The Institute

The Institute-3

“Not that much,” said Naomi.

“There’s no way to be sure,” I said, “but I think Grant has a point.”

“He’s on your team,” said Penelope. “Of course you think he has a point.”

We had, by that time, been outside for close to an hour. No one seemed to be getting ready to go back inside. We all had responsibilities at the institute. We should probably have been thinking about getting back inside and fulfilling them.

“Here’s what’s been bothering me lately,” said Grant. “Here’s why I broke the spoon. It had nothing to do with who owned it. It had to do with this problem I’ve been working no. A guy from the government brought it to me. It’s kind of interesting, but also kind of depressing. If it was within their power to thin the world’s population by fifty percent, who should they eliminate?”

As a conversation stopper, this beat Ralph’s confession of being attracted to Sylvia.

“I mean,” said Grant, continuing in a blandly thoughtful voice, like he was narrating a boring documentary, “what criteria would one use?”

“Such questions are outside the parameters of what we research,” said Naomi.

“Oh, yeah, I know that,” said Grant. “I should have told him to f**k off, but I didn’t. I said I would consider the question and get back to him with an answer.”

Naomi took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Grant,” she said, “we don’t have a lot of rules at the institute so you all can feel free to do as you please, more or less, but the few rules we do have are therefore doubly important. You should have reported this guy immediately.”

“I know,” said Grant. “But I didn’t do it.”

“Why not?” I said.

“He made the problem sound too interesting.”

“I had a question like that once,” said Sylvia. “A rep from some multi-national wanted to find out how to target his company’s products’s deaths.”

“What?” said Ralph.

“I remember something about this,” said Naomi.

“Yeah,” said Sylvia. “She told me her research department had determined a certain percentage of users died from their product. However, they were concerned that some of those deaths were losing them loyal customers. She wanted to know how to shift the percentage so that only occasional users of their products died.”

We had all dealt with the realties of the marketplace. Most of us had come to the institute to do pure research, thinking for the sake of thinking, or, at the very least, thinking for the good of humanity blah blah blah. But we also got a kick out of being asked things by prominent people in business and government. It was how we measured our status.

“Maybe they should have asked you to make their products so they wouldn’t kill anyone,” said Penelope.

“Can’t be done,” said Grant.

Sylvia nodded. “You can optimize that result, but given a sufficient sample size, you will never get zero fatalities. Fletcher proved that in a paper in Proceedings of the American Statistical Foundation a few years ago. It was a pretty impressive—and devastating—result.”

“Yup,” said Grant. “That was the paper that changed everything. It smashed the holy grail of perfection into little shards.”

“Well, actually,” I said, “I think Gödel did that about a hundred years ago with his incompleteness theorem.”

“Well sure,” said Grant. “But that only referred to mathematical sets. It never had any real application to real world problems.”

“Grant’s right,” said Sylvia. “ Gödel’s result has been way over-applied to all kinds of fields where it didn’t belong.”

“Just goes to show what I’ve always said,” said Ralph. “Math is not necessary. Just a game with symbols.”

“Excuse me,” said Penelope, “but without math you wouldn’t have a paycheck. Money would be just pieces of paper.”

I could see the discussion lining up along math lovers and math haters. It could be interesting. My own view was that math was an approximation of the world as we might know it, but it was in no way an accurate picture of the world. More of an elaborate metaphor. Naomi put a stop to it before it could get started.

“This is all very interesting,” she said, “and I’m glad you have such strong opinions, but I’m trying to make a point here.” We became as attentive as a dog who has just been reprimanded by its owner. “I want you all, when confronted with this situation, to do as Sylvia did at that time. She proceeded according to the rules. She reported the incident to us and we took action.”

“What kind of action?” said Ralph. “I didn’t hear about this.”

“We told the rep that her question was not welcome here. We also suggested it amounted to conspiracy to commit murder and reported her to the police.”

“I’m sure that went far,” I said.

“It didn’t go anywhere. They thought we were crazy, but that is not the point. We have to keep the reputation of the institute as pristine as possible. Everything depends on our image. We can’t be seen as possibly working as death merchants.”

Ralph put up his hand. He was still staring at the sky. “Yes, Ralph,” I said in a school teacher drone.

“The rep from the company, she wasn’t suggesting they increase their kill rate, was she?”

“No,” said Sylvia.

“So how can it be conspiracy to commit murder?”

“They were acknowledging that their product killed people inadvertently. What they were trying to do was have their product kill people other than the ones it was killing by accident. It was targeted killing. They were purposely trying to kill other people.”

“That’s a harsh way of putting it,” said Ralph. “And the authorities did not agree with you.”

“Not this time,” said Naomi. “But even if legally it wasn’t a crime, it still stunk to high heaven and we were right to have nothing to do with them.”

“So what about my dilemma?” said Grant. “Anyone want to help me out, purely as an academic exercise?”

“While we’re at it,” said Penelope, “let’s review the experiments of Dr. Mengele and see if we can’t come up with some better methods than he employed. Purely as an academic exercise.”

“Touché,” said Grant.

“Touché, indeed,” I said. “Penelope, I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“Well why do you all look so surprised,” she said. “Do you think I’m an airhead or something just because I’m in accounting?”

“I know I always did,” said Ralph. “Not anymore.”

Penelope grabbed some dirt and threw it at Ralph.

“Oops,” said Ralph. “I just switched back to my original opinion.”

Penelope threw more dirt on him.

“Hey,” said Ralph, sitting up. “Some of that got in my eyes.”

“Good,” said Penelope.

“Children,” I said. “Let’s focus. No more squabbling. Especially petty squabbling.”

“That’s the best kind,” said Ralph.

“Well,” said Grant. “What are the parameter here? Do we decline anything we feel uncomfortable about? I told the guy I would think about it and get back to him.”

“Wrong,” said Naomi. “That is not the procedure.”

“I know,” said Grant. “Let’s just indulge me for the moment.”

“I think,” said Ralph, “that I would do some kind of lottery thing. Divide the world into people with an odd number of letters in their names and those with an even number of letters in their names. Flip a coin. Heads are even, tails are odd. Whichever comes up, the corresponding people are earmarked for extermination. Simple.”

“We are not having this discussion,” said Naomi.

“I agree,” I said. “Let’s keep digging. Wasn’t it fun to just sit out here and dig?”

“Look,” said Ralph, “I don’t know why you’re all so squeamish about this. We deal with death all the time. It’s just a thought experiment.”

Naomi threw a spoon at Ralph. It landed on his chest. “Dig,” she said.

Ralph picked up the spoon. He looked as though he was going to throw it back, then sat up and began digging.

“All I’m saying,” he said, “is that a lot of our questions are about death. Death and money. The EPA sets standards for certain contaminants. The standards don’t tell us the level at which there will be no deaths. It sets a level of acceptable deaths. No deaths would be too expensive. A few deaths, well, that’s the cost of doing business.”

“That’s a terrible way of looking at it,” said Penelope.

“It’s the truth. It’s what happens. To eliminate those last few deaths would be astronomically expensive, so we don’t do it. The economy could not take it.”

We scraped the dirt for a while. No one wanted to say anything. We were tired, cranky, and thirsty. The sound of plastic spoons in the dirt seemed a soundtrack for a coarsened existence. Suddenly none of us felt good about being part of the institute.

“I could dig up this dirt for the rest of my life,” I said.

“So you wouldn’t have to think about what we do?” said Ralph.

“Something like that.”

“We do good work,” said Naomi. “I’m not ashamed of any of it.”

“There was a teacher I had in high school,” said Grant. “He was a brilliant guy. Had a doctorate in economics. He was just a little too delicate for the rough and tumble of corporate and government life. So he went into teaching. Always struck me as odd, the man and his circumstances. But he was a good teacher. Way over qualified, but then that’s the kind of teacher you really want. They know stuff and they want to help you learn how to know stuff. He once told me that human behavior, for all its supposed complexity and richness, comes down to the three Fs. Feeding, fighting, and fucking.”

“I would have loved to have had such a cynical teacher,” said Ralph.

“I don’t think he was being cynical,” said Grant. “He was just telling me what he had learned in life. I appreciated it very much.”

“Well,” I said. “I could stand some feeding right now. I’m kind of hungry.”

“I’ll fight you for it,” said Sylvia.

“I’ll f**k you for it,” said Ralph.

We all turned to him.

“What?” he said. “I thought we were doing a bit.”

“Honestly,” said Naomi. “Sometimes you’re kind of a dolt.”

“Ah,” said Ralph. “That would be the fighting part. But you don’t want to get into it with me. I’d take you down in a second.”

“Just try it,” said Naomi. “I’d squash you like a bug.”

“Getting squashed by you would be an honor,” said Ralph, with a grin on his face.

Naomi rolled her eyes. “Anyone else want some food? I was thinking of getting a pizza.”

Sylvia and Grant nodded their heads vigorously. “Pizza sounds great,” said Sylvia.

“All right,” said Naomi. “I’ll go get it, but your team has to send someone with me or you’ll have an unfair advantage over our team.”

“Are we still doing the stupid competition?” said Ralph. “I’ll go with you.”

“Yes we are doing the stupid competition,” said Naomi, “and you can’t go with me, you dimwit. You’re on my team.”

Ralph slapped his forehead and dropped his mouth open into a wide O.

“I’ll tag along,” said Grant. He stood up, dusted off his pants, and joined Naomi heading to the parking lot on the other side of the campus.

I took the opportunity to survey our work so far. We had dug maybe half a foot into the ground. We had piles of dirt next to the holes. The competition was not nearly as fun or interesting as I had suspected. Yet there was something compelling about it. I knew none of us wanted to quit.

“I’m ready to quit,” said Penelope.

“We can take a rest,” said Ralph.

“No rest, just quit.”

“I kind of thought we were all enjoying this,” I said.

“Maybe you are,” said Penelope, “but I was going along with it because Naomi said we should. We always try to keep you creative types happy happy happy.”

“You seemed to like it before,” I said. “Did the discussion upset you?”

“No one ever told me we were deciding who dies and who doesn’t,” she said.

“We don’t decide that,” said Sylvia. “We just do thought experiments. That’s all they are.”

“But then people, other people, use our thought experiments for things.”

“That’s true,” I said. “We can’t help that. It doesn’t mean we don’t do valuable things here.”

“Maybe,” said Penelope. “But Grant’s question. It was just creepy and gross beyond words. There’s no reason to be thinking up things like that.”

“Governments do it all the time,” said Ralph. “There are all kinds of contingency plans about mass deaths and what to do about them. It would make your hair curl.”

“All of us can decide we don’t want to do anything we don’t want to do,” said Sylvia. “I have no problem with the questions we tackle or the subjects we investigate. If there is anything that bothers us, we are free not to pursue them. It’s that simple.”

“Hear hear,” said Ralph. “The woman makes sense. We are free agents, allowed to choose our destiny.”

“I just sometimes think I should be working for some other organization,” said Penelope. “Like some animal rights group, maybe, or a children’s hospital.”

“All perfectly noble institutions,” said Ralph.

“But then, we wouldn’t do things like this, I’m sure. You people are all crazy, at least a little bit. It makes it interesting.”

“Well,” said Ralph. “Terry and Sylvia and maybe you are stark raving bonkers, I will agree. But I myself am perfectly sane.”

I had fallen back into scraping dirt and letting my mind wander to nothing in particular. It was a way of avoiding much of the issues that we were talking about. I had had many crises of conscience about my stint at the institute. There was the opportunity cost of being here. My talents might be better used in some other endeavor. Who was missing out on what I might be doing?