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  3. People should undertake risky action only after they have carefully considered i

People should undertake risky action only after they have carefully considered i

游客2024-01-12  28
问题 People should undertake risky action only after they have carefully considered its consequences.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, describe specific circumstances in which adopting the recommendation would or would not be advantageous and explain how these examples shape your position.
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答案     Commercial catchphrases like "Just do it" and "Impossible is nothing" have dominated almost every media platform ranging from newspapers to mobile phone screens. These well-written slogans aim at encouraging people to be brave enough to take risks without giving a second thought to their possible outcome. However, I argue that most of the times people should indeed go through serious and thorough considerations about the potential outcomes before taking a risky action. The only exception is urgent cases where time is critical and fast action is a necessity. In such specific scenarios such as wars and natural disasters, people should act first even without considering the possible consequences.
    To begin with, I concede that in a situation where time and speed are critical, a careful thought about the consequences in advance would not be desirable because of the urgent nature of the issue. In such cases, time itself is a precious resource we ought to factor in when making decisions. In other words, taking too much time to carefully consider the consequences itself may lead to even more negative outcomes. In the battlefield for instance, if a commander cannot decisively take risky action, his army would perish in a blitzkrieg. For example, Marcus Luttrell, an Afghan war veteran in US elite special forces, writes in his firsthand battlefield account Lone Survivor that the field commander must have a keen intuition to determine the next step. Because the battlefield situation is evolving by every minute, there is simply no time or reason for careful consideration of an order. A similar case is natural disaster rescue, in which every second counts in saving lives. Just like any action in a war, a decision in such rescue missions is inherently dangerous because it could be a life-or-death choice. If the search-and-rescue team spends too much time in pondering possible outcomes, people could have died by the time the deliberation had concluded.
    However, when there is ample time for preparation, a second thought before taking risks can significantly reduce unnecessary harms and losses, because careful consideration of the consequences would lead to better preparation. The example of the famous mountaineer David Lama could lend strong support to my argument. Not fully prepared, he failed thrice to climb the Himalaya Mountains. The failure resulted from a lack of properly consideration of the consequences of being at extreme high elevation and in harsh climate: he neither had enough oxygen supply with him nor the physical stamina demanded by climbing. In 2018, however, after re-evaluating the whole venture and making proper preparations accordingly, Lama finally achieved his goal in reaching the top of the 6907-meter-high Lunag Ri peak. Lama’s story, along with the successes and failures of many other mountaineers, demonstrates the necessity of carefully considering a risky action’s consequences before undertaking it.
    Of course, some may disagree with my statement above and argue that careful considerations of risky action are only possible when one is dealing with relatively simple and straightforward issues. In knotty situations, they claim, people cannot and should not consider the consequences of their risky actions because the complexity involved. While this logic appears reasonable at first glance, there is a fatal assumption underlying the lines of reasoning here. That is, it is assumed that complexity equals inscrutability, which I cannot agree. From my point of view, a complicated issue can still be broken down into a series of smaller and simpler steps, whose consequences can and should be studied and evaluated. For example, although the stock market is commonly perceived as an extremely intricate and risky system, people can still persistently make money out of this seemingly overwhelming entanglement. The secret to the success of Ray Dalio and his 120-billion-dollar Bridgewater hedge fund is to decompose the complex stock market as a whole to smaller, more fragmented elements, including long-term economic outlook, mid-term profitability of the industry, and short-term investor mentality. Then, the consequences of every investment action can be evaluated by those more specific metrics. Therefore, the statement of undertaking risky actions only after a careful consideration of its consequence still stands firm in more complicated occasions.
    To recap, while in some extreme cases time is a precious resource we cannot afford to spend too much on the evaluation of consequences, I to a large extent agree with the statement that people should consider the consequences of their risky action before undertaking it. (733 words)
解析     这是一篇涉及人类行为的题目，这篇文章讨论的是人们应该如何行动。题目的prompt当中提到，人们只有在认真思考了危险行为的可能后果之后才能采取行动。对此，一种最简单的破题方法是首先承认这样做在理论上的好处，即能让我们更为审慎，进而避免不好的后果。第二段马上反驳这样做在实践过程中的难处，其中最容易想到的是，人类对于复杂的世界可能无法做出准确的判断。
    但这种观点下的文章很难得到高分，因为它缺乏一个足够深刻的视角，只是对表象进行理论和实践的分析。如果进一步思考，其实我们会回到一个更为深层的问题：这个世界是不是可知的?如果一个人认为是世界可知的，那么就该承认，我们可以考虑清楚每一个行为的后果——只要有足够的时间。请注意这后面跟随的限定条件——时间。生活中的很多事情其实并不是我们没有能力去想通，而是客观上时间紧迫，我们必须在限定的时间内做出抉择而已。因此本文的思路变成了从时间的充裕与否来分析这个题目，然后点明：即便是复杂问题也可以拆解成若干个更基本的问题，并各个击破。这样即便是面对复杂的情况，我们也可以分析出危险行为的后果(诚然这需要时间)。
    顺便再说一句，在上面的分析和本文第三主旨段的论证中，提到了复杂事物可以看成是更简单事物的总和来理解，这种哲学思想叫作还原论(reductionism)。应当说这是许多现代科学背后的哲学方法论，譬如牛顿力学，是把力的存在与相互作用从具体事物中剥离开的。但是，近几十年随着复杂系统特别是混沌体系的发现，大家逐渐意识到本质是线性的还原主义可能并非永远万能，因为太多系统是非线性的。当然写GRE的文章并不需要下潜到这个深度，因为以大多数中国学生的英语表达能力很难把这么复杂的问题说清楚。但就个人思考的深度而言，把问题考虑到这个层面对我们认识自己所处的学科是有益的。
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