Root Privileges

Month: October 2022

  • COP talks as ambition police

    Part of what makes Greta Thunberg such a powerful voice in climate activism is her no-nonsense communication.

    Yesterday, for example, she called the impending COP27 climate talks, to be held in Egypt on November 6-18, an opportunity for “people in power” to “greenwash”, “lie” and “cheat”. Her words are presumably referring to the world’s wealthiest nations resisting efforts by the less, and in fact the least, wealthy nations to secure more funds to adapt to the climate crisis, research and implement new technologies, resettle vulnerable people and safeguard threatened livelihoods and geographies.

    In the past, wealthier countries – as well as the institutions that sustain their wealthy status – have also been reluctant to take responsibility for historical emissions and for the role of their colonialist or imperialist policies, as the came may be, in perpetrating inequity.

    At the COP21 in Paris six years ago, the famous Paris Agreement was signed after intense day/night negotiations, only to come to a weak agreement on the 1.5º C threshold, and even without any legal bindings. Last year’s COP26 in Glasgow ended as a disappointment, with negotiators’ focus squarely on climate finance. At the upcoming COP27 in Egypt, the talks will take off on this point.

    At this juncture, and in fact against the backdrop of the UK having defaulted on a $288 million commitment to the Green Climate Fund, Thunberg’s comments must be welcome for all the less-than-rich countries. However, the unqualified nature of her statement – painting COP27 in toto as something resembling a sham – should be unwelcome for the same group for a few reasons.

    Apart from providing an arena in which nations on the roughly two sides of the climate finance crisis can meet, these climate talks, organised under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, also provide a stage on which countries forge alliances and where – with the advantage of uninterrupted media attention – lesser known voices from remote parts of the world can make themselves heard.

    But perhaps most importantly, here, less-than-wealthy countries can cooperate and squeeze just a little more commitment from the wealthier ones – because outside of these forums, negotiations are one-to-one, ad hoc and scattered, and often combine political considerations with climate-related ones in a way that could be detrimental to the latter.

    For example, at COP26 last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced India’s intention to become ‘net-zero’ by 2070 as well as called on wealthy countries to step up their financial support for climate mitigation activities worldwide, joining a chorus of voices making the same demand as well as responding to international pressure to declare such a target.

    At the same time, India is one of Asia’s fastest-growing oil markets, and whose government has projected oil and gas demand in the country to grow 8-11% through this decade despite a lack of clarity on what these fuels will be used for. As a result, several international energy corporations are expanding their foothold in India, capitalising on the country as one of the world’s last major markets for fossil fuels. The government is encouraging this trend for the investments it brings.

    At the Conference of the Parties (i.e. COP), thus, we can expect a check against our own government’s ambitions – as well as where the clout of individual governments fructifies as part of a collective bargaining enterprise. (Why not take advantage of the fact that the current Indian government is sensitive to how it’s perceived in the Western press?)

    So dismissing the talks as a whole – as Thunberg has done on more than one occasion – and expecting the world’s wealthiest nations to step up is, for better or worse, not going to get us anywhere. That said, recasting the talks as a forum that works in favour of the world’s economically developing and least developed nations, by allowing them to function as a single bloc, may serve us all better. The governments of these countries also need to be held accountable after all.

    Featured image: Greta Thunberg in Montreal in September 2019. Credit: Lëa-Kim Châteauneuf/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

  • Neuromorphic hype

    We all know there’s a difference between operating an Indica Diesel car and a WDP 4 diesel locomotive. The former has two cylinders and the latter 16. But that doesn’t mean the WDP 4 simply has eight times more components as the Indica. This is what comes to my mind when I come across articles that trumpet an achievement without paying any attention to its context.

    In an example from yesterday, IEEE Spectrum published an article with the headline ‘Nanowire Synapses 30,000x Faster Than Nature’s’. An artificial neural network is a network of small data-processing components called neurons. Once the neurons are fed data, they work together to analyse it and solve problems (like spotting the light from one star in a picture of a galaxy). The network also iteratively adjusts the connections between neurons, called synapses, so that the neurons cooperate more efficiently. The architecture and the process broadly mimic the way the human brain works, so they’re also collected under the label ‘neuromorphic computing’.

    Now consider this excerpt:

    “… a new superconducting photonic circuit … mimics the links between brain cells—burning just 0.3 percent of the energy of its human counterparts while operating some 30,000 times as fast. … the synapses are capable of [producing output signals at a rate] exceeding 10 million hertz while consuming roughly 33 attojoules of power per synaptic event (an attojoule is 10-18 of a joule). In contrast, human neurons have a maximum average [output] rate of about 340 hertz and consume roughly 10 femtojoules per synaptic event (a femtojoule is 10-15 of a joule).”

    The article, however, skips the fact that the researchers operated only four circuit blocks in their experiment – while there are 86 billion neurons on average in the human brain working at the ‘lower’ efficiency. When such a large assemblage functions together, there are emergent problems that aren’t present when a smaller assemblage is at work, like removing heat and clearing cellular waste. (The human brain also contains “85 billion non-neuronal cells”, including the glial cells that support neurons.) The energy efficiency of the neurons must be seen in this context, instead of being directly compared to a bespoke laboratory setup.

    Philip W. Anderson’s ‘more is different’ argument provides a more insightful argument against such reductive thinking. In a 1972 essay, Anderson, a theoretical physicist, wrote:

    “The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. In fact, the more the elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of science, much less to those of society.”

    He contended that the constructionist hypothesis – that you can start from the first principles and arrive straightforwardly at a cutting-edge discovery in that field – “breaks down” because it can’t explain “the twin difficulties scale and complexity”. That is, things that operate on larger scale and with more individual parts are physically greater than the sum of those parts. (I like to think Anderson’s insight to be the spatial analogue of L.P. Hartley’s time-related statement of the same nature: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”)

    So let’s not celebrate something because it’s “30,000x faster than” the same thing in nature – as the Spectrum article’s headline goes – but because it represents good innovation in and of itself. Indeed, the researchers who conducted the new study and are quoted in the article don’t make the comparison themselves but focus on the leap forward their innovation portends in the field of neuromorphic computing.

    Faulty comparisons on the other hand could inflate readers’ expectations about what the outcomes of future innovation could be, and when it (almost) inevitably starts to fall behind nature’s achievements, those unmet expectations could seed disillusionment. We’ve already had this happen with quantum computing. Spectrum‘s choice could have been motivated by wanting to pique readers’ interest, which is a fair thing to aspire to, but it remains that the headline employed a clichéd comparison, with nature, instead of expending more effort and framing the idea right.

  • A masculine build-up to the Ind-Pak cricket match

    This post benefited from feedback from Thomas Manuel.

    Every time I watch an ad about the upcoming India-Pakistan men’s cricket match, as part of the ongoing T20 World Cup in Australia, I’m reminded of Cutler Beckett’s line in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series: “It’s just good business.”

    Beyond the field, there has been new animosity between the Indian and the Pakistani cricket boards, with the former having said that the Indian men’s cricket team won’t travel to Pakistan for the 2023 Asia Cup. But even beyond the administrators of cricket and their realpolitik machinations, there are Star Sports and Pepsi.

    Star Sports has been running an ad depicting life in a fictitious town called “Dardnapur” (Hindi for ‘no-pain town’) peopled with many men of considerable strength, capable of lifting motorcycles, having their fingers slammed by a closing door with nary a wince, and so forth. But when India lost to Pakistan at the Asia Cup, as a young boy narrates in the video, these men were sent to tears. So, the boy says in an address to the Indian men’s team, “Right this wrong, win the match and end the wait.”

    (The ad benefits from an ambiguity: India’s loss to Pakistan contributed to the end of its last Asia Cup campaign, so “ending the wait” could apply equally to beating Pakistan and winning a major tournament. On the flip side, at the ad’s end, the screen shows illustrated faces of the two team captains, Rohit Sharma and Babar Azam, gesturing to each other in an aggressive way.)

    In the Pepsi ad, India’s frontline pacer Jasprit Bumrah askes if viewers have the guts to watch the upcoming match against Pakistan from the PoV of a camera fit into the batter’s stumps (a.k.a. the ‘stumpcam’), followed by the ad spelling out something about a QR code to be found in Pepsi bottles.

    Obviously women and people of other genders are welcome to share in these sentiments but neither ad features any women and there has been no indication that either of these brands – Star Sports or Pepsi – is interested in advertising to women in this matter. Instead, both brands are investing in associating the match with shows of strength and guts, an inescapable parallel to the violence in Kashmir as well as to the fact that India-Pakistan face-offs in the cricketing sphere represent one of the few remaining ways in which the two countries directly compete for victory.

    There have been a few articles in ESPN and similar outlets about the Indian and the Pakistani men’s cricket teams trying to relax, stay away from the hype and focus on playing the game (see here, e.g.). But everyone else – from the administrators to the people at large, mediated by advertisements of the sort described above – are either pushing or are being pushed the triumphalist narrative that the match is a proxy for India being “better” than Pakistan, to project India as a highly competitive and – assuming India will win the match – tough country. Even the ICC is partly to blame as it starts major tournaments by having India and Pakistan face each other.

    All this brings to mind the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’, coined by various sociologists in the 1980s and which has come to encompass the following features, among others: shows of achievement, use of physical force and heterosexuality – all of which have been put on display in the two ads and in the actions of the Indian cricket board.

    Even “frontiersmanship” has raised its head: according to Wiktionary, it stands for “the craft or skill of being a frontiersman, of succeeding in settling a frontier” – which in this case is relevant to the regions of ‘Pakistan-administered Kashmir’ in western Kashmir and Aksai Chin in the eastern portion, over which India has disputes with Pakistan and China, respectively.

    The person who announced India wouldn’t go to Pakistan for next year’s Asia Cup was Jay Shah, who has three identities here that matter: he is BCCI secretary, president of the Asian Cricket Council (ACC) and son of Union home minister Amit Shah. Shah junior said he was making the announcement as the president of the ACC, yet it’s laughable that the decision was motivated by anything other than the Indian government’s grouses with Pakistan in Kashmir.

  • Bad responses to The Wire’s Meta reports

    Note, September 18, 2023, 6:40 am: I’ve often returned to this post since The Wire retracted its ‘Meta’ reports, to see if I still stand by its contents. I do with the portions that I haven’t struck through. That said, I believe in hindsight that holding these positions alone can’t be a gainful way to judge this or any other story.

    Note, October 19, 2022, 6:25 am: Quite a few people have checked in asking if I will update this post in the light of The Wire updating its position on its investigation into censorship by Meta. I don’t intend to change this post, other than adding this note, because the 10 points still stand irrespective of what The Wire‘s internal review finds.

    Ten types of bad-faith responses to The Wire‘s stories – this and this – on Meta, Andy Stone and Amit Malviya, plus one that we expect to face soon.

    1. “The Wire is afraid to give the source’s name.”

    Protecting whistleblowers is a matter of integrity. Trying to save skin by outing one’s sources wouldn’t be the credible thing to do in a situation like this.

    2. “So source’s point is ‘trust me, bro’.”

    Yeah.

    3. “The Wire has lied all its life, so it will double down on its claim to avoid losing its purpose.”

    A falsifiable contention, or an unfalsifiable one to those bent on avoiding simple facts, so a waste of time.

    4. “You have no credibility.”

    Thanks for reading and sharing articles from The Wire.

    5. “The Wire has a bad track record.”

    Hardline right-wing commentators on social media platforms have disagreed with almost every other The Wire article over what they perceive to be bias when it is disagreement with their point of view. Given this, I don’t trust these commentators’ definition of “track record”.

    6. “You see what you want to see” is both accusation and defence.

    After The Wire‘s first report and then Andy Stone’s response, The Wire was accused of seeing only what it wanted to see. But when the reports doubled down, the hardline commentators started to see only what they wish to see as their arguments defaulted to “The Wire must be lying.”

    7. “Facebook/Meta has denied it, this is credible.”

    All the arguments so far were levelled by the usual suspects and in that regard were as expected. But when other journalists from other publications signalled their willingness to buy Meta’s/Facebook’s/Stone’s denial – “M/F/S usually don’t do this but now that they have, it must be true” – it was hard to believe.

    It indicated one or some of the following to be likely: a) they were cowed by Meta/Facebook, by the deluge of comments on Twitter or by both to agree with Stone’s denial;  b) how Meta is behaving now, responding now, etc. is new – but even then to claim Stone’s response on Twitter to be “clean” or “credible” is a bridge too far; …

    8. Just ignorance

    c) they weren’t aware of the lack-of-integrity with which Facebook operates in India; or d) they weren’t aware of their ignorance.

    The American commentariat has expected non-Western journalists before to go to greater lengths than journalists from their own part of the world to prove something to them because you’re not one of them, overlooking the fact that you’re in fact working in a different part of the world where it is easier for the government or the corporation to discredit you, which in turn gives you less latitude to ‘show’ your work in every way they’d like before conferring you with the privilege of their agreement, even as they continue sealioning and gaslighting you.

    9. “Stone’s email address can’t be *@fb.com”

    If you wish to hitch your wagon to the “Stone couldn’t possibly have replied from a *@fb.com address, so the email whose screenshot The Wire has is fabricated” argument, that’s your prerogative. But you immediately give me the right to step over you at the first appearance of an email from a Meta employee sporting a *@fb.com address. Et voilà.

    10. [Ignore the posts that were taken down]

    In all this hullabaloo, people have forgotten that Instagram took down @cringearchivist’s posts without specifying a reason other than that it contained nudity. It didn’t. Update, October 19, 2022, 6:35 am: Instagram/Meta quietly reinstated the posts by 4:16 pm yesterday. Still not clear why they were taken down or why they are now back online.

    Preemptive: “Headers or it didn’t happen.”

    The Wire‘s upcoming third report should clarify the point about email headers, but the (potential) problem here is larger: the audience isn’t entitled to all the evidence when any part of it may compromise the whistleblower’s identity, and particularly when some of those making the demands are just fuelled by bloodlust.

    The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and never will be. Those who expect otherwise are kidding themselves, and probably willfully disregarding what they understand to be true.

    Update, 6:43 am, October 15, 2022: There’s more happening here than I expected. After exchanges with with some of my colleagues, I now believe that there some gaps in my knowledge that complicate blanket statements like the one above. Instead, I will defer on this count to the third Meta report by The Wire, which will be published today. 5.55 pm: published.

  • A Kuhnian gap between research publishing and academic success

    There is a gap in research publishing and how it relates to academic success. On the one hand, there are scientists complaining of low funds, being short-staffed, low-quality or absent equipment, disoptimal employment/tenure terms, bureaucratic incompetence and political interference. On the other, there are scientists who describe their success within academia in terms of being published in XYZ journals (with impact factors of PQR), having high h-indices, having so many papers to their names, etc.

    These two scenarios – both very real in India and I imagine in most countries – don’t straightforwardly lead to the other. They require a bridge, a systemic symptom that makes both of them possible even when they’re incompatible with each other. This bridge is those scientists’ attitudes about what it’s okay to do in order to keep the two façades in harmonious coexistence.

    What is it okay to do? For starters, keep the research-publishing machinery running in a way that allows them to evaluate other scientists on matters other than their scientific work. This way, lack of resources for research can be decoupled from scientists’ output in journals. Clever, right?

    According to a study published a month ago, manuscripts that include a Nobel laureate’s name among the coauthors are six-times more likely to be accepted for publication than those without a laureate’s name in the mast. This finding piles on other gender-related problems with peer-review, including women’s papers being accepted less often as well as men dominating the community of peer-reviewers. Nature News reported:

    Knowledge of the high status of a paper’s author might justifiably influence a reviewer’s opinion: it could boost their willingness to accept a counterintuitive result, for example, on the basis of the author’s track record of rigour. But Palan’s study found that reviewers’ opinions changed across all six of the measures they were asked about, including the subject’s worthiness, the novelty of the information and whether the conclusions were supported. These things should not all be affected by knowledge of authorship, [Palan, one of the paper’s coauthors, said].

    Palan also said the solution to this problem is for journals to adopt double-anonymised peer-review: the authors don’t who the reviewers and the reviewers don’t know who the authors are. The most common form of peer-review is the single-blind variety, where the reviewers know who the authors are but the authors don’t know who the reviewers are. FWIW, I prefer double-anonymised peer-review plus the journal publishing the peer-reviewers’ anonymised reports along with the paper.

    Then again, modifying peer-review would still be localised to journals that are willing to adopt newer mechanisms, and thus be a stop-gap solution that doesn’t address the use of faulty peer-review mechanisms both inside journals and in academic settings. For example, given the resource-mininal context in which many Indian research institutes and universities function, hiring and promotion committees often decide whom to hire or promote based on which journals their papers have been published in and/or the number of times those papers have been cited.

    Instead, what we need is systemic change that responds to all the problems with peer-review, instead of one problem at a time in piecemeal fashion, by improving transparency, resources and incentives. Specifically: a) make peer-review more transparent, b) give scientists the resources – including time and freedom – to evaluate each others’ work on factors localised to the context of their research (including the quality of their work and the challenges in their way), and c) incentivise scientists to do so in order to accelerate change and ensure compliance.

    The scientometric numbers, originally invented to facilitate the large-scale computational analysis of the scientific literature, have come to subsume the purpose of the scientific enterprise itself: that is, scientists often want to have good numbers instead of want to do good science. As a result, there is often an unusual delay – akin to the magnetic hysteresis – between the resources for research being cut back and the resulting drop in productivity and quality showing in the researchers’ output. Perhaps more fittingly, it’s a Kuhnian response to paradigm change.

  • Bruno Latour (1947-2022) and critiquing science

    The French philosopher Bruno Latour passed away on October 9, at the age of 75. I don’t know if many people in India have noticed but people abroad, especially in Europe, have. His passing leaves a considerable vacuum in the field of science and technology studies, but I’d like to memorialise his passing here for what I learnt from him about the nature and purpose of critique. To learn about critique through the work of Latour was to first learn about critique and then to learn how to critique critique itself. Ignorant me particularly enjoyed how, in Pandora’s Hope (1999), Latour turned the rhetoric about science being politicised around to consider how much better politics would be without the influence of science, especially by the characteristic focus on objective facts, the little details and the absolute application of cold logic.

    … when [Callicles] defines the goal of his aristocratic friends, he paints an accurate portrait of the real qualities that Socrates entirely lacks: “The superior people I mean aren’t shoemakers or cooks : above all, I’m thinking of people who’ve applied their cleverness to politics and thought about how to run their community well. But cleverness is only part of it; they also have courage, which enables them to see their policies through to the finish without losing their nerve and giving up” (491a-b).

    It is precisely this courage to see “through to the finish,” that Socrates will misrepresent so unfairly when he destroys the subtle mechanism of representation by polluting it with the question of an absolute morality. To see a political project through, with the crowd, for the crowd, in spite of the crowd, is so stunningly difficult that Socrates flees from it. But instead of conceding defeat and acknowledging the specificity of politics, he destroys the means of practicing it, in a sort of scorched-earth policy the blackened wreckage of which is still visible today. And the torch that set the public buildings ablaze is said to be that of Reason!

    … political reason cannot possibly be the object of professional knowledge. … Politics is about dealing with a crowd of “non-experts,” and this situation cannot possibly be the same thing as experts dealing with experts in the inner recesses of their special institutions. So when Plato is making his famous joke about a cook and a physician pleading for votes in front of an assem bly of spoiled brats (522), it takes very little talent to twist the story to Socrates’ embarrassment. This funny scene works only if the crowd of Athens is made up of spoiled kids. Even putting Socrates’ aristocratic scorn aside, nowhere does it state, if the story is read carefully, that it pits a serious expert against a populist flatterer. Rather, it stages a controversy between two specialists, the cook and the physician, talking to an assembly of grown men about either short-term or long-term strategy, the outcome of which neither of them knows, and through which only one party is going to suffer, namely the demos itself.

    (pp. 239-241)

    But more broadly than just science, I learnt from Latour’s books and essays what it means to be a critique per se. This sense of purpose will be constantly eroded if you’re working for The Wire, and I imagine other similar publications, defined at once by their public engagement and a trenchant anti-establishment stance. In response to every bit of critique, a thousand trolls erupt accusing us, claiming to look beyond The Wire‘s veil of intellectualism into a heart that wants nothing other than to drag India through the mud. The idea that critics care deeply for the thing that they are critiquing is lost on these trolls, and in fact most followers of the Bharatiya Janata Party, even those closer to the margins. Most, if not all, of our less loyal readers want to know why we’re so “negative all the time” and expect us to justify our attitude with anything other than the obvious reason. So it’s important to constantly replenish my sense of purpose, and Latour in this regard has been very helpful, more so since his work has often been concerned with matters of science and society.

    But to be a student of critique in Latour’s classroom wasn’t easy. For example, around five years ago, I discovered while reading Latour’s 2004 essay, ‘Why has critique run out of steam?’, that I was often guilty of adopting the post hoc “fact position” of critique and thus levelling unfalsifiable allegations instead of creating new knowledge, much less anything useful. Critique has to be animated by concern for the subject of criticism in order to be useful. The obvious answer to the trolls and the naysayers’ question to us is this: the critic is the gardener and the subject of criticism the garden. Otherwise, no matter how well dressed, it is simply outrage. Excerpt:

    The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution. I am aware that to get at the heart of this argument one would have to renew also what it means to be a constructivist, but I have said enough to indicate the direction of critique, not away but toward the gathering, the Thing.

    The practical problem we face, if we try to go that new route, is to associate the word criticism with a whole set of new positive metaphors, gestures, attitudes, knee-jerk reactions, habits of thoughts. … We all know subcritical minds, that’s for sure! What would critique do if it could be associated with more, not with less, with multiplication, not subtraction. Critical theory died away long ago; can we become critical again … ? … generating more ideas than we have received, inheriting from a prestigious critical tradition but not letting it die away, or “dropping into quiescence” like a piano no longer struck. This would require that all entities, including computers, cease to be objects defined simply by their inputs and outputs and become again things, mediating, assembling, gathering many more folds than the “united four.” If this were possible then we could let the critics come ever closer to the matters of concern we cherish, and then at last we could tell them: “Yes, please, touch them, explain them, deploy them.” Then we would have gone for good beyond iconoclasm.

    RIP, Bruno Latour.

  • A question about India’s new science prizes

    really deserving candidates

    In a meeting chaired by Union home secretary Ajay Bhalla on September 16 and attended by senior members of the various science departments of the national government (DST, DBT, etc.), the Union government eliminated hundreds of awards given to the country’s scientists for achievements on various fronts and fields. Governing a country the size of India is bound to result in bloat, so it wouldn’t be possible to dismiss this move by the government out of hand. However, the three words above make an appearance among Bhalla’s many utterances in the meeting and they are worthy of suspicion.

    The Indian government under Narendra Modi has regularly used vague adjectives to accommodate a diversity of possibilities instead of committing to one course of action over another. Perhaps the best known example is its use of the “national security” excuse to refuse answers to questions under the RTI Act, such as what the scientific payloads of the Chandrayaan 2 and 3 missions were or why the FCR Act was amended. Other examples include any assurance made by Prime Minister Modi, such as on the occasion he was forced to repeal the regrettable farm laws.

    In December 2019, physicist Brian Skinner uploaded a preprint paper to the arXiV server in which he quantified the effect of a “prestige bias” on the professional trajectories of scientists who are subjected to multiple rounds of evaluation. I’ve had occasion to return to this analysis on multiple occasions because, to me, it arrives at an essential, irreducible truth of the world: that keeping the conditions of entry to some space vague doesn’t just allow for arbitrary decision-making but inevitably causes such decision-making. As Skinner wrote:

    For example, two applicants for graduate school may have similar grades and exam scores, but if one candidate comes from a more prestigious university then their application will, in general, be evaluated more highly. This ‘prestige bias’ arises naturally, since metrics like grades and exam scores are imprecise measures of a student’s ability, and thus the evaluator looks for any other information available to help with their decision. Belonging to a prestigious group suggests that the candidate was ranked highly by some other evaluator in the past, and this provides a prior expectation (like a second opinion) that biases the decision in their favor.

    Vagueness when the stakes are high can’t be innocent, especially once it has been identified, because the more powerful can and will use the resulting uncertainty to their advantage. Here as well, when Bhalla has determined that a small number of new prizes should replace the plethora of the now-extinct prizes and that they ought to be given to “really deserving candidates”, it brings to mind the “really deserving” corporations that are winning contracts for mines, ports and defence manufacturing, the “really deserving” businessmen whose wealth has increased disproportionately to that of their peers, and the “really deserving” ministries and departments that are receiving an increasing fraction of the Union government’s budgetary allocations.

    Granted, drafting and holding a fixed definition of the term ‘deserving’ can only be bad for the people and the government both. But when any doubts or uncertainties about its ambit are likely to be abused by the government – awarding India’s top honour for scientific work to, say, Appa Rao Podile or M. Jagadesh Kumar over Gagandeep Kang or Rakesh Mishra – our options are limited to a meaningless science prize that represents, above all else, the BJP’s successful subversion of another science-related space (after the IITs) for the nationalist project versus a prize that is much more meaningful but whose terms are rigid and unresponsive to the times.

  • Assorted comments: MOM, IIT Mandi, scientists’ wishes

    These are some remarks that have been fermenting in my mind and for which I don’t have the time or the inclination to supply a beginning-middle-end structure to publish as individual posts. I’m just packing them into this one post so I can say what I’d like to say, clear some headspace and move on.

    1. MOM end of mission

    The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) reached end of life on October 3, 2022, a healthy seven years beyond its design lifespan of six months. While the confirmation from ISRO was muted, to the accompaniment of a characteristically verbose PTI copy, the occasion was nothing short of the end of an era. MOM was ISRO’s last fully successful major mission and the last time ISRO undertook an outreach campaign of any sort that was as candid and as effective as many of us ISRO enthusiasts have wished all of their campaigns to be. ISRO’s last partly successful major mission was Chandrayaan 2; the way it responded to the lander’s failure was regrettable. And there hasn’t been a publicity campaign since that wasn’t also closely orchestrated by the office of the Supreme Leader et al. So the end of MOM was symbolically the end of a time in which things other than total narrative control were possible.

    2. An IIT Mandi press release

    IIT Mandi recently emailed me a press release about a newly published paper (which I couldn’t find) describing a study led by a researcher and his team at the institute – in which they recovered polymer composites from used wind-turbine blades in what the release claimed was a “green” procedure. The two chemical compounds required in this procedure are hydrogen peroxide and acetic acid. Dear readers, hydrogen peroxide is not “green”. Nothing, really, is green unless it’s green throughout its lifecycle. Hydrogen peroxide manufacturing is currently not a green process. You can’t just say “hydrogen peroxide is the water molecule plus one more oxygen atom, so it’s green”. That’s like saying “ozone is dioxygen with one more oxygen atom, so it’s okay to inhale.” Diluted hydrogen peroxide is okay but at higher concentrations (typically >40%), it is highly toxic to living things. It’s also very reactive chemically and is hard to store, transport and use. So without knowing where the hydrogen peroxide in their experiment came from, without knowing the volume of hydrogen peroxide required to make the research team’s solution commercially feasible, and without knowing the concentration at which it must be used, let’s not make any claims about greenness.

    Addendum: Also according to the press release (emphasis added), “The recovered fibres retained nearly 99% of the strength and greater than 90% of other mechanical properties as compared to the virgin fibres.” Do we really need to use terms like “virgin” to describe pre-utilisation objects? I doubt anyone’s going to tell the IIT Mandi press office this but both universe press offices and scientists need to put some thought into their language instead of playing it safe from within their lanes. Other English words rooted in objectionable sexual notions include ‘seminal’ (from semen) and ‘hysterical’ (from the Latin for ‘suffering in the womb’). The lingua franca is what we consider okay to say, okay to think, eventually okay to believe, so it’s important we tend to it.

    3. “Top 3 wishes”

    The The Science Talk blog published a post discussing the results of a call it’d put out earlier, to materials scientists, asking them to list their top three wishes. The question received a hundred responses and, according to the post, the most common three wishes were: More funding and longer contracts; “resources – unlimited microscopes, open access and less bureaucracy”; and “informal networking, comfortable lab shoes and outreach”. Let’s set a part of our common sense aside for a moment and assume that these hundred materials scientists are speaking for the millions of scientists working on thousands of topics worldwide in a variety of contexts. Doing this allows us to consider their wishes as a monolithic set of requests so that they can do science better – and leaves us to think about which wishes we can and can’t allow, and to what extents, so that science can fulfill its purpose in our lives, in our countries, in our politics without at the same time exacting too high a cost. Take “longer contracts”, for example: obviously that will allow scientists to work with larger questions, build towards bigger ideas and so forth – but the gains for those funding that scientific work, the government and by extension the people, will also manifest over longer time-periods and come with a greater risk of sunk costs. That in turn should make us think about what sort of nation, with the attendant economic and sociopolitical features, can afford longer contracts for scientists. (In my view, richer, more economically developed and more powerful countries, where there is little social or political expectation for science to contribute to the betterment of society.)

    I didn’t have a point to make here as much as express the hope that more people who read the The Science Talk post will be interested in asking such questions, and thereon become interested in the government of science, the place of science in your country and, ultimately, the politics of rooting for science.

  • The passive voice is political

    Eric Martinez, Francis Mollica and Edward Gibson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Edinburgh won an Ig Nobel Prize for literature this year for their work on what makes legal documents so hard to read. Ironically, the abstract of their paper, published in July 2022, is also very hard to read, coming in at 165 words in just five sentences:

    Despite their ever-increasing presence in everyday life, contracts remain notoriously inaccessible to laypeople. Why? Here, a corpus analysis (n ≈10 million words) revealed that contracts contain startlingly high proportions of certain difficult-to-process features–including low-frequency jargon, center-embedded clauses (leading to long-distance syntactic dependencies), passive voice structures, and non-standard capitalization–relative to nine other baseline genres of written and spoken English. Two experiments (N=184) further revealed that excerpts containing these features were recalled and comprehended at lower rates than excerpts without these features, even for experienced readers, and that center-embedded clauses inhibited recall more-so than other features. These findings (a) undermine the specialized concepts account of legal theory, according to which law is a system built upon expert knowledge of technical concepts; (b) suggest such processing difficulties result largely from working-memory limitations imposed by long-distance syntactic dependencies (i.e., poor writing) as opposed to a mere lack of specialized legal knowledge; and (c) suggest editing out problematic features of legal texts would be tractable and beneficial for society at-large.

    But nitpicks aside, I hope the award will bring more attention to why writing in the passive voice is problematic.

    1. It makes for duller reading.
    2. It glosses over actors who are performing an action and focuses on those on whom the action is being performed.

    The first problem is not an opinion: readers like to be able to visualise what they’re reading. It makes reading a more interesting and immersive experience. This is why “show, don’t tell” is always good advice. But when the writer leaves out the performers of an action – everything from day-dreaming to a heist – a part of the picture disappears. The second problem is obviously dangerous but it can also impart the narrative with political overtones that the writer might like to do without. For example, writing “B was hit” instead of writing “A hit B” keeps the focus on the nature of the violence and recipient. A, the perpetrator, stays out of the picture, out of the narrative and out of readers’ conception of what really happened. If a writer intends to keep the focus on B as a way to humanise them, it doesn’t have to come at the cost of forgetting A. The way to construct the identities of A and B is with narrative – and not with grammatical techniques like the passive voice. If all the sentences in a given piece are in the passive voice, it will still be possible to build a narrative that is fair to B and suitably consternated towards A. The inverse is also true: you can write a piece using the active voice in all sentences and still build up to a narrative that’s unfair to B. The passive voice may not compromise your ability to faithfully describe reality but it will get in the way of what the reader takes away. Reading is a psychological experience and every little adjustment matters to whether your attempt to persuade succeeds.

    Unfortunately, many science writers in India – especially those who have trained as scientists – employ the passive voice in a way that reveals the clear influence of scientific writing on their brand of English. In scientific writing – i.e. the labour that produces the text in research papers – both narrative and grammatical technique converge on the desirability of removing the scientist, as the performer of an experiment, from the picture. I dislike this sort of writing because a) it’s founded on the premise that the scientist’s identity or choices don’t matter to the experiment’s outcomes, whereas there are several examples in history of researchers’ identities influencing the questions they choose to ask, and answer, and b) as the Ig Nobel Prize has acknowledged, it makes for needlessly difficult reading. And not just me: even scientists have spoken up about how they’re having a harder time making sense of scientific papers. I’ve written before as to why science communication is not an add-on to science itself but a separate enterprise animated by its own skills and goals. Switching from the narrative-grammatical coincidence associated with ‘good science’ to the narrative-grammatical separation is one of the dividing lines. When scientists don’t make this switch, they’re at risk of participating in a communication exercise that’s liable to overlook the relationships between scientists’ identities and their ideas.

    Note that, in India, a non-trivial number of people come into sophisticated forms of English use by engaging with the scientific enterprise. When The Wire Science first published its ‘submission guidelines’, some readers told us that our decision to enforce them was unfair because different people write in different ways. I agreed – but didn’t edit them because something someone told me at ACJ still rings true: before you attempt poetry, you must understand grammar so you know how exactly to break it.

    Being introduced to English in the walled garden of science habituates people to using English in a certain way – a way that they consider to be good and effective but which is so only in the limited context of scientific work. It fails significantly and repeatedly when writers use it to engage with non-experts from the problems I noted above. It also doesn’t help that the bulk of scientists conducting research in India at the moment are (cis)male and Brahmin, thus not likely to perceive discrimination along these axes, and thus not likely to perceive the need to acknowledge it in the way they use their language. If you had “writing about particle physics” in mind and have been using it to contextualise my arguments, you may not have much luck; instead, I suggest considering “agriculture”, “psychology”, “biomedicine”, “pedagogy” or “astronomy”. (It’s not a coincidence that India’s lower-tech scientific enterprises have been more assailed by such discrepancies.) Irrespective of whether it is good/bad English, the passive voice doesn’t make for good communication. It may not, and never, affect readers’ ability to understand what you alone are communicating, but ditching it for the active voice could a) engender a habit among readers to expect it, and b) encourage other writers to adopt it when they’re writing on topics where the difference is crucial.

  • The Frida Kahlo NFT

    Like a Phoenix rising from its ashes, Art is reborn into Eternity.

    fridanft.org

    In July this year, a Mexican businessman named Martin Mobarak allegedly destroyed a painting by Frida Kahlo in order to liberate it from its physical shackles and unto its “eternal” existence henceforth as an NFT that he is selling for $4,000 apiece. He has said the money will go to charity, but it’s hard to understand how that is relevant considering what has (allegedly) been lost. Art these days is not entirely art: at least a part of its purpose has been subverted by cryptocurrencies into an object for proponents of this technology to con. Also, a fundamental tenet of the NFTs market is that scarcity is always better. Put these things together and you realise Mobarak’s actions were a matter of when, not if. However, the intersection of NFT-centric thinking with the art world has been and continues to be complicated.

    In 2021, an artist named Beeple sold a collage of images he’d crafted and pieced together to a cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Metakovan for tokens worth $69 million. Metakovan, and his partner Twobadour, had said at the time that they were democratising art by enabling the cryptocurrency-based public ownership of works of art and by taking advantage of cryptocurrencies’ opportunities to allow non-white, non-western people to acquire high-valued art. It was a poorly conceived proposition in many ways – starting from the fact that the acquisition was a façade for Metakovan to inflate the value of the tokens he owned and going up to the fact that the $69-million moment did everything to uphold the links between art and modern capitalism instead of critiquing them (forget tearing them down).

    Fast-forward to Martin Mobarak’s (alleged) destruction of ‘Fantasmones Siniestros’ and the contradictions abound. Contrary to Metakovan’s aspiration to democratise anything, even in principle, Mobarak’s (alleged) action epitomises the private ownership of art – outside history itself, isolated in one’s personal collection and thus – by the premium American logic of private ownership – at the unquestionable mercy of its proprietor, who may even choose to burn it without regard for its thingness as a historical-cultural-political object. In both cases, and the thousands of other instances in which NFT-makers have either championed the cause of paying artists or conceived art of their own, this human endeavour has been far removed from its telos of critiquing capitalist society and has become a commodity per se.

    But while this is the long- and well-known effect of capitalism on art, the (alleged) destruction of ‘Fantasmones Siniestros’ also confronts us with a tense three-way contest. On vertex 1: The painting is Kahlo’s and is as such an important part of Mexico’s past, heritage and the aspirations of its people through the ages. On vertex 2: The headlines of most news reports, if not all, make sure to mention that the painting was worth $10 million, in a reminder of its monetary value de facto and the place of art by influential artists as an important bourgeois value-store de jure. And on vertex 3: No matter the legerdemain of businesspeople, NFTs will always and eventually ensure the complete commodification of art, thanks to their foundational premise.

    The only thing worth prizing here is that on vertex 1: Kahlo’s work, inasmuch as it captures her spirit and anima and is a reminder of what she did, when and amidst whom. But vertices 2 and 3 seem to hold the means by which this preservation has been achieved before and will be achieved in future, and together prompt us to pay more attention to the delicate strands by which the memories of our pasts dangle. We still await the public ownership of the work of important artists, and many others, but anyone who says cryptocurrencies or blockchains are the way to get there is lying.

    A similar problem has assailed the world of scientific knowledge and publishing for many years now, with more scientists becoming more aware today of their actual role in society: not to create new knowledge and improve lives as much as to widen the margins of scientific journals, overlook their glaring flaws and the incentives they have set up to the detriment of good science, and comply unquestioningly with their inexplicable price hikes. And even as many scientists have invented notions like “prestige” and “status” to make their allegiance to journals make sense, Mobarak et al. tell us, and themselves, that they’re doing everyone a favour.