“I hate you,” said the orange.
“But why?!” exclaimed the apple, surprised, and hurt.
“Because you are green! And green is not beautifully orange, like me,” the orange preened, twisting slightly in the early morning sun to highlight its beauty.
There was an awkward silence.
“Well,” said the apple, with righteous annoyance, “of course I am not orange. I am green. I am an apple”.
“Well,” harrumphed the orange, clearing its non-existent throat, “I don’t care. I don’t care that you’re an apple. I don’t care that you’re green. I care that things should be orange, because orange is better. So, it would be better if you were orange, at least in part. That’s logic, that is,” the orange argued.
“But I’m an apple. And apples are green. If I become part orange, I wouldn’t be an apple anymore,” the apple explained.
“I don’t care,” the orange said, and then turned its metaphorical back on the apple.
The apple pondered the orange’s strange ideas. It looked around and saw leaves, and bushes, and grass. All green.
A new argument
So, it decided to try a new argument with the orange.
“Look,” said the apple, gesturing with its non-existent hands, “we are in a world of green. The grass is green, the leaves are green, the bushes are green, and I am green.”
“So?” the orange demanded, aggressively.
“Welllllll,” said the apple slowly and carefully, “me being green means that we can look at me and say, ‘this is apple-green’. And then we can look at the bushes, and leaves, and we can say ‘they are not apple-green’. We can also say they are greener, or less green, or about the same green, as apple-green,” the apple explained.
“And of it, what?” the orange snorted, annoyed.
“It means we have a point of comparison. We can judge green things by reference to how green I am,” the apple explained.
“The point being?” the orange challenged, derisively.
“It’s valuable. It gives us a new way of looking at the world,” the apple said. “We can compare. And contrast. Maybe we can even decide, using all this new information, which is better. Or worse. And knowing that, we could then decide what, if anything, we might do to make things a little better. And if things are better, then our welfare might improve a little bit. Now, if I were part orange…” the apple said.
“…Orange is best,” the orange affirmed, enthusiastically.
The apple ignored the interruption. “… then we would lose that ability to compare, to contrast, to judge so as to make things better”.
“Hmmmmmm,” the orange pondered.
“Yes?” the apple asked, eagerly.
What is best?
“Orange is still best!” yelled the orange. “You should become part orange! I don’t care how green things are! None of this matters to me! Because being part orange is best! Which means you should become part orange!” the orange raved.
“Oh, we’re going around in circles!” the apple despaired. “If I turn part-orange, then I’m not a pure apple anymore! And then we lose the ability to judge just how green things are!” the exasperated apple explained.
“I’m not going to pay attention to you,” the orange said, and turned its metaphorical back on the apple.
The apple pondered the words of the orange for a while and felt sad.
It then reached out in a small, despairing, and quiet voice and asked: “why can’t you see the value of knowing what is green?”
“BECAUSE IT’S NOT IN MY INTEREST!” the orange yelled in reply.
And with that, both fell into an uncomfortable silence.
So it is that the concept of truth, and the path to improvement, fades away before the obstinacy of self-interest.
Errors of the philosophical fruit
We hope that everyone can see the errors in the thinking of the philosophical fruit.
The orange tried to mix apple-ness, greenness, and orangeness. To demand that the apple become orange, and to criticise it for not becoming orange, is to attack the apple for not being inherently what it is, which is an apple.
No matter how good the orange thinks the colour orange actually is, and no matter how devoutly the orange wants the apple to become orange, the apple is not orange. It will not become orange because it is an apple, and this specific apple is green. The orange has made a category error, which, in this case, is demanding that the apple have properties it cannot possibly have or acquire because the fundamental nature of its being is not to have those properties. It’s like demanding that the cold be hot or that a table should have emotions.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the apple’s apple-ness or its greenness. In its substance it is fundamentally an apple. And using its greenness as a tool for comparison to judge other green things is a perfectly valid function of its inherent quality of being green.
Things are what things are, not what we want them to be
Let’s abstract that little bit. No matter how much we want a thing to be some other thing, or to have the qualities of that other thing, it is – ahem – fruitless to wish or desire for that other thing to change and to still be what it once was.
It is also sub-optimal to then demand that the thing be mixed with some other thing, and, in so doing, destroy a perfectly valid and useful tool that could be derived from the original qualities of that thing. When the use of that tool could lead to improvement that benefits the public good, to demand to destroy the underlying basis of that tool is really quite morally repugnant especially if the motivation for so doing is to protect one’s own interest.
Now, let’s de-abstract that a bit, and apply it to the World Bank’s Container Port Performance Index and to Australia’s shipping and seaports industry. There has been a lot of criticism (wholly unjustified in our view) of the CPPI which we have tackled elsewhere in this annual report. But there is one point we want to tackle here and now.
The World Bank’s Container Port Performance Index measures time spent in ports by ships. It is a marine side data report. That’s its fundamental nature. Its function is to provide a reference point in the world of container ports. Stakeholders can make performance-related judgements of the performance of container ports. They can use the report to judge the performance of a given port against an average of ship time spent in port, against the top-ranked ports, against the bottom-ranked ports, by quartiles, by deciles, and by any of the other myriad ways that the data in the CPPI can validly be chopped.
We now know from the CPPI that Australian container ports are greatly underperforming both relative to the top-ranked ports and also against the global average.
We also know that the performance of most Australian container ports – which serve the vast majority of the Australian people – is among the world’s worst-performing container ports. We also now know that this has been going on for at least four or five years (and we can probably infer underperformance for a period longer than that). We further know from the CPPI that their performance is generally getting worse over time.
Oranges, apples, criticism and critics
Critics of the World Bank’s CPPI report have made the criticism (and we’re summarising and paraphrasing a bit here) that the CPPI is flawed because it does not contain a range of broad supply chain measures or hinterland performance indicators such as connectivity, cargo dwell time, or intermodal performance.
But that’s not what the CPPI is about. As the CPPI states in section 5.6 (on page 54): “When interpreting the CPPI scores of a port, it is essential to understand what is being measured and what is not. The CPPI focuses on the time spent [by a vessel] in port as a proxy of performance”. In the subsequent paragraphs the CPPI talks about the shipper’s perspective and the things that they would like to see analysed. The CPPI then adds that such things will be captured in a forthcoming logistics performance report.
Criticism condemning the marine data focused CPPI report as flawed because it does not include broader landside logistics performance indicators is a criticism that the CPPI is bad because it excludes elements that are fundamentally excluded by design. It’s a criticism that the CPPI is bad because it does not include elements that by its fundamental nature it does not, and should not, have nor acquire without becoming something other than what it is i.e. a marine side-data report. And it’s a report that has a lot of value because it gives us great insight into the world of Australian container port performance that could be tackled to the welfare benefit of all Australians.
To say the CPPI should include data other than what it already does is a category error. It is to demand that the true nature of the report be changed by the inclusion of other data which, if included, would corrupt and de-value the original report.
This is like the orange condemning the apple for being green.
Such criticism is invalid.
Disregard.
