I think the most important thing is that people are risk-averse because they really don’t know what will happen when they fail. This is the same as startups: if the cost of starting a company is very high, then it means the cost of failure is also very high. In Taiwan as well as in many other places when we talk about startup policy, the policy makers usually focus on how to lower the barriers of setting up a new company, so that if you set up 10 and fail 9 of 10, you don’t feel much of anything because of the cost of failing is low. But in Taiwan’s public servant system, the cost of failing is unpredictable because it all depends on how the popular media frames it and how the judicial process and finds them, and so on. Because of the unpredictability of risk, most public servants, when they’re making decisions, they overestimate the risk to the maximal amount, right? Like they assume the worst thing that will happen and then choose the minimum course of action that will avoid this maximum kind of risk. So it’s not about minimizing risk really, it’s defining risk. It’s about making sure that if this policy fails, then after another 60 days we can go back and do a revision; and if this policy is a bad idea we have 60 days for people to voice their opinions. So it’s not shameful if you have a draft that doesn’t take care of many stakeholders, because those stakeholders will show up and tell you: "Hey! You missed our voices!" and it’s okay to revise, whereas previously because of the old system that only allows 7 days or 14 days of opinion expressing, it has to be almost perfect before it could be announced to the public. Because nobody really has a voice on anything, and once it pass if you forgot some stakeholder, they would let you know on the street and that risk is very high, right? So by basically spreading the risk to the early stages of policy-making, we make the risk containable, definable and also share part of agenda setting power but also responsibility

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