Rational Philosophy

On broken escalators and varying sperm counts.

The New York Times, after “months examining the system,” has concluded that New York City Transit does a lousy job of installing, maintaining and repairing its elevators and escalators. I think that about 5 million people could have saved the poor Times reporters several months of trawling through financial records, trouble reports, maintenance chits, interviewing experts and the like. Any member of the regular subway ridership knows that the New York City Transit performance in this area sucks. (That’s the official technical term.)

Until recently I would make the round trip every weekday from my home in Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan. The escalators at the stations I traveled through regularly broke down, with sometimes just a few days between repairs. With a glance over the transom at the smudged and harried faces of the maintenance crew it was clear that their level of confidence in the repairs was no higher than anyone else’s.

Unlike the New York City Transit Authority, the New York Times, despite the redundancy of its efforts, does a bang up job of itemizing the extent of the problems and the underlying causes. To net it out, the system is mismanaged. Again, no great revelation. I myself once worked for the Transit Authority and witnessed first hand and unwittingly became a part of the hypertrophied organization that runs the city’s subway system. The level of unnecessary and wasteful bureaucracy is staggering, and inevitably leads to crappy services. (Another official technical term.)

On a less depressing note, the ravishing Olivia Judson reports on findings that animals vary their sperm output according to the circumstances of the intercourse — more chance of rival sperm, more jizz (I apologize for using so much technical jargon in this post). Judson holds out the tantalizing hope that these findings may have practical application for couples who are undergoing IVF. If the man watches the appropriate explicit videos while he’s providing his sperm, he’s more likely to produce more active sperm. (The appropriate videos would depict a woman with more than one man — competition!)

New York City Transit Authority take note. In the absence of competition, we fall back on regulation, bureaucracy, checks and balances. But as anyone knows who has worked in such an organization, or read any Kafka, the regulation and bureaucracy rarely achieves what it’s supposed to achieve — transparency, fairness and efficiency, and instead creates a culture of indifference, ass-watching, megalomania, and ineptitude.

From a philosophical perspective, competition derives from the concepts of aims and pursuers. The aim or object exists or is perceived, and the pursuers go after it. Why do pursuers pursue, and out of what circumstances does competition arise or not arise?

Living things have an urge to persist and to pursue the persistence of their genes. Given time and causality, competition between living things is inevitable. But in circumstances when cooperation promises greater success, competition can take a back seat. This is why we have IVF and novel ideas about how to produce a higher sperm count. It’s also why we live in societies with division of labor and, for the most part, respect one another’s right to live.

But in circumstances where competition is thwarted without sufficient incentive for success — i.e., New York City Transit’s monopoly on the subway system — we end up with incompetence and failure.

And here is the great challenge: When society wants to have services like subways that may not be profitable if privately operated how do we make them work well? How do we inculcate a sense of competitiveness, of aiming for an objective, into the organizations that operate those services?

I have an idea: Run them like a company — reduce the bureaucracy, operate them with targets and incentives, weed out the freeloaders and crappy managers, hire bright, motivated employees, challenge them to succeed or face the consequences. Bloomberg, put your thinking cap on!

(When I worked at the Transit Authority, you could have fired half the workforce and it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference; well, it actually might have meant that more got done.)

If this seems impossible, just think about how efficiently and effectively the city runs the parking violations unit. One minute after your meter expires, the transit cop is there writing the ticket…

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On nature’s mysteries; the difficulties of environmental protection, IVF, and global warming.

A NY Times article today reports on an odd ecological phenomenon; protected trees that ail and die. The trees suffer, apparently, because cordoning them off disrupts a delicate balance of mutualism between species. The acacias house ants, the ants repel giraffes and elephants, thereby protecting the thorn nectar they feed on. But, when cordoned off from large herbivores, the trees become less ingratiating to the ants, who in turn become less well-disposed to protecting the trees, allowing deadly attack by wood-boring beetles…

In England, a member of the House of Lords (David Alton) has used the spectre of twins separated at birth who later married, not knowing they were brother and sister, to argue against maintaining the anonymity of the biological father for children born by in vitro fertilization. The twins in question were born normally. But Alton argues that withholding the name of the biological father for those born of IVF would make such cases more common. Alton’s choice to disclose information about the case during debate seems distressingly melodramatic and I suspect that he has other reasons to dislike the proposed law change. But it also made me wonder whether and how many people stop to think just why we have laws against siblings marrying.

Unless I’m mistaken, the prohibition (religious, moral, and legal) against marrying close family members derives from the increased likelihood of destructive genetic mutation; society has codified nature’s preference for mixing dissimilar gene pools. It is normal now in the US that prospective parents with a high likelihood of passing on a genetic health problem to their children get genetic counseling, along with testing for the fetus to determine whether the mutations in question have been passed on. Would it be natural then or unnatural to suggest that another approach to resolving Alton’s concern would be to recommend genetic counseling and testing for specific mutations to those born of IVF so that they can be better prepared before beginning a family? (Not to determine familial ties to their spouse, but simply to watch out for shared mutations.)

And lastly to global warming. It appears that glaciers were formed during a so-called “super greenhouse” period about 91 million years ago. Even as surface ocean temperatures at the equator rose several degrees higher than they are today, sheets of ice appeared in Antarctica. Hmmm. Throw that one into your current climate model.

Evidence shows we’ve messed with the earth’s natural climate by burning large quantities of fossil fuels and cutting down trees, causing global warming. And now we have to live with the consequences. Logic seems to indicate that we should try to slow down global warming. Wishful thinking would indicate that we would like to fix things and return the planet to a more natural equilibirium. (Some scientists have covered large swaths of glacial ice with aluminum foil in the hopes of preventing the ice from melting. Which seems pragmatic, touching and utterly futile.)

But, when the relatively innocuous seeming act of cordoning off trees to protect them leads to their death, how can we hope to know what is natural when dealing with things on a much vaster scale? After making so many terrible mistakes by ignoring the consequences to the planet we live on, our philosophy in living as modern human beings, it seems, should be to do as little as possible to mess with nature, and to stop doing things that we know are invasive.

Where does this leave us with IVF? Well – and I hesitate long and hard before writing this, since it seems heretical to me as a self-professed liberal, and insensitive to those who seek to have children but can’t — since IVF isn’t natural, and since messing with nature tends to have unforseen and undesired consequences, shouldn’t we consider this before we consider IVF?

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