-off between energy and speed that will provide a suitable time for your journey.

If you substitute distance for anything else; such as work to be accomplished, or widgets to be produced, and so forth, you recognise that the principle that applies to speed remains the same. There is only this much the rushing would help you reduce the time spent. The excess energy put into rushing will have diminishing marginal returns and it would probably be squandered, and you find yourself drained significantly just to reduce the time when perhaps that amount of speed is not necessary.

For a Singaporean like me who tends to be impatient and wants things to be fast or rushed, grasping this principle is quite precious because it forces you to recognise the limits of using your energies to rush things and compress time. There is a natural limit to it, and we probably ought not to try too hard to challenge that limit. Even if you encounter someone unreasonable who tries to compress it further, you would do well not too be too caught up with their attempts at squandering excess energy to pressure you. Allow this insight, this understanding to dissipate their pressure and negative energies on you.

Solving the right problems

One of the greatest challenges confronting our modern world is the sense that when there is a solution for something, the idea that we didn’t apply it indicates a lack of responsibility or some kind of mistake on the part of a human. The fact a surgeon could have healed someone but failed to puts the blame on the surgeon even when the chance of success is probabilistic. Of course, some things require a lot of resources to achieve even when they are feasible, so that doesn’t mean that the feasibility of a solution isn’t the only parameter to determine whether it should be applied or not.

Yet somehow at the back of our minds, if we didn’t apply it, that seem to imply we did not try hard enough or do our best. The issue is that with limited resources, you probably can’t ‘do your best’ in everything. There’s only this much you can give. This applies even to the government, whether it is taken from the budget perspective or the use of manpower.

And for a small country with a lean government like Singapore, solving for the ‘which problem’ to tackle is perhaps increasingly important as there will always be some fringe issues that you can deal with to make yourself look as though you’re doing your job when you’re not making any progress. The recent cigar dish case seems like one of those situation where it is probably not significant enough to escalate to higher (or more mature) decision-makers while seeming to have that easy solution of ‘order them to remove it’. We have a limited attention span available for our public servants, especially those handling frontline issues.

AI Roadmap

Everything that has become a norm in our lives went through some hype cycle. So in essence people may overblow its usefulness and think these things are going to change the world but then it doesn’t change the world overnight so things comes crashing down for a while before it goes on to slowly change the world. The internet is probably the best example. In the 90s people were sure that the internet was going to change everything, and so it went through a bit of a hype. So did computers in the 80s. But after the hype, things crashed, and then life went on except it got changed bit by bit, steadily and surely.

Generative AI is itself going through a bit of that; we are all sure things are going to turn out great. Of course, some doomsayers will be warning the world of the problems and calamity it would bring – just as Socrates thought writing was a poor form of communication and would also bring about the decline in memory of men. I think it is probably necessary to create more safeguards for AI and allow the governance to evolve with its development.

I think Gen AI will be helping to augment the capabilities of human workers for a really long time before they come to ‘replace’ workers so to speak. Yes of course you could use some kind of AI technology to help you even have a conversation at the call center, but it’s not going to be able to handle 100% of the queries, you will eventually still have a human in place. Consultants for example, who might have been spending time copy-pasting or doing data entry type of work might lose their jobs but then there will still be someone senior who needs to intervene.

The real economic challenge for us is how are we going to let Gen AI do the so-called low-level jobs while maintaining a pathway for us to train more junior workers into capable senior workers. Sure there is the grunt work that has to be done but traditionally, the juniors learn the ropes by doing those work. If they are going to be performed by Gen AI, then how on earth are they going to be able to get the chance to learn?

There is still substantial job opportunities which are slightly underpaid but cannot be replaced by Gen AI. These work are underpaid either because of systematic biases in the economic systems or as a function of labour market rigidities. They include the care-giving, pastoral guidance type of roles, as well as all of the cases where it is important to have a human example who can model moral character and other crucial human attributes. No kid is going to see the politeness of a Gen AI figure or speech bot and say he or she wants to be courteous because they are a role model for the kid.

To me, those problems will need to be gradually resolved before we would allow AI to play a bigger part in the lives of people. Part of the way some of these problems are resolved is actually through mutual cancellation with the demographic transition challenge. Economies that are mature and have severely ageing population will need to rely on AI for many things. Improving labour mobility globally should slow down the need for that but it is inevitable for these markets who have the resources to play the early adopters’ role.

Non-profit organisations

We can organise our economy in very different ways, and even as the free market and the idea of capitalism reign, there can be different extents to which goods and services are produced and supplied to the end consumers. The non-profit organisation can serve as a way to coordinate activity that delivers real economic results in the form of goods and services.

I think we have overlooked the ability of such a form of economic organisation to do more for the world. The advantage of a non-profit that it explicitly pursues resources specifically for a cause. It doesn’t mean it will squander resources inefficiently, but the stated purpose of it, is to generate the impact or advance towards the mission. Ironically, some of the more profitable companies in the world can tend to make claims that are similar to non-profit in terms of the contribution it brings to society.

And since non-profits often have to deliver results in exchange for funding, or to unlock pre-committed funding, they will learn to optimise their budget and utilise resources optimised to deliver some of the results or at least provide inputs to the causes they are trying to champion. The funding portion of non-profits may be different but the way it should be ran operationally is probably not so different from a typical company, with the exception it may not be able to use the usual incentives for its staff (in those circles, they sometimes call it a passion tax).

Yet perhaps more forms of organisations should be acting as non-profits. For example, banks should potentially operate without profits, with the key objective of optimising risks in the system while providing access to credit for organisations and people. In fact, I think that all financial institutions, even those providing payment solutions probably should have limitations placed on their profits because ultimately, it is the real economy that they are trying to drive and allowing them to extract too much from the real economy can hinder the more fundamental process of capital allocation – which is what we are already seeing. Everyone needs to contribute to the real economy and finance in particular, has become the tail wagging the dog, in name of the pursuit of profit. That is a shame.

Character development in sports

Continuing my series of musings about the nexus of sports and life. Something more important than winning in the sports arena is that your character is being built. How do you measure the extent of character development? What am I thinking about exactly? And why does it matter?

You can’t measure character. It doesn’t mean it is not important but you just cannot measure it. In the film Les Choristes, the Maths teacher, Mr Mattieu, formed a choir believing it would help reform the badly behaving boys. And it did! But how do you measure it? What changed? Maybe the school grades, maybe the noisyness of the classroom, perhaps even their sense of aspirations. In sports, the players’ performance can be seen in their behaviour on the pitch or courts, as well as their scores, but perhaps also in their lives, the way they treat the people around the sport, and so on. Even how they treat their competitors and how they talk about them. Max Maeder, the Singaporean kite-foiling Olympic medalist, impressed everyone by giving kudos to his competitors after finishing third in his final race when asked to comment on the race.

So that’s what I’m thinking about. There’s something unmeasurable that we can achieve in sports and sporting culture. Are we going to invest into that as a nation? Do we care enough about our people’s lives and their mental fortitude, resilience in face of struggles, competition, and need to perform? Those are precisely what sports offers us an opportunity to train and build up. And so investing in sports is not just about shiny stadiums, sport science degree programmes but also providing athletes with sport psychologists, equipping athletes with the science involved in training, practice, self-care and so on.

An excerpt from Roger Federer’s commencement speech for the graduating class of 2024 at Darthmouth this summer:

In tennis, perfection is impossible… In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches… Now, I have a question for all of you… what percentage of the POINTS do you think I won in those matches?

Only 54%.

In other words, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play.

When you lose every second point, on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot.

He could be considered perhaps the most long-running, persistently successful individual athlete of our times, and the lessons he can draw from his experience are timeless. If we could have more of such models and examples to train, motivate, and encourage our next generation of Singaporeans – for their lives not just in sports but other aspects, won’t it be great?

Judging yourself

For some reason, despite not being particularly sporty or athletic, I’ve had the benefit of knowing good athletes and learning a lot from them about psychology, personal development, and mindsets. While not being involved in the sporting scene, I’ve come to recognise the many ways our attitudes or behaviours during sports can mirror some other aspects of our lives.

One of them shared a really good practice introduced by her coach in Australia. After each training, he would get the athletes to go down the line to describe how they thought they performed for the training and why. And he’d listen to them, and then tell them whether they are judging themselves accurately regarding the performance and reasons provided. Often, people could judge their own performance correctly, but they come up with the wrong explanation, which means they are not going to correct it properly. And the coach would then offer his thoughts. Compared to Asian coaches who typically just drops his feedback directly, this Australian coach was challenging because he required his athletes to develop their judgment of themselves.

I thought this practice is great because over time, the athletes are building up a stronger ability to judge their own performance and pinpoint why. That creates a strong ability to coach oneself and also develop the right approach towards improvement. Many aspects of sports is about psychology and even getting oneself to put in the effort to practice can be something psychological. By coaching this way, athletes can come to see sports as more than just about performance but learning about oneself and one’s body even more intimately.

This is important. In Asian societies, especially with strong examination cultures, we never learn to judge or discern our own performance in things nor develop that independent sense about our abilities. This is a shame because once you’re at work, you will need to form judgment about the quality of your own work before you make submissions, you’ll have to determine if coworkers are doing what you need them to do, and of course, you’ll need to do so on many different dimensions including the social performance aspect of things. We strengthen our mental resilience and fortitude when we can judge ourselves more objectively.

Paying for outcomes

As a consultant, we sometimes encounter clients who only want to pay for the outcome but not the inputs or the efforts. It is probably true that a client takes on the cost of the work and all of the risks when they are just paying someone for the efforts, but they do also get most if not all of the upside pertaining from the subsequent business success. Of course, the consultants get a track record or credential but that’s probably a win-win situation, not something you’d expect the consultant to be paying the client for.

But paying for effort, monitoring it and managing the risk continuously can sometimes be the only way to achieve success, rather than striking an agreement with someone whom you would only pay for success. You see, outcomes are often not a function of incentives, they are a function of effort, timing, chance and many things outside the agent’s control. By paying for success, you might not even be optimising the effort for success.

And that brings me to the payouts for Olympic medalists. A gold medalist for Singapore gets a payout of a million SGD, whereas an Australian gets a payout of $20k AUD, which is about $17.5k SGD at current market exchange rates. The point isn’t about whether that is a lot or little; and in any case, the Singapore government might say there are so many Aussie gold medalists that it would not be worthwhile paying them too much. The point is that Australia probably already spend a lot more money upfront in terms of public infrastructure for sports, supporting local sport teams, supporting talented coaches, and promoting a culture of sportsmanship. The ‘outcome’ of Olympic success is already ‘bought’ when they make those investments.

On the contrary, Singapore still thinks that sporting excellence and investing in sports is out of a desire to win. I think that’s a shame, because there are so many other great outcomes that comes from a strong sports culture. And I think the many years of ‘investing’ into Olympics thus far had been out of that desire to ‘buy outcomes’, which is probably why we are offering such a big payouts to the Olympic medalists for Singapore. It allows us not to spend taxpayers money if we don’t get the medal – but at what costs to our sporting culture?

If we are prepared to secure a gold medal, why not take 90% of that million dollars and spend it on something like paying coaches better so they can focus on coaching a one or two teams rather than two handfuls? And why not alter the education system so that civic values are also taught through sporting interactions? There are so many possibilities only if we are willing to put our minds to it, and think about the effort we want to pay for, rather than trying to buy an outcome.

Persuasion vs argument

I was having coffee with a friend yesterday, and the conversation went on about having disagreements at the workplace, particularly when there are also some kind of philosophical clashes.

I reminded her that too often, we try to get others to do what we suggest by being right, by arguing for why it is the right way, or how our proposed approach would be the best. Or why the alternative proposed is ‘wrong’ or suboptimal. The merits of the approaches in and of themselves can make for endless arguments. Because that exercise on resolving disagreements become one about tossing perspectives and viewpoints around.

There are a few key ingredients needed for resolution of such matters:

Some deadline for making the decision
Aligning expectations that the particular discussion outcome needs to be a decision and not just a plan to discuss more of it
Set aside time to argue for the other side; when you are forced to argue for the other side, you reset your thinking

Another thing we tend to forget is when there’s a disagreement, sometimes it is not about pointing out pros and cons about the approach or subject matter at hand. Often it is more of a persuasion, on how that approach of way of handling things would benefit the counterparty personally or their ‘side’ of the matter. The more we think of the discussion and conversation as a matter of persuasion rather than proving something, the more we allow ourselves to be flexible and think from the viewpoint of the person we are trying to persuade.

It also takes the ‘I am right and you are wrong’ dynamic out of the room.

Compelling stories

I was reading Morgan Hounsel’s Same as Ever and one key claims he make is that compelling stories are probably more important than well-researched, time-tested facts or truths. The challenge is that people would find it easier to believe, and digest compelling stories than truth that might be hard to swallow.

And this probably comes from various different ‘incentives’ that are at work including socio-cultural incentives (relationships, perceived or otherwise), compelling financial incentives but also some kind of psychological incentives relating the way the pieces of information somehow resonates.

To some extent, it is beautiful that humans are wired this way. We are not some hard calculating machine that spits out answers in binary form or just goes into system error and choke up in smoke. There’s something poetic in the manner we appreciate and take in information, work them in our minds. Yet it is also responsible for crippling us and causing us to go down the wrong path in terms of decision-making, and coloring our behaviours.

The challenge is we can’t quite help ourselves. Even when we know we are biased, we somehow fail to control for it appropriately. The fact we managed to get as far as we did is rather miraculous. And probably stands testimony to the fact that while as individuals we might not be that successful, we’ve managed to develop systems larger than ourselves to deal with some of those issues. And those challenges are not as fatal as long as they are not being synchronized somehow.

The risk is when we all keep converging towards the same false compelling stories. Or when we collectively as a society discriminate or eliminate the outlier types who tend to be more capable at cutting through bullshit.