Root Privileges

Month: December 2021

  • A false union in science journalism

    At what point does a journalist become a stenographer? Most people would say it’s when the journalist stops questioning claims and reprints them uncritically, as if they were simply a machine. So at what point does a science journalist become a stenographer? You’ll probably say at the same point – when they become uncritical of claims. I disagree: I believe the gap between being critical and being non-critical is smaller when it comes to science journalism simply because of the nature of its subject.

    The scientific enterprise in itself is an attempt to arrive at the truth by critiquing existing truths in different contexts and by simultaneously subtracting biases. The bulk of what we understand to be science journalism is aligned with this process: science journalists critique the same material that scientists do as well, even when they’re following disputes between groups of scientists, but seldom critique the scientists’ beliefs and methods themselves. This is not a distinction without a difference or even a finer point about labels.

    One might say, “There aren’t many stories in which journalists need to critique scientists and/or their methods” – this would be fair, but I have two issues on this count.

    First, both the language and the narrative are typically deferential towards scientists and their views, and steer clear of examining how a scientist’s opinions may have been shaped by extra-scientific considerations, such as their socio-economic location, or whether their accomplishments were the product of certain unique privileges. Second, at the level of a collection of articles, science journalists who haven’t critiqued science will likelier than not have laid tall, wide bridges between scientists and non-scientists but won’t have called scientists, or the apparatuses of science itself, out on their bullshit.

    One way or another, a science journalism that’s uncritical of science often leads to the impression that the two enterprises share the same purpose: to advance science, whether by bringing supposedly important scientific work to the attention of politicians or by building the public support for good scientific work. And this impression is wrong. I don’t think that science journalists have an obligation to help science, and I also don’t think that science journalists should.

    As it happens, science journalism is often treated differently than, say, journalism that’s concerned with political or financial matters. I completely understand why. But I don’t think there has been much of an effort to flip this relationship to consider whether the conception and practice of science has been improved by the attention of science journalists the way the practices of governance and policymaking have been improved by the attention of those reporting on politics and economics. If I was a wagering man, I’d wager ‘no’, at least not in India.

    And the failure to acknowledge this corollary of the relationship between science and science journalism, leave alone one’s responsibility as a science journalist, is to my mind a deeper cause for the persistence of both stenographic and pro-science science journalism in some quarters. I thought to write this down when reading a new editorial by Holden Thorpe, the editor of Science. He says here:

    It’s not just a matter of translating jargon into plain language. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson at the University of Pennsylvania stated in a recent article, the key is getting the public to realize that science is a work in progress, an honorably self-correcting endeavor carried out in good faith.

    Umm, no. Science is a work in progress, sure, but I have neither reason nor duty to explain that the practice of science is honourable or that it is “carried out in good faith”. (It frequently isn’t.) Granted, the editorial focuses on communicators, not journalists, but I’d place communicators on the journalism side of the fence, instead of on the science side: the purposes of journalists and communicators deviate only slightly, and for the most part both groups travel the same path.

    The rest of Thorpe’s article focuses on the fact that not all scientists can make good communicators – a fact that bears repeating if only because some proponents of science communication tend to go overboard with their insistence on getting scientists to communicate their work to a non-expert audience. But in restricting his examples to full-blown articles, radio programmes, etc., he creates a bit of a false binary (if earlier he created a false union): that you’re a communicator only if you’ve produced ‘packages’ of that size or scope. But I’ve always marvelled at the ability of some reporters, especially at the New York Times‘ science section, to elicit some lovely quotes from experts. Here are three examples:

    This is science communication as well. Of course, not all scientists may be able to articulate things so colourfully or arrive at poignant insights in their quotes but surely there are many more scientists who can do this than there are scientists who can write entire articles or produce engaging podcasts. And a scientist who allows your article to say interesting things is, I’m sure you’ll agree, an invaluable resource. Working in India, for example, I continue to have to give reporters I commission from extra time to file their stories because many scientists don’t want to talk – and while there are many reasons for this, a big and common one is that they believe communication is pointless.

    So overall, I think there needs to be more leeway in what we consider to be communication, if only so it encourages scientists to speak to journalists (whom they trust, of course) instead of being put off by the demands of a common yet singular form of this exercise, as well as what we imagine the science journalist’s purpose to be. If we like to believe that science communication and/or journalism creates new knowledge, as I do, instead of simply being adjacent to science itself, then it must also craft a purpose of its own.

    Featured image credit: Conol Samuel/Unsplash.

  • JWST and the imagination

    When the Hubble space telescope launched in April 1990, I was too young to understand what was going on – but not yesterday, when NASA launched its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Every once in a while, the Hubble telescope team releases an image of thousands of stars packed into one shot, the so-called “deep space” views. I don’t know if there is another way to react to them than with awe. But given the hype surrounding the JWST as well as its better technical specifications, its launch just seemed surreal – the threshold of a new era of astronomy photographs that everyone says will be better than what the Hubble has managed thus far, yet I can’t imagine how.

    In 2015, I had written, after gazing for an hour at a Hubble image of the M5 cluster, that the telescope’s images are so flawless, so devoid of the aberration of its instruments, that it is easy to forget the telescope lies between our eyes and the subject of its image. This sensation was reminiscent of the opening of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980):

    One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: “I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.” Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it. My interest in Photography took a more cultural turn. I decided I liked Photography in opposition to the Cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to separate it. This question grew insistent. I was overcome by an “ontological” desire: I wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was “in itself,” by what essential feature it was to be distinguished from the community of images. Such a desire really meant that beyond the evidence provided by technology and usage, and despite its tremendous contemporary expansion, I wasn’t sure that Photography existed, that it had a “genius” of its own.

    The JWST is now expected to top this… this flawlessness, and I’m already excited for the possibilities – yet I’m also instinctively inclined to temper this excitement because of something else Barthes said in the same book: a warning about making the meaning of an image too “impressive”, too powerful as to render its aesthetic qualities more keenly than its political – or in this case technical – ones:

    Yet the mask is the difficult region of Photography. Society, it seems, mistrusts pure meaning: it wants meaning, but at the same time it wants this meaning to be surrounded by a noise (as is said in cybernetics) which will make it less acute. Hence the photograph whose meaning (I am not saying its effect, but its meaning) is too impressive is quickly deflected; we consume it aesthetically, not politically. The Photograph of the Mask is in fact critical enough to disturb (in 1934, the Nazis censored Sander because his “faces of the period” did not correspond to the Nazi archetype of the race), but it is also too discrete (or too “distinguished”) to constitute an authentic and effective social critique, at least according to the exigencies of militantism: what committed science would acknowledge the interest of Physiognomy?

    I don’t know if this argument applies here or, if it does, how exactly. I thought to recall it only because of the possibilities with which the JWST will soon confront us, their implications for astronomy as a whole, and how we might respond as a people and as a species to them. And of course as science communicators.

    Featured image: An infrared image of the ‘Pillars of Creation’ in the Eagle Nebula, photographed by the Hubble space telescope in 2014. Credit: NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA.

  • About vaccines for children and Covaxin…

    I don’t understand his penchant for late-night announcements, much less one at 10 pm on Christmas night, but Prime Minister Narendra has just said the government will roll out vaccines for young adults aged 15-18 years from January 3, 2022 – around the same time I received a press release from Bharat Biotech saying the drug regulator had approved the company’s COVID-19 vaccine, Covaxin, for emergency-use among those aged 12-18 years.

    I think there’s a lot we don’t know about Covaxin at this time – similar to (but hopefully not to the same extent as) when the regulator approved it for emergency-use among adults on January 3, 2021. But what grates at me more now is this: more than being any other vaccine to protect against COVID-19, Covaxin has been the Indian government’s pet project.

    This favour has manifested in the form of numerous government officials supporting its use and advantages sans nearly sufficient supporting evidence, and in the form of help the vaccine hasn’t deserved at the time the government extended it – primarily the emergency-use approval for adults. Most of all, Covaxin has become a victim of India’s vaccine triumphalism.

    And I’m wary that Prime Minister Modi’s 10 pm announcement is a sign that a similar sort of help is in the offing. Until recently, up to December 24 in fact, officials including Rajesh Bhushan, Vinod K. Paul and Balram Bhargava said the government is being guided by science on the need to vaccinate children. Yet Modi’s announcement coincides with the drug regulator’s approval for Covaxin’s emergency-use among children.

    I admit this isn’t much to go on, but it isn’t an allegation either. It’s the following doubt: given the recent political history of Covaxin and its sorry relationship with the Indian government, will we stand to lose anything by ignoring the timing of the prime minister’s announcement? Put another way – and even if pulling at this thread turns out to be an abortive effort – did the government wait to change its policy on vaccinating those aged younger than 18 years until it could be sure Covaxin was in the running? (The drug regulator had approved another vaccine for children in August, Zydus Cadila’s ZyCoV-D – another train-wreck.)

    Modi’s announcement also has him making a deceptively off-handed comment that today is Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s birth anniversary. Such an alignment of dates has never been a coincidence in Modi’s term as prime minister. Makes one wonder what else isn’t a coincidence…

  • The way we talk about computing power

    Whenever I hear someone rhapsodize about how much more computer power we have now compared with what was available in the 1960s during the Apollo era, I cringe. Those comparisons usually grossly underestimate the difference.

    A Quadrillion Mainframes on Your Lap, Rodney Brooks, IEEE Spectrum

    And I cringe whenever I hear someone rhapsodise about computing power – however accurately – sans the context of its ubiquity. Those comparisons usually grossly miscommunicate what it means to have such power. It recently struck me that, contrary to the problem of presentism that frequently undermines what amateur historians have to say about events of the past, assessments of computing power are frequently undermined by pastism: of the tendency to quantify the computing power we have in our pockets (smartphones) or on our laps (tablets and laptops) as multiples of the computing power available to the people who launched the Apollo missions.

    These are often thinly veiled exhortions to people to use the computers at their disposal more wisely, and they’re often bad advice as well.

    But I wonder, are we using all that computation effectively to make as much difference as our forebears did after the leap from pencil and paper to the 7090?

    Same source as above

    Since the advent of the personal computer and then the internet, the ubiquity of computers – and the information that they can carry, distribute and access – has transformed the context in which information exists, and is required. Instead of talking about how our laptops have a quadrillion-times the computing power that exist in an IBM 7090 mainframe, and therefore simply inferring how much more we can do with it, I think it would be better to imagine that the 7090 had one-quadrillionth the power of a modern laptop.

    More than illustrating the progress we have made to improve the speed with which some well-known computers perform calculations, looking at the past as being in possession of a small fraction of the computing power we can access today could help us remember, say, the quantities at which information can be useful (depending on the context) or how quickly innovations in information-processing technologies from the mid-20th century changed our lives. Mainframe systems operating with magnetic tapes helped some people obtain, accumulate and analyse large amounts of information and synthesise enough knowledge to get people into orbit around the planet and land them on the Moon. Half a century later, there were enough of these machines going around to make the accumulation and processing of information not the goal but often the problem, in some contexts even the problem.

    And this is just one way to look at it. Another is illustrated by the following example: I use lots of power relative to, say, some calculation involving the G-force that a rocket motor might have to adjust for to update my blog and make sure as many people on the planet as possible can access it, preferably within a second of them clicking the link. This is thanks to the democratisation of computing power. In the 1960s, only large organisations could afford the machines required to host and operate computing engines. As a result, when we think about computers of the past, we have only a few examples to consider – such as NASA launching astronauts to space. But think of computers today and you get to think about a mind-boggling array of activities, each of which may not use nearly as much power but which together use a lot more than was available in the Apollo era.

    I’m sure social scientists do but too many news articles and social media commentators don’t stop to think that as our relationship with information changed, the expression of computing power as multiples of that in the mainframe era became less useful. Put another way, the past still matters – but using the language of computing power to talk about it sweeps our altered relationship with information, and the kinds of economy and enterprise it has spawned, under the rug.

    Featured image credit: Pixabay/Pexels.

  • Charles Lieber case: A high-energy probe of science

    There’s a phenomenon in high-energy particle physics that I’ve found instructive as a metaphor to explain some things whose inner character may not be apparent to us but whose true nature is exposed in extreme situations. For example, consider the case of Charles Lieber, an American chemist whom a jury found guilty earlier today of lying to the US government about participating in a Chinese science programme and about having a Chinese bank account.

    Through our everyday interactions with protons and neutrons – sitting in the nuclei of their respective atoms – we’d have no reason to believe that they’re made up of smaller particles. But when you probe a proton with another particle at an extremely high energy, such a probe can reveal that the proton is really made of smaller particles called up and down quarks.

    Similarly, Lieber’s case is an extreme instance of a national government clashing with the nation’s scientific enterprise for engaging in a science-related activity with immutable political implications. In our everyday interactions, there is no reason to believe that the government, or any other relatively more powerful political entity, could have a problem with what some scientist is working on or has to say. But sparks start to fly the moment the scientist’s work, words or even thoughts begin to have political implications.

    It’s not like the protons are not made of up and down quarks when probed at lower energies; it’s that the latter don’t reveal themselves. Similarly, it’s not like science isn’t a political activity even when it lacks political implications; it’s that the relationship between science and politics, in that limited context, is too feeble to matter. But it’s there.

    According to a New York Times article explaining Lieber’s case, by Ellen Barry so you know it’s well-written, the Trump-era ‘China Initiative’ to “root out scientists suspected of sharing sensitive information with China” has been accused of “prosecutorial overreach”, but also that Lieber also shot himself in the foot by denying his involvement in the Chinese programme when “he was specifically asked about his participation”.

    Barry’s article makes the point that scientists are scared because the US government criminalised otherwise innocuous activities – activities that scientists have spent decades learning to not fear. At the same time, it would be unfair to spare Lieber – an accomplished nanoscience expert employed at Harvard University – the expectation to know what the consequences of his actions might be and the risk of ignoring them.

    Perhaps he harboured a sense of exceptionalism vis-à-vis his cause; perhaps he thought the ‘China Initiative’ that had knocked on the doors of other scientists wouldn’t knock on his; perhaps he just assumed it wouldn’t matter. But any which way, more than just being “about scaring the scientific community”, as one of Lieber’s former students says in the article, the initiative’s victory in the Charles Lieber case should also remind scientists that the best way to beat the initiative is for the scientific community to proactively engage in political issues.

    Lieber’s excuse, according to tapes of his interrogation by FBI officers, was that he wished to train younger scientists in a technology he had developed and thus increase his chances of winning a Nobel Prize. This is the science-politics link coming back to bite Lieber, and others like him (notably Brian Keating, whose act of ‘coming clean’ on this sentiment I continue to find admirable), who risk ruining their careers just win the prize (see addendum).

    One major impediment to acknowledging that politics is suffused in every human enterprise – including science – that happens in any organised society whose people govern themselves is that people often misunderstand politics to be “what their politicians say/do” instead of “the practice of self-governance”. But by understanding it to be the former, there’s a hoopla every time some political leader or other apparently oversteps their remit.

    Addendum

    Three comments.

    First, somewhere between the early 20th century and the early 21st, the prize’s perception went from being “do good work and you’ll win it” to “do good work and then hack your way to winning it”.

    Second, I’ve seen this tendency of going ‘over and beyond’ to ensure one wins a Nobel Prize predominantly among scientists of the US – which in turn is hard to separate from the fact that most winners of the science Nobel Prizes have been from the US. There is perhaps a academic-cultural issue at work, and there’s certainly a competition issue at work. People are first nominated for a prize by eminent individuals and former laureates, and thanks to a historical skew of the laureates’ countries of citizenship (in favour of the US thanks to the rise of Nazism in Europe) and the way industry and the scientific publishing enterprise are organised today, both these groups of people as well as new laureates are skewed US-ward. What happens when a country produces “too much” good work for one prize, and its inexplicable rule to award only three people at a time, to consider? Surely Lieber believed this and wanted to get ahead of others, leading to his bullheaded actions?

    Third, dismantle the Nobel Prizes.

    Featured image: Charles M. Lieber. Credit: Kris Snibbe/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

  • Make war for the environment

    Last week, India voted against a resolution in the UN Security Council to allow the council’s core members to deliberate on climate issues because, in the resolution’s view, they impinge on national security. Russia and India, among others, voted ‘against’. Russia is a permanent member so its rejection sunk the idea; India’s rejection, on the other hand, turned out to be the most articulate – at least according to a video circulating on the web of India’s permanent representative T.S. Tirumurti delineating India’s stance. Senior Indian officials seldom have anything to say these days that’s working taking seriously; this was one of them. India’s position, according to the statement Tirumurti read out, was centered on the following point:

    This draft resolution is a step backward from our collective resolve to combat climate change. It seeks to hand over that responsibility to a body which neither works through consensus nor is reflective of the interests of the developing countries. India had no option but to vote against.

    Read Devirupa Mitra’s explanation of the significance of India’s vote here and Aathira Perinchery’s report on what climate policy researchers made of it here. Fundamentally, war gives rise to the most ridiculous ideas because war also gives rise to one of the most anti-democratic of what Lewis Mumford called the authoritarian technics: anti-accountable decision-making. In the context of India’s vote, arguments against the resolution were also rooted in the fact that one permanent member – the US of A – continues to drag its feet on useful climate action, especially domestic and international climate finance. As if to set the ground for the resolution, the US Department of Defence published a report in October this year that said:

    The risks of climate change to Department of Defense (DoD) strategies, plans, capabilities, missions, and equipment, as well as those of U.S. allies and partners, are growing. Global efforts to address climate change – including actions to address the causes as well as the effects – will influence DoD strategic interests, relationships, competition, and priorities. To train, fight, and win in this increasingly complex environment, DoD will consider the effects of climate change at every level of the DoD enterprise.

    While these may be legitimate considerations, holding closed-door meetings to, say, weaken climate action because doing otherwise could weaken national security – which, if India’s example is anything to go by, could be as arbitrary as you need it to be – would just be a backdoor that undermines already weak climate pacts and treaties. As Tirumurti said:

    It sends a wrong message to the developing countries that instead of addressing their concerns and holding developed countries responsible for meeting their commitments under the UNFCCC, we are willing to be divided and side-tracked under the guise of security.

    A less ridiculous but still precarious idea is that responding to climate-change-fuelled natural disasters could distract the armed forces from the training required to fight the country’s enemies abroad. While it’s reasonable to argue that there aren’t enough properly trained people to respond, specifically as first responders, to an extreme weather event, it’s hard to square America’s defence spending (and somewhere in there its Department of Defence being the world’s single-largest consumer of oil) with the view that such ‘distractions’ may cost American lives in wars abroad.

    Fundamentally, including vis-à-vis the Security Council resolution, it would be a case of putting war before the climate. And now that I’ve put it that way – the most ridiculous examples I’ve come across of this variety (H/T to Samir Malhotra) is a research opportunity that the Small Business Innovation Research programme of the US government issued in 2017: bullets loaded with seeds that sprout plants once they have been in the ground for many months.

    The US Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) has demonstrated bioengineered seeds that can be embedded into the biodegradable composites and that will not germinate until they have been in the ground for several months. This SBIR effort will make use of seeds to grow environmentally friendly plants that remove soil contaminants and consume the biodegradable components developed under this project. Animals should be able to consume the plants without any ill effects.

    PHASE I: In Phase I the contractor develop a process to produce biodegradable composites with remediation seeds that can be used to manufacture 40mm-120mm training rounds. These Training rounds shall meet all the performance requirements of existing training rounds. The contractor should also explore avenues to produce biodegradable composites with remediation seeds for use in products outside the defense sector.

    PHASE II: In Phase II the contractor will prove out the fabrication process and manufacture prototypes that demonstrate the process is ready for industrial use. Provide a sufficient number of prototypes for the government to perform ballistic tests.

    PHASE III: Contractor will coordinate with PEO Ammunition and ammunition prime contractors to establish a transition path for the SBIR technology.

    Paralleling its government’s viscous approach to international climate action, it seems like the American military establishment has also been looking for ways to make war for the environment.

  • Some thoughts on Robert Downey, Jr.’s science funding idea

    On December 12, Iron Man, a.k.a. Robert Downey, Jr., and David Lang coauthored an op-ed in Fast Company that announced a grant-giving initiative of theirs designed to help fund scientists doing work too important to wait for the bureaucracy to catch up. Their article opened with a paragraph that, to my eye, seemed to have many flaws in reasoning, or at least overlooked them, perhaps in favour of getting to their limited point.

    If there were a Nobel Prize for Overcoming Bureaucratic Adversity, do you know who would win it? Katalin Karikó. Her story of enduring decades of little to no support for her research into the properties of mRNA, which led to the development of the COVID-19 vaccines, has transcended science. It exposes a blind spot of our current scientific institutions to find and nurture every passionate scientist and line of inquiry.

    Except it isn’t a blind spot.

    I think it’s a romantic ideal that dreams of funding every idea scientists have. You can, there’s nothing wrong with it, except you’d need lots of money. The current system is designed – even if it hasn’t been implemented – to ensure at least a certain percentage of good ideas are identified and funded at the right time and in parallel to maximise that percentage. What Iron Man and Lang imagine in their article is a system that will fund all good ideas, including those that The System has let slip. It’s a welcome move, perhaps, but it isn’t more virtuous, even when it rewards adversity that, again, The System has let slip, simply because The System’s way – which is effectively the tax-funded government’s way in most parts of the world – is the most efficient for its limited corpus of funds and its responsibility to organise research output to maximise societal good, directly or indirectly, instead of letting it all be open-ended.

    Granted, in times of great adversity, it might be foolish to wait for evidence before waiting to act, and a ‘wartime’ funding paradigm during a pandemic makes some sense, even if it’s a solution designed for wartime alone. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic – and the ‘fast grants’ for pandemic research that seem to have inspired Downey, Jr. and Lang – is a different kind of adversity than climate change. The latter is longer-lasting and more persistent, is a wicked problem (i.e. has multiple interrelated and/or emergent causes), has significant social implications that complicate the relationships between causes and effects, and is decidedly inter- and multi-generational. These differences could in turn render unbridled rapidity counterproductive.

    A part of the reason for the authors’ outlook, concerned with ‘catching’ good ideas before it’s too late, sticks out in the first sentence, in which Iron Man and Lang single out Katalin Karikó for praise for her work on mRNA vaccines as well as signal that they consider the Nobel Prizes to be the ultimate reward. If you’ve been reading this blog, you know where I stand on these prizes. But more importantly in the current context, the use of these prizes in particular and the choice of Katalin Karikó as an example of the sort of scientist they’d like to fund is… jarring.

    Iron Man and Lang seem to believe, as they write, that it’s important to catch brilliant ideas quickly (and that “the major impediments” to funding scientific work “are the obvious limitations of decision-making by committee”). First, one cause, among many, of the bureaucracy’s slowness is the bureaucracy’s need to be accountable to the polity about how it spends the polity’s money. And I don’t know if Iron Man and Lang are making room for any kind of slowness, and the corresponding paperwork, in their grant-funding programme. ‘Risk-seeking’ shouldn’t become an excuse for ‘accountability-avoiding’. On a related note, to zero in on ‘speed of funding’ as the principal problem with not funding the “right” kind of environmental research is also to ignore other, potentially more fundamental problems hiding behind the slowness – like “the party currently in power is not interested”.

    Second, many of us have lambasted others for singling out individuals – typically white men – as the sole originators of great discoveries. However, many people have identified Karikó more than anyone else with creating the idea of mRNA vaccines, aided by long profiles published by major newspapers about her work and her role in BioNTech, yet haven’t elicited the same or even similar reactions. If adversity is our measure, i.e. “we’re going to associate the person who struggled the most to make a meaningful contribution to an important idea”, then Karikó is by no means alone – nor is she likely to be, as just the post-war history of science has taught us, if we’re focusing on women. She couldn’t have worked alone, and even if the people we’re ignoring as a result are white old men, it’s still problematic to say Katalin Karikó is deserving of a Nobel Prize – at least not without, at the same time, admitting that it would be legitimate for the Nobel Prizes to award two or three people for the invention of mRNA vaccines.

    (I discovered that Nature News published a deep-dive in October on the “tangled history of mRNA vaccines” after I started writing this post, discussing the work of a long line of people, including Karikó, who contributed to this enterprise. So on a related note, if Karikó’s story is being used to illustrate new science-funding ideas, what might the professional experiences of all those other people say about how science is funded – as well as about how we apportion credit?)

    Third, it’s kind of a bummer that, heartening though it is for major Hollywood actors to get interested in the relatively more obscure problems of science administration and funding, and in turn to become part of a concrete solution instead of running their mouths on Twitter, this new initiative refuses to break from the tradition of devising new solutions to old problems instead of fixing existing solutions – an admittedly much less glamorous enterprise. The only other person who’s compared to Iron Man as frequently as Robert Downey, Jr., one Elon Musk, is infamous for this kind of thinking vis-à-vis ‘revolutionising’ personal transport. Musk wants more people to own cars – especially the ones his company makes – but will go so far as to dream up Hyperloop and The Boring Company to avoid considering fixing existing public transportation options.

    Similarly, Downey, Jr. and Lang, and their supporters, will go to the extent of setting up a whole new platform, or getting on a relatively new platform (same difference), instead of building on the things The System is already getting right. And this is a problem for at least three reasons. First, the new system will set up its own forms of discrimination and in-ness. For example, Downey, Jr.’s and Lang’s idea goes like this:

    FootPrint Coalition is funding early research in brand new environmental fields, and doing it under the direction of esteemed Science Leads who can move quickly and fund at their discretion. The FootPrint Coalition Science Engine builds off suggestions made in the Funding Risky Research paper. It operationalizes the “loose-play funding for early-stage risky explorations” but doesn’t bind it to universities.

    We’re doing it “in public” on the Experiment funding platform, a website for crowdfunding science research projects, so anyone can participate as a cofunder.

    As a platform that you get on, describe your idea and convince potential funders that your work is worth funding, ‘Experiment’ fundamentally requires you to be able to communicate clearly and with the same sensibilities as your future funders, most of whom are likely to be English-speakers of the US or Europe, if you expect to be successful. This in turn quickly eliminates a panoply of scientists who aren’t great communicators or aren’t even fluent in English. And in the specific case of the ‘Science Engine’, your work needs to appeal to the ‘Science Lead’ and fit into their sense of what’s important and what isn’t. A version of this problem already exists with scientific journals – where major journals’ editorial boards are often filled with editors who turn down papers because they’re not as enthusiastic as the authors might be about, say, the nutritional properties of an ant species endemic to Odisha.

    In addition, not all ideas to save the environment are great ideas. For example, climate geoengineering is popular with the US government because it needs to make up for historical emissions without compromising on current economic growth, it needs to placate the local, powerful energy industry and it wields the clout to disregard how much geoengineering solutions could screw up the weather in other parts of the world.

    Second, as a system designed to patch “leaks” in the “scientific talent funnel”, it still presumes the existence of a funnel for its own success even as it does nothing to fix the funnel itself. This is self-serving. And third, allowing scientific work to achieve success based solely on what gets funded quickly – that too based on descriptions on platforms on the internet, unmoderated by the criticism of other scientists (have you visited PubPeer?) or even by the critical attention of competent science journalists, and based on what people who are already rich think is “cool” – can be a short path for things the world could really do without to get funded.

    So, do I think Iron Man’s and Lang’s pitch is a good idea? I still don’t know.

    Featured image: A screenshot of Iron Man in action in Avengers: Infinity War (2018). Source: Hotstar.

  • Disappointing persons of the year 2021

    I’m starting to think that in this day and age, you will but err when you pick individuals for traditionally ‘prestigious’ awards, prizes, recognitions, etc., probably because the sort of people who can stand out by themselves have to have had the sort of clout and power that typically comes not through personal achievement as much as systemic prejudice – or they need to have screwed up on a magnitude so large that the nature of their action must overlap significantly with a combination of centralised power and lack of accountability. And on the spectrum of possibilities between these two extremes lie The Week‘s and Time‘s persons of the year 2021.

    The Week has picked – wait for it – Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) director-general Balram Bhargava for his leadership of India’s medical response to the country’s COVID-19 crises. I doubt I’d lose my journalistic equipoise if I said he deserved to be the “clown of the year” not just because Bhargava, and ICMR with him, has made many batty claims throughout the epidemic – principally in press conferences – but also because, to echo the recent words of Barton Gellman, he has pushed an independent medical research body outside the democratic system and into the prime minister’s office.

    Yet The Week‘s article justifying its choice makes no mention of these transgressions and sticks only to Bhargava making life-impacting decisions at 3 am – like tens of thousands of healthcare workers around the country, who did that and kept their collective spine – and a can-do attitude in which The Week fails to see that “getting things done” to the appreciation of your colleagues also means that unless someone takes more initiative than they’re expected to, the organisation is systematically incapable of going “over and beyond”, so to speak. One way or another, it’s not hard to conclude that Bhargava will leave ICMR worse than it was when he joined.

    Time‘s person of the year 2021 is Elon Musk. Its profile reads much less like the profilee is doing the profiler a favour, but it also fails to overcome the suspicion that it expects the sheer magnitude of Musk’s ambitions for the world to absolve him of his failures – failures that appear like minor glitches in a grand, technocratic future-vision to Silicon Valley and Wall Street honchos (and their mimics worldwide) but to anyone else suggest something worse but also familiar: a plutocracy in which each billionaire is only looking out for himself, or at best his company’s interests.

    Time‘s profile is essentially a paean to the extent to which Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX companies have reinvigorated their respective industries (automotives and spaceflight) through innovations in manufacturing and industrial management, but it’s often presented in a context-limited, value-neutral fashion that prompts concerns that the magazine wouldn’t have had access to Musk if it didn’t promise to write nice things about him.

    For example, Time writes that “Musk’s … announcement of a $100 million climate prize rankled some environmentalists because of its inclusion of proposals for direct-air carbon capture,” and that its sole criticism is that this tech doesn’t work. But the greater issue is that focusing on carbon capture and storage technologies is a technofix that allows Tesla and other vehicle-makers to evade responsibility to reduce the demand for carbon, and that Musk’s ‘challenge’ is really a bid through philanthrocapitlism to prolong ‘business as usual’ climate scenarios. For another related example, about Tesla’s success with electric vehicles, the profile says:

    That has made Musk arguably the biggest private contributor to the fight against climate change. Had the 800,000 Teslas sold in the last year been gas-powered cars, they would have emitted more than 40 million metric tons of CO₂ over their lifetimes—equivalent to the annual emissions of Finland. But EVs may ultimately be less important to the climate fight than the central innovation that made them possible: batteries. Tesla has repurposed the lightweight, energy-dense cells that power its cars for huge grid-scale batteries that provide essential backup for renewables. Demand for Tesla’s smaller home-based Powerwall, which can store electricity from rooftop solar systems, has spiked as consumers look for alternatives to the grid, driven by everything from February’s Texas power shortage to the fire risk in California that has led to power shutoffs.

    Yet the profile doesn’t mention that even when electrified, more and more people owning cars only exacerbates the underlying problem – the demand for electricity, from a climate mitigation standpoint, and urban traffic and congestion – and that we need cities to shift to more affordable, usable and efficient modes of public transport. (The profile also and obviously doesn’t include Musk’s comment in 2017 that he dislikes public transport because he grossly mistrusts other people.) And if Tesla’s technologies will ultimately benefit the US’s, and the world’s, public transport systems, it’s hard to imagine the extent to which they would’ve also undermined our fight for climate and social justice by then.

    Instead, this is profiteering, plain and simple, and Time‘s failure to see it as such – throughout the profile, not just in this instance, it repeatedly tries to reflect the world’s aspirations in his own – seems to me to be a symptom of a desire to coexist with Musk more than anything else. Once in a while the profile has a few paragraphs of complaints against Musk and his businesses, only for them to be followed by an excuse for his behaviour or an indication that he was sanctioned appropriately for it, and never anything that goes far enough to contemplate what Musk’s politics might be. “Something about our upbringing makes us constantly want to be on the edge,” Elon’s brother Kimbal says – in the same paragraph that makes the profile’s sole meaningful allusion to the centrality of lucrative NASA contracts to SpaceX’s success. That, to me, said enough.

    I wish both The Week and Time had picked persons of the year who make the world fairer and better in spite of the people they’ve actually picked – but at the same time must conclude that perhaps this is one more tradition whose time has ended.

    Featured image credits: ICMR/Facebook and Steve Jurvetson/Flickr.

  • The foolishness of a carbon-negative blockchain

    With the experience of ‘fortress conservation’, poor implementation of the Forest Rights Act and the CAMPA philosophy in India, it’s hard not to think that the idea of carbon offsets is stupid. This mode of ‘climate action’ has been most popular in the US and the EU, given that carbon offsets are essentially status-quoist: they only remove carbon downstream, after the activity that released it has been performed, and doesn’t lower the demand for carbon or carbon-producing activities (i.e. consumption) in the first place.

    With the emergence of entities that collect carbon debt from multiple sources and offset them through afforestation drives, many organisations and companies now claim to be carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative by simply passing on their debt and paying a fee to have it offset. And now, dispiritingly, even cryptocurrency enterprises have joined this party, with advertisements of carbon-negative blockchains that continue to ignore the fact that crypto is still a solution looking for a problem.

    It’s constantly baffling how a community composed mostly of rich, white libertarians, presumably with a good education culminating in some of California’s or Massachusetts’s finest institutes of study, fails to acknowledge the inefficiency of a financial system more cumbersome and energy-intensive than the one already in place, sustained by self–indulgence and inflated promises of socio–financial revolutions and carbon-neutrality, all in the name of liberties that few others care for.

    Now specifically, crypto hitching its wagon to the international carbon-offset programme is doubly problematic because it’s two status-quoist enterprises working together to further erode climate and social justice.

    Crypto proponents, notably the Ethereum community, have deflected arguments against the energy demand of cryptocurrency transactions by claiming they’re already implementing or planning to implement the ‘proof of stake’ over the ‘proof of work’ model of verification. I’m sure you’ve heard that to earn bitcoins, you use your computer to solve some difficult math problems, with the coins as your reward. Your computer’s work is your proof of work – the thing you use to demonstrate that you’ve earned the coins. ‘Proof of stake’ demands that you already own some coins – or, more generically, tokens – to perform transactions on the blockchain that the tokens are already part of.

    Proponents of the ‘proof of stake’ model like to say that it’s less energy-intensive than ‘proof of work’, which is true in the same way the Delhi government plans to cut traffic pollution by asking drivers to turn off their cars’ engines at red lights. This is because ‘proof of stake’ has its own big problems, ranging from concerns that it’s a scam to, more pertinent to this post, being rooted like ‘proof of work’ in the more fundamental tenet of ‘proof of preexisting wealth’. To quote Everest Pipkin writing in March this year:

    Proof of stake is, and always has been, valuable as a bait and switch, but there are other, obvious problems with PoS (and various other proofs), which are that to more or less degrees they don’t address any of the problems with access to cryptocurrency relying on existing wealth.

    Proof of stake coins use a variety of mechanisms to determine “lottery ticket” allocation, but it essentially boils down to: 1 coin in your wallet, one lottery ticket. Proof of capacity gives you a lottery ticket per available hard drive segment. Proof of assignment gives you a lottery ticket per smart device / internet of things consumer electronics good you own. Proof of donation gives you a lottery ticket per donation to a charitable organization.

    I’m sure you’re seeing the problem here – there is not a schema that doesn’t reward those who already are already wealthy, who are already bought in, who already have excess capital or access to outsized computational power. Almost universally they grant power to the already powerful.

    This is also a climate issue.

    Climate justice is social justice. This is true in that the worst impacts of climate collapse are felt by those with no means to avoid them, while those with resources easily fuck on off to somewhere where they don’t have to see it.

    But climate justice must mean giving leadership and power to those who will bear the worst effects of climate catastrophe, including the very young, those living in the global south, those living rurally in coastal areas or farming regions, those living in poverty, those in marginalized communities, and particularly to indigenous communities who have actual experience in managing complex local ecosystems for generations without creating spiraling, resource-extractative devastation.

    And carbon-offsets just make a false promise to make this better. Trees planted today to offset carbon emitted today will only sequester that carbon at optimum efficiencies many years later – when carbon emissions from the same project, if not the rest of the world, are likely to be higher. Second, organisations promising to offset carbon often do so in a part of the world significantly removed from where the carbon was originally released. Arguments against the ‘Miyawaki method’ suggest that you can only plant plants up to a certain density in a given ecosystem, and that planting them even closer together won’t have better or even a stagnating level of effects – but will in fact denigrate the local ecology. Scaled up to the level of countries, this means (I assume) that emitting many tonnes of carbon dioxide over North America and Europe and attempting to have all of that sequestered in the rainforests of South America, Central Africa and Southeast Asia won’t work, at least not without imposing limitations on the latter countries’ room to emit carbon for their own growth as well as on how these newly created ‘green areas’ should be used.

    Too many people also continue to maintain the colonial-era view that planting trees is the answer even if it means we degrade ecosystems that don’t want trees – helped along by one wildly misleading 2019 study that pro-offset groups have cited more often than they have cited a big correction it received a year later. Ultimately, by bundling so many injustices together, crypto + carbon-offsets is just a bigger racket.

    Featured image credit: Michael Dziedzic/Unsplash.

  • On The Caravan’s new profile of The Hindu

    On December 1, The Caravan published a 50-page report entitled ‘Paper Priests: The battle for the soul of The Hindu’. The report – actually, as a friend put it, a big profile – has many good parts and many others, not so much, especially from the point of view of an insider: I worked there from June 2012 to May 2014, coinciding roughly with Siddharth Varadarajan’s tenure as editor-in-chief.

    It is hard for me to comment openly on the subpar parts because they’re rooted in my position as once-insider, with information that anyone else will have a hard time getting their hands on, at least not without considerable effort. In that sense, those parts of the profile may not be subpar per se. My second concern is that my comments at this point can only appear in a non-journalistic context and at the same time lack the liberty to be as detailed as they may need to be, and both these limitations are bad for the spirit of being fair. Nonetheless, I think I will attempt an overview with these caveats – of the subpar followed by the better bits.

    The principal contention is that the profile is titled ‘The battle for the soul of The Hindu’ when in fact the ‘soul’ bit remains unclear to the end and ‘The Hindu’ refers to just the newspaper’s political and related journalism and not, as one might assume, its entire breadth of coverage. I was particularly disappointed that the profile didn’t bother with the sports and internet departments, for example, which have had many issues in the past under multiple editors and which merit inclusion.

    Second (and also in my friend’s view), the profile’s authors could have spoken to more employees of The Hindu, both current and former, to get a fuller sense of what it means or meant to work there. It is interspersed with quotes but the bulk of it is narrative, with a lot of material collated from what is already in the public domain. There is value in curating things in the right context, and that to me is a big strength of the profile. At the same time, as an insider, reading it was both a big trip down memory lane and a sharp reminder at many points about which decisions, which people and which assets were left out, why, and how their absence diminished the narrative at that point. It serves to give non-insiders a good sense of The Hindu’s workings, but beyond that, the profile, while exhaustive, is not comprehensive.

    Third, the profile overlooks some issues adjacent to running the newspaper smoothly and which provide insights that the more ‘mainstream’ issues in the organisation may not. One prominent example was The Hindu’s design. N. Ram and other members of the board overseeing the newspaper took a keen interest in its pages’ layouts, colours, fonts, etc., and made a big deal of getting designer Mario García to change the way it looked from its 125th anniversary. That The Hindu’s chiefs paid so much attention to the design was heartening. At the same time, when Varadarajan quit as editor, design changes made in his tenure became one source of contempt for Malini Parthasarathy’s new dispensation, with derisive comments directed that way to ensure there were no doubts about how much she was prepared to change things and little thought for the designers caught in the crossfire.

    Other examples: the primacy of publishing in print versus online, how much different people should be paid, and the circumstances in which a person could be sacked.

    The goodest part of the profile is that it places The Hindu’s Brahmanism front and centre. (I’m also glad it takes a sterner look at Malini Parthasarathy’s closeness to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a friendship discomfitingly proximate to its decision to part ways with Varadarajan because he was anti-Modi and its tendency to ‘balance’ criticism of Modi with favourable reports.) At the time I worked there, a friend and I received a considerable salary hike at one point and wanted to celebrate with a good dinner in the office canteen. We got there, got our plates, got some rice and dal, and sat down at a table along with a box of some egg-based dishes we’d ordered from outside. When we opened the box, the people on the tables around us suddenly lost their shit and had us leave, and we had to finish our dinners in my friend’s car parked in the office garage.

    The Caravan profile discusses a similar incident involving overt expressions of Brahmin privileges, as well as quotes Sudipto Mondal extensively, and some others less so, on the newspaper’s upper-caste character at the newsroom level. My egg-eating colleague and I are both Brahmins, so we may not be able to fully articulate how the office’s few non-Brahmin, rather non-upper-caste, staff members felt in circumstances when others around them engaged in distinctly upper-caste rituals and conversations, excluded them in intra-newsroom social settings, and sidelined them in decisions about which stories could feature on the front or national pages, or what stories they could work on, even to the detriment of the stories’ implicit merit. The profile fixes this gap in awareness to an appreciable extent.

    In fact, overall, The Caravan’s profile is well worth your time for its efforts to locate The Hindu and its coverage of political issues in the broader context of its preference – conscious or otherwise – for upper-caste ideals through its history and many parts of its inner workings.

    Featured image credit: ashni_ahlawat/Unsplash.