Rational Philosophy

Clouds over Olympic competition in Beijing, mammoth trading fraud in Paris and synthesized life.

Apparently smog and pollution levels in Beijing, host to this year’s Olympics, are nearly five times above World Health Organization standards for safety. Track cyclist Colby Pearce saw smog floating inside the velodrome in Beijing. He developed bronchitis, he said, because of air pollution. Fears of the dire effects of pollution on Olympic athletes run so high that the U.S. Olympic Training Center has been developing strategies to combat the performance-diminishing effects of smog, and a special mask to filter out most of the worst pollutants. Here’s the odd thing: As the U.S. and other countries have worked intensely on protecting their athletes from smog and pollution, they have protected their findings as fiercely as an athlete protects his lead in a race. Where is the Olympic spirit? Do we want athletes to win just because they’ve had access to a $25 face mask that poorer countries couldn’t afford to research and develop? How does this make for a level playing field?

Unfortunately, an early version of a NY Times story about massive fraud at Société Générale, complete with a couple of splendidly portentous quotes from a bank representative, has already been revised and those quotes removed. I’ll try to paraphrase: a bank spokesman referred to his state of serenity; he was very calm about the loss of $7.1 billion, he said, because it had been through the act of a clever individual and didn’t reflect badly on the bank’s fundamental solidity and stability… Hmmm. The most recent version of the story reveals a little less bullishness on the bank’s part. It tells of the dismissal of four others — including its head of global equity and derivatives trading, Luc François. And the bank’s chairman describes the debacle as “a very grave loss.” The rogue trader is “on the run.”

While the loss of $7 billion or so interests me, this wasn’t the amount that the trader stole, simply the amount that he put the bank in the hole for when it had to extricate itself from his fraudulent transactions. I found myself wanting to know how much money the trader (Jerome Kerviel, right) actually got away with. After the first few million, is it really worth it? And, further, if you have a job as a trader, aren’t you doing pretty well in the first place? (And, if this guy applied for a job at your organization would you hire him?)
Like many things in life, it seems that if you’re going to cheat you should at least be rational about it.

Far be it from me to give advice to those who want to defraud a bank, but surely it’s not rational to take positions that can add up to losses of billions of dollars. With numbers this big, eventually someone will notice, even a smug bank bigwig.

Back to Beijing: Surely the International Olympic Committee should be coordinating research that will protect the health and competitive effectiveness of Olympic athletes. Couldn’t the IOC fork out $25 for face masks, give advice on pre-games training, etc.? I know that world-class athletes have had a bad rap recently for gaining unfair advantages through the use of performance-enhancing drugs, but isn’t it rational that if you want to win you want to win on your merits not because you’re from a wealthier nation?

In what’s becoming something of a rationalphilosophy series on the risks of messing with things natural, I have to mention the success of scientists in synthesizing life from its constituent chemicals. Part of me rejoices at this achievement. If scientists can create life from chemicals then the supposed mystery of life’s appearance on earth gets a step closer to being demystified. That’s a good thing. But synthesized life could also mean the end of life on earth, or at least human life, unless we’re very careful.

I just got back from an evening out with a friend (hi, Neil). I was discussing these stories and he made the point that people just do some crazy, irrational things. I think that’s right. From the scientists synthesizing life because they can, to the trader defrauding the bank because he can, to the athletes and their training bodies seeking a smog advantage because they can, people just do stuff. I guess we are organisms that just do stuff. Being rational is kind of a new thing for us from an evolutionary perspective and often we find it hard to overcome the excitement of just doing stuff because we can…