Some people have a poor understanding of risk. Much of the public tends to look at risk only in an absolute sense. They call certain activities “risky” and other activities “not risky”. As such, people tend to completely avoid “risky” activities at all costs while preferring activities they consider “safe”.

According to many sources, such as Dictionary.com, risk can be formally defined as, “exposure to the chance of injury or loss”. People don’t like risk because they fear loss. The actual probability of loss is often irrelevant – any hint of a potential loss, and some people just run for the hills.

The problem with this mindset is that it demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of risk, and in doing so, prevents individuals from maximizing their opportunities for success.

Risk is Inherent to Most Activities

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Yesterday I wrote about a hypothetical moral situation and ended up questioning whether or not I am meeting my moral obligations (if they do exist).

Essentially, the hypothetical situation poses the question of whether causing harm is just as morally wrong as not preventing the same harm from occurring. I’d like to believe that, yes, action and inaction that produces the same result (in a simple scenario) can be morally equivalent. The bigger problem then was that if I am morally obligated to prevent harm from occurring, then am I not morally obligated to spend as much of my time and money as possible to help others? (That is, without doing harm to my own life, obviously. For example, it may not be moral to donate all of my money such that I can no longer pay for my own food, shelter, etc.)

How and whether you can answer this question first depends on what beliefs your general morality system is based on. Some people have no moral system, and therefore, these questions are irrelevant to them. But it seems as if most people do have some morality system, and in general, I would say that most people believe in the morality system that it is “moral to not cause harm and moral to prevent harm if possible”. You may not agree with this, but assume this is true for the sake of my argument.

Let’s return to the question “am I not morally obligated to spend as much of my time and money as possible to help others?”. Given the above morality system, if you say “no, I am not morally obligated to spend all my time/money helping others”, then it must follow that inaction to prevent harm is not immoral, and therefore, you cannot say committing a crime is immoral either. If you do, then your entire morality system breaks down. The reason I say this is that if you agree that not preventing harm from occurring is immoral, then you are morally obligated to always prevent harm from occurring – and well, harm to individuals is occurring every second right now.

Again, this is true only if you believe that given the same result, action or inaction are morally equivalent – if you don’t agree with this, then we can’t go any further. But if you don’t agree, then you have no moral system or a different one – but aren’t most people’s moral systems pretty close to what I suggested?

This is the Idea I was Struggling With

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Today I read about a hypothetical scenario that I’m struggling with, and not exactly sure yet how I feel about it.

Hypothetical scenario 1: A person is tied to a train track and a train is going to run the person over. There is a switch that controls the train. If you flip the switch, the train will stop. If you don’t, the person will die.

Hypothetical Scenario 2: Same situation as above, but in this case, the switch is off and the train isn’t moving. If you flip the switch on, the train will start to move and kill the person on the track.

Is not flipping the switch in #1 just as morally wrong as flipping the switch in #2?

I would say that you are morally obligated to not harm / let the person be harmed in both scenarios. Yet I initially struggled with the idea of moral equivalency for this situation. Could action to hurt ever be equally bad as inaction against harm?

In case #2, if we flip the switch, then we essentially desire the person to die. In case #1, if we choose to not stop flip the switch and stop the train, this does not necessitate that we desired the person to die – it could also mean that we did not feel a moral obligation to save the person’s life (but in that case, we don’t share the same moral values), or that even if we did, we chose not to act on it. So initially, it felt as if flipping the switch in #2 was worse if we took complete intentions into account.

However, if we are just looking at just morality, I guess one could argue that it is morally correct to act on your moral obligations. Therefore, in #2, we are morally obligated not to kill, and in #1, we are morally obligated to prevent death – in that respect, you could argue both action (#2) and inaction (#1) are morally equivalent and equally wrong.

Yet legally, there is a clear distinction between how we would treat an individual in those circumstances – in general, you can’t really be charged with a crime for inaction for such situations (but if you have any interesting spots where you can, let me know). For instance, if this exact situation was presented in court, I would think you could only jail the person who flipped the switch in #2.

A bigger question, however, emerges if we extrapolate inaction into a larger sense. Right now some people in third world countries are dying of hunger, disease, etc. Am I committing an immoral act by sitting here and typing this at my computer instead of directly contributing to improving their lives?

Now that might sound ridiculous at first, but that’s probably because humans tend to feel stronger about immediate events and results – such as actually being at the train tracks with the switch and a person about to die. Besides not being able to visualize it in real time, how is my inaction right now any different from not acting to help?

However, the idea that anytime I am watching a movie is immoral seems pretty ridiculous to me. The question we must then ask is: Are we actually morally obligated to do anything? If so, how can we act on our moral obligations in some cases but not others?

I am definitely not an expert or anything on moral theory – these are ideas I struggle with, and I’d be interested in hearing different opinions, insights, and perspectives on these issues.

What do you think?

Modern day education systems constantly stress the importance of developing leadership skills. Students who have “demonstrated leadership and “initiative” are the ones desired by higher education programs, as obvious through a glance at university admissions booklets and scholarship applications. Yet one of the things I find really weird and rather misleading is how young people are brought up viewing what it means to be a leader.

At least in my experience, while growing up, a strong leader was portrayed as someone who always took initiative in almost every situation; someone who always immediately knew the right thing to do; someone who was able to contribute in every single instance; someone who had charisma and was very vocal with his or her group members. I noticed certain individuals in my school and elsewhere who had those qualities, and so it seemed as if they were natural born leaders.

But I’m nothing like this

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I have been writing a lot recently on work, careers, and happiness, and I feel like I may have come off with sort of this noble attitude that people should not be working for money and that if you are working for money, you’re an awful person. I apologize if it came off that way, and that could not be further from the truth.

All of these ideas revolving around work, income, and happiness are concepts I constantly struggle with, and it’s hard to come up with an overall generalization that works. I do think that being able to support yourself financially is important – in fact, it is necessary to survive. At the same time, I believe that if you want to live a long and happy life, you need to be doing things in your life that make you happy – and really, there’s nothing greater than being able to do work that you love and get paid for it.

On the other hand, maybe the type of work you love doing does not support as well as you’d like financially, so you don’t do it – that’s a legitimate concern. If a physician was paid minimum wage, would I do it? The quick answer would probably be no (assuming I had no other source of income). And it’s not because I love money, but it’s because I would love my family more (if any career of mine was bad for my family, I would quit in a second) and would want to support them in ways where getting paid minimum wage for the type of work and hours a physician does would not be enough. It would also hinder other aspects and interests in my life because I would have to constantly worry about my financial situation, paying all of my bills, etc. The thought of being able to deal with the stress of both say a career in neurosurgery at work, and then the financial stress while home is pretty scary.

So it is absolutely a more complex situation than maybe I had written about earlier, and I can understand many reasons why people may do the work that they do. On the other hand, some of you are in a situation where you have opportunity to choose among many possible types of work to pursue and finances may not be as much of an issue – and you are really fortunate to be in this situation, and should really take advantage of it.

Assuming you are in such a situation, here’s one exercise that may help you figure out what you really enjoy doing, and what type of pursuits would make you happy.

Imagine you had an unlimited amount of money right now. What would you be doing?

Would you still be going to school?

Playing computer games competitively?

There are no wrong or right answers, but it’s definitely something interesting to think about.

If the type of career you are working towards is not one of your answers to this hypothetical situation, maybe you should rethink the career path you’ve put yourself on – not saying your current path is wrong, but it’s definitely something interesting and worth thinking more about.

A few weeks ago in my Social and Political Philosophy class, we learned a bit about some of the theories of Karl Marx. He is probably most famous for his work on communism, and although many people might disagree with that aspect of his writings, his reasons for communism are based on a very interesting concept that at the core, I really like and quite agree with.

Several years before writing his renowned Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote an article about Alienated Labour. In this article, Marx argued that capitalism created two classes (owners and workers), and that in this system, the workers become socially alienated or separated from the world around them. Marx believed that pursuing meaningful work was an essence of being human, and that the type of labour workers were forced to do in this system inhibited them from fulfilling this essence.

In short, Marx was saying that we can’t truly live and be happy unless we are allowed to pursue work that is inherently meaningful to us.

I thought most people hated work?

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Apparently, the Teacher Assistant’s Union at York University is planning to go on strike this Thursday, Nov. 6 for an indefinite period of time. I honestly don’t know much about the situation. All I know is that an agreement between the Teacher Assistant’s Union and York University could not be reached, and they are in a legal position to strike on Thursday – and from what I hear, they are going to strike unless some absolutely miraculous agreement is reached before then. And if there’s a strike, the university has decided to cease academic operations, and therefore, no classes.

The last time such a strike occurred as several years ago, and apparently lasted six weeks or something close to that. So there’s a good chance this upcoming strike could last a month or something, who knows? Some students are upset about the prospect of having to finish the school year in May. Personally, I don’t really care, as I wasn’t planning to do anything particularly interesting next May… so I actually wouldn’t mind having a month break right now.

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The basketball player you see above is LeBron James. For those of you who don’t follow the sport, LeBron James is arguably the most gifted player to have ever played the game. The amazing thing is that he is only 23 years old, has many years left to play, and can only get better. I really can’t wait to see how good he gets.

Imagine for a second that LeBron James decided not to pursue basketball as a career. In fact, let’s go as far to imagine a scenario where he did not train on a regular basis, was completely out of shape, and could barely play basketball for five minutes without running out of breath – let alone playing 48 minutes of intense basketball every other night with the best in the world, which is what he’s doing right now. In that world, he would not even come close to being one of the best basketball players in the world.

Nonetheless, his potential to be one of the world’s best basketball players has not changed. In our hypothetical world, he simply hasn’t gone out and achieved it.

What is Potential?

I’m sure you’ve heard many stories of teachers telling parents “Oh your son has the potential to do well – if only he worked harder!”, or something to that effect. What does that really mean?

Dictionary.com gives two pretty good definitions for potential: (1) Possible, as opposed to actual, and (2) Capable of being or becoming.

From my perspective, your potential for a specific activity are the levels of achievement you are capable of obtaining, given your natural abilities. I don’t think circumstances (e.g. resources available to you) are involved with determining someone’s actual potential; rather circumstances are factors that affect your ability to achieve that potential.

Case Study: Potential for School Performance

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The following concept is pretty different from what I normally write about, but I think it’s really neat, and hope some people will find topics like this quite interesting!

The Most Useful Course in High School (in my opinion)

If you were to ask me today what my most useful high school course was, I would have to say Data Management. Ironically, Data Management is not really a prerequisite for any but a few programs. For those of you who haven’t taken Data Management, it was a course that covered basic probability, statistics, distributions, and other things of the like. And although it is a mathematics course, I would have to say that many concepts it covered are more useful to the way in which we live than the concepts taught in any other high school course. There are far too many to count and explain, but there’s one in particular I’d like to write about today.

Frequency Distributions

One of the really neat concepts you would learn in Data Management is the idea of a frequency distribution. Many of you probably know this, and if not, it’s a pretty simple idea. A frequency distribution is basically a mathematical representation of the frequencies for possible outcomes of an event. For example, a sample frequency distribution for the grades in your 30 student class could be 10 A’s, 10 B’s, 5 C’s, and 5 D’s. These frequencies could also be represented as fractions or percentages of the total class.

Simple enough, right? In spite of its simplicity, the powerful of this concept is in recognizing that thinking in terms of frequency distributions can apply to so many more things than just the examples about classroom grades in your Data Management or Statistics textbook. One of the really cool things is that you can use the concept of frequency distributions to solve problems and make better decisions.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

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When people hear the word “teacher”, they often imagine a school teacher standing at the front of the classroom or a professor lecturing in a large university hall. Personally, I have a much broader interpretation of the word “teacher” to also include mentors, coaches, speakers, and so on.

What is a Teacher Really?

I think a teacher is anyone who imparts any knowledge or lesson on you, regardless of the content. Your parents are teachers when they teach you the personal values you have come to hold. Your sister is your teacher when she helps you with that homework problem you just can’t figure out. Your hockey coach is your teacher when he shows you that new puck handling technique.

When I say that anyone can be a teacher, that includes you. If you have experience or expertise in a particular field, be it academic or not, you have the necessary background to teach someone. At the same time, just because you can teach something, does not mean you would necessarily be good at it – an idea we will touch on later in this article.

Teachers of all types play significant roles in our lives. We may often assume that it is the student who can only benefit from this relationship. The teacher already has this knowledge or skill, and the student is the one learning; therefore, it follows that it is the student who mainly gains, right?

The Teacher Often Benefits More

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