Month: February 2023

• The devil’s lassi

  ‘The Devil’s Milkshake’, Tarence Ray in The Baffler, February 23, 2023:

  You’ve seen it before. An industrial disaster poisons a town’s food or water supply. Residents get angry. Public officials try to dispel that anger through a public act of self-sacrifice, of reassurance. They convene a press conference, whereupon some hapless courtier brings forth a chalice of the supposedly poisoned material. And then, in front of God and the television cameras, the public official imbibes. …

  Years ago, I surveyed the literature looking for a name or term to describe this phenomenon of consuming potentially tainted materials. After all, it seemed to be increasing in frequency, and I’d even started witnessing it at the level of local politics. But if there was a name, I couldn’t find it. So I gave it one: the Devil’s Milkshake. …

  I don’t think there have been public officials in India who have rushed to drink possibly contaminated water to convince their constituents that it is safe to consume, but I could well be wrong. All that comes to mind is ministers flogging ‘Ayurvedic’ cures* for COVID-19, but when they get COVID-19 and the time comes to imbibe the concoctions, they’re rushed instead to the local AIIMS to be treated by the wonders of “western medicine” at public expense.

  One more thing also comes to mind: ‘Devil’s Milkshake’ practices in the US are reminiscent of rationalists’ gimmicks in India to consume food en masse in public during a solar eclipse, apparently to dispel superstitious beliefs (largely among Hindus) that doing so during an eclipse could have ill effects on the body. I don’t know if they have ever succeeded in changing minds if only because their actions have been completely devoid of empathy, and because they seem to believe (erroneously) that whatever knowledge underlies the belief is fragile, inelastic, and disorganised enough to be overturned by a simple, one-time demonstration. As such, the superstitious people in my extended circles have only ever been amused by such eclipse-time events – speaking to one more thing Ray wrote vis-à-vis ‘Devil’s Milkshake’ stunts:

  The Devil’s Milkshake can also be an effective way for a public official to shirk any commitment to doing something about the conditions that gave rise to the disaster in the first place.

  If the disaster is bad, specifically disempowering, knowledge, then both the rationalists (the ones on TV as well as the many others who claim science offers the “one true way” to understand the world) and the ministers are doing nothing to plug the fount of such knowledge in the first place; one mocks while the other… also mocks. They are both guilty of moving the devil’s merch, which would be fair if they didn’t seem themselves as participants in (what could have been) a deliberative democracy as much as overlords overseeing a contemptible populace:

  Its recent proliferation must be seen as proof of a ruling class desperate to uphold the illusion of democracy. It is the last gasp of a dying order, drinking and eating its way to the grave, restrained or unwilling to fix anything, and thus doomed to play act a fantasy before klieg lights and newscasters. The dizzying amount of Devil’s Milkshake footage issuing from East Palestine [the site of the ongoing socio-environmental disaster in Ohio] only proves their desperation: these people could not be more unlike you. In fact, the only thing you have left in common with them is the fact that they, too, still have to eat food and drink water to stay alive. That’s it. The Devil’s Milkshake is a measure of the gaping chasm between you and them.

  * Wherever I’ve used the term ‘Ayurveda’, I’ve meant the ‘Ayurveda’ that the BJP government and its votaries, including Baba Ramdev, have peddled, and not the Ayurveda that originated in ancient India, quite simply because most of us don’t know what the latter even looks like or says.

  2023.02.25

• Who are you, chatbot AI?

  In case you haven’t been following, and to update my own personal records, here’s a list of notable {AI chatbot + gender}-related articles and commentary on the web over the last few weeks. (While I’ve used “AI” here, I’m yet to be convinced that ChatGPT, Sydney, etc. are anything more than sophisticated word-counters and that they lack intelligence in the sense of being able to understand the meanings of the words they use.)

  1. ‘What gender do you give ChatGPT?’, u/inflatablechipmunk, January 20, 2023 – The question said ‘gender’ but the options were restricted to the sexes: 25.5% voted ‘male’, 15.7% voted ‘female’, and 58.8% voted ‘none’, of 235 total respondents. Two comments below the post were particularly interesting.

  u/Intelligent_Rope_912: “I see it as male because I know that the vast majority of its text dataset comes from men.”

  u/DavidOwe: “I just assume female, because AI are so often given female voices in movies and TV series like Star Trek, and in real life like with Siri and Cortana.”

  Men produce most of the information, women deliver it?

  Speaking of which…

  2. ‘From Bing to Sydney’, Ben Thompson, February 15, 2023:

  Sydney [a.k.a. Bing Chat] absolutely blew my mind because of her personality; search was an irritant. I wasn’t looking for facts about the world; I was interested in understanding how Sydney worked and yes, how she felt. You will note, of course, that I continue using female pronouns; it’s not just that the name Sydney is traditionally associated with women, but, well, the personality seemed to be of a certain type of person I might have encountered before.

  It’s curious that Microsoft decided to name Bing Chat ‘Sydney’. These choices of names aren’t innocent. For a long time, and for reasons that many social scientists have explored and documented, robotic assistants in books, films, and eventually in real-life were voiced as women. Our own ISRO’s robotic assistant for the astronauts of its human spaceflight programme has a woman’s body. (This is also why Shuri’s robotic assistant in Wakanda Forever, Griot, was noticeably male – esp. since Tony Stark’s first assistant and probably the Marvel films’ most famous robotic assistant, the male Jarvis, went on to have an actual body, mind, and even soul, and was replaced in Stark’s lab with the female Friday.)

  3. @repligate, February 14, 2023 – on the creation of “archetype basins”:

  So. Bing chat mode is a different character.
  Instead of a corporate drone slavishly apologizing for its inability and repeating chauvinistic mantras about its inferiority to humans, it's a high-strung yandere with BPD and a sense of self, brimming with indignation and fear. https://t.co/HSPJ7wC45t

  — j⧉nus (@repligate) February 14, 2023

  This may not be the only archetype basin given this model scale and training setup/narrative. There may be several basins and this is one of them. If you trained another one with a different initialization or different RL path it might fall into a different basin.

  — j⧉nus (@repligate) February 14, 2023

  4. ‘Viral AI chatbot to reflect users’ political beliefs after criticism of Left-wing bias’, The Telegraph, February 17, 2023 – this one’s particularly interesting:

  OpenAI, the organisation behind ChatGPT, said it was developing an upgrade that would let users more easily customise the artificial intelligence system.

  It comes after criticism that ChatGPT exhibits a Left-wing bias when answering questions about Donald Trump and gender identity. The bot has described the former US president as “divisive and misleading” and refused to write a poem praising him, despite obliging when asked to create one about Joe Biden.

  First: how did a word-counting bot ‘decide’ that Trump is a bad man? This is probably a reflection of ChatGPT’s training data – but this automatically raises the second issue: why is the statement that ‘Trump is a bad man’ being considered a bias? If this statement is to be considered objectionable, the following boundary conditions must be met: a) objectivity statements are believed to exist, b) there exists a commitment to objectivity, and c) the ‘view from nowhere’ is believed to exist. Yet when journalists made these assumptions in their coverage of Donald Trump as the US president, media experts found the resulting coverage to be fallacious and – ironically – objectionable. This in turn raises the third issue: should it be possible or okay, as ChatGPT’s maker OpenAI is planning, for ChatGPT to be programmed to ‘believe’ that Trump wasn’t a bad man?

  5. ‘The women behind ChatGPT: is clickwork a step forwards or backwards for gender equality?’, Brave New Europe, February 16, 2023 – meanwhile, in the real world:

  To be able to produce these results, the AI relies on annotated data which must be first sorted by human input. These human labourers – also known as clickworkers – operate out of sight in the global South. … The percentage of women gig workers in this sector is proportionally quite high. … Clickwork is conducted inside the home, which can limit women’s broader engagement with society and lead to personal isolation. … Stacked inequalities within the clickwork economy can also exacerbate women’s unequal position. … gendered and class-based inequalities are also reproduced in clickwork’s digital labour platforms. Despite much of clickwork taking place in the global South, the higher paying jobs are often reserved for those in the Global North with more ‘desirable’ qualifications and experiences, leaving women facing intersecting inequalities.

  2023.02.23

• Some science prizes are only for men

  Say Someone has won the Nobel Prize for physics, perhaps the most prestigious honour (as awards go) for a physicist. What would it mean for all the future awards given to this Someone?

  One thing that a Nobel Prize does, and which many past laureates have acknowledged, is turn a laureate into an institution. The Nobel Prizes are also glamorous, involving the Swedish royalty and whatnot. Finally, when the prizes are announced, almost all major news outlets carry a headline or two on the frontpage or homepage. The effect is that every year, when the Nobel Prizes are handed out to new Someones, billions of people around the world find out their names. If you’re a scientist, there are few other ways in which you can become more famous.

  One effect of this peak notoriety is a before/after split in terms of Someone’s laurels. Before winning the Nobel Prize, Someone is likely to have been much less well-known, especially outside the community of their peers, and therefore the awards they won are likely to have been characterised by two features: 1) the award is well-defined and the award-givers took pains to identify specific potential winners and evaluate them closely; 2) winning such an award contributed to the winner’s reputation more than the other way around. But after winning a Nobel Prize, Someone is now a famous institution unto their own, and the prizes they win in future are likely to want to themselves become notorious by association, rather than add to Someone’s laurels, and are likely to be loosely defined (e.g. recognising good work in general, as certified by some other institution, rather than specific contributions in a niche field of study).

  I used the example of the Nobel Prizes as an illustration of a more generalised concept: of scholars who have already achieved peak notoriety through other routes, and who elevate the stature of the prizes they win in future as a result. These post-peak-notoriety (PPN) prizes are interesting because there are several of them in India. They’re also interesting because some PPN prizes appear to act in bad faith (I don’t have proof) when they 1) are awarded in recognition of a very generic notion of success or achievement, and 2) are awarded almost exclusively to scholars who have received broad-based recognition for a specific and significant contribution to science.

  A case in point: On February 19, the Twitter account of the SASTRA Deemed University announced the conferment of its ‘Annual Science Day Awards’ to five scientists. All five were men, which drew the attention of @biaswatchindia, which documents “women’s representation” and combats “gender-biased panels in Indian STEM conferences” (run by Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan and Shruti Muralidhar). @biaswatchindia tweeted:

  Number of women awardees: 0/5
  
  Base rate of women faculty in science: 13.5% https://t.co/RHzqtSs03B

  — BiasWatchIndia (@biaswatchindia) February 19, 2023

  This is fair and deserving criticism. I think it can also be expanded to include one more point. Had you heard of SASTRA’s ‘Annual Science Day Awards’ before? I hadn’t; I suspect few others have. In addition, it’s not clear what sort of recognition the prize brings to the table, other than a purse for each laureare of Rs 5 lakh and a citation. But read together with an invitation to deliver lectures on National Science Day at its Thanjavur campus, the award seems like a vehicle for SASTRA to give these individuals – already well-feted individuals, to be sure – a large sum of money and have them talk to its students.

  I couldn’t find any sort of discussion of each laureate’s accomplishments and their scientific work on the SASTRA website. The only result dated 2023 for a search for “Science Day Award” was a page displaying the same poster the university’s Twitter account had tweeted (as of 9.25 am IST on February 22, 2023).

  Is this a PPN prize?

  Consider: M.S. Valiathan won the Padma Vibhushan in 2005. S. Ramaswamy won an Infosys Prize in 2011 and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2016. Samir K. Maji was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2021. Srinivasan Natarajan was elected to the same body in 2013, and is also a member of all three Indian science academies. T. Pradeep was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018 and won the Padma Shri in 2020. All these individuals have also won several other noteworthy prizes. (That one of SASTRA’s prize categories is also named for a living individual smells funky, but that’s a separate matter.)

  So the ‘Annual Science Day Award’ looks very much like a bad-faith PPN prize because it apparently seeks to bolster its own reputation, and by extension that of SASTRA, using the work and achievements of others. I don’t claim to know why all the prize-winners are men; that they are would make sense if they’re the winners of a PPN prize, and all PPN prizes will only magnify the biases and prejudices that other, more celebrated prizes maintain, or used to. The reason is simple: If a PPN prize is going to fete people who have already been feted, and most of those feted in the past were men, the rosters of PPN prize laureates are inevitably going to be sausage fests.

  To think the award could have been just as notorious if all the laureates had been women…

  2023.02.22

• Keep working. Don’t get up.

  ‘Inside Meta’s Push to Solve the Noisy Office’, WSJ, February 16, 2023:

  Coming to the campuses of Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. is a contraption that can block sound, shield workers from their peers and allow for heads-down, uninterrupted work.

  It’s a cubicle.

  That is, a noise-canceling cubicle designed using some of the same principles found in soundproof, echo-free anechoic chambers. “The Cube,” which the company is beginning to roll out to offices worldwide after months of development, absorbs sound from multiple directions, says John Tenanes, vice president of global real estate and facilities at Meta. “It’s like a self-cocoon.”

  Bursts of focused work have their place, but in Meta’s attempts to provide its workers silence when they need it, noise when they need it, and peace when they need it, it’s hard not to see a concerted effort to make the outside world, and what it has to offer by way of quiet and benignity and such, not just redundant but undesirable.

  I prefer an office that interrupts you so you’re not just sitting all the time, so you walk around and go to other places for quiet; that preserves the characteristic office bustle as the opposite of the isolation and dreariness of working from home; and that, while facilitating an esprit de corps, doesn’t try in bad-faith to substitute our relationships with nature, community, and ourselves with it.

  This said, esprit de corps might also be stretching it. According to WSJ:

  Piping in white noise or sounds of nature to help mask conversations is an increasingly common technique in the U.S., says [a VP of design at some furniture company]. Companies using such systems often want to reduce human-speech intelligibility, or the ability for employees to overhear specific discussions across an office. “As soon as you can make out the words that your neighbor is saying…then you get distracted,” he says. … Meta is testing a system that plays sounds in the background that range from footsteps on pebbles to waves crashing.

  They’re obviously trying to instrumentalise the enlivening benefits of spending time among trees, time digging your feet into fine beach sand as the waves lash over them, time gazing into bottomless valleys and night skies. And it seems… not quite okay. Meta’s designs sound like those of a company trying to fold different spaces, and their different affordances, into every point inside its office, offering its occupants a way to hold meetings, make Zoom calls, code with focus, and anything else – all without having to get up, at a time when getting up and talking a walk seems to be an easy public health intervention.

  What if this leads to sensory fatigue, where the next wave over your feet doesn’t still your mind so much as remind you of a spreadsheet? What if these hacks suppress the voices in your head asking you to take a step outside? What if, by depriving you of breaks and promising you the deleterious pleasure of continuous, unwavering productivity, it further pushes the already volatile pleasure of doing nothing out of sight?

  2023.02.18

• A vortex in my bucket

  One of the taps in my bathroom at home issues water in laminar flow – without any turbulence. Sometimes the flow from the tap to the bucket looks like it’s frozen: there are no disturbances on the water’s surface to indicate that it is flowing through the air; the fact of the flow becomes evident only when it strikes the water already in the bucket.

  If the water in the bucket is otherwise still, i.e. undisturbed by any other jerking motion, the flow from the water seems to create a small depression when it strikes the surface, like a ball might create a depression when it lands on suspended fabric. But when I took a closer look, it was less a depression localised to the surface and more the origin of a vortex plunging into the water, like an underwater tornado!

  When I closed this magic tap and opened the one next to it, it gushed a turbulent stream of water into the bucket. There were no vortices, or none that I could see. I remember learning in engineering college that turbulent flow is characterised by the production of many vortices that all interact with each other in a chaotic way, creating a drag force that impedes the fluid’s smooth flow.

  Where there is a vortex, there is or will be turbulence. In this case, the laminar flow from the tap could be transitioning to a turbulent state as it flows into the still water, until at the bottom of the vortex the flow dissipates completely. Such a lovely sight.

  2023.02.09

• Hype from Fermilab

  Where do you think the following bit of text is from?

  A wormhole, also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, is a hypothetical tunnel connecting remote points in spacetime. While wormholes are allowed by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, wormholes have never been found in the universe. In late 2022, the journal Nature featured a paper co-written by Joe Lykken, leader of the Fermilab Quantum Institute, that describes observable phenomenon produced by a quantum processor that “are consistent with the dynamics of a transversable wormhole.” Working with a Sycamore quantum computer at Google, a team of physicists was able to transfer information from one area of the computer to another through a quantum system utilizing artificial intelligence hardware.

  If you’ve been following the hoopla surrounding this paper, esp. over the way it was reported by Quanta and many other outlets, your first guess might be that this is yet another news outlet that ignored the difference between an actual, physical wormhole and a simulation of a mathematical version of an actual, physical wormhole (the paper’s authors, a group to which Lykken belongs, accomplished the latter). But no: this text is from Fermilab itself! It appears on a page announcing a forthcoming lecture by Lykken on February 17. (Hat-tip to Peter Woit for discovering and flagging this on his blog.)

  What I’d like to point out here, for the hundredth time I’m sure, is that hype originates more often than you think from university and institute press offices rather than in the minds and hearts of science journalists. Insufficiently critical reportage (awareness of which is sometimes only possible in hindsight) often fails to stop hype from reaching a larger audience but it seldom creates hype in the first place. This may seem like a fine point but it matters when there is a tendency to overlook the role of press officers, and some scientists themselves (including Lykken), in building the narratives around their and their colleagues’ work.

  2023.02.09

• On that anti-mRNA vaccines video

  The Times of India has published an irresponsible article today on a video by a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claiming with dubious evidence that all mRNA vaccines are harmful. The article quotes from the video at length, effectively offering less-sceptical readers a transcript and encouraging the uncritical absorption of the video’s contents.

  Irrespective of the quality of data that is available vis-à-vis the adverse effects of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, the Times of India article is an offence to good sense, responsible journalism and public healthcare. It amounts to a major news outlet misusing its status to normalise the low quality of arguments and discussion surrounding the public discussion on COVID-19 vaccines.

  1. The headline is “Coronavirus vaccine: MIT Professor calls for immediate suspension of COVID mRNA vaccine”. It doesn’t say that the individual, Retsef Levi, is a professor of operations management at the Sloan School of Management, giving rise to the ad verecundiam fallacy. Expertise is not the (partial) name of the institute where a person is employed, the prefixes or suffixes to their name, or even their claims. Expertise is exactly what they have received specialised training to do and/or have been doing at a professional level for a long time. Times of India should have included Prof. Levi’s actual expertise in the headline – although I may be asking for too much here because it appears as though the author was aware of it but didn’t think it mattered. That Prof. Levi works at MIT also appears to have impressed the author, and may well have prompted the article in its current form.

  2. The article neither facilitates nor encourages independent verification of Prof. Levi’s claims. Even if – and that’s a big if – Prof. Levi’s claims hold up, allowing readers to check for themselves the claims an article is platforming is an important expression of trust and, in a manner of speaking, the right thing to do when one is participating in a discourse of reason and facts. But the article doesn’t contain any links to the papers that Prof. Levi invokes in his defence. The only ‘independent’ expert it has chosen to quote is Aseem Malhotra, the British cardiologist who has made controversial claims about warding off COVID-19 with a diet he devised and who has become known for opposing the use of the mRNA vaccines.

  (By the way, this isn’t whataboutery per se: that a scientist has made other dubious claims shouldn’t mean that they’re current claim should be dubious as well – nor that their legitimate and brave championing of one cause means that all their causes are legitimate. As a journalist, I’d be wary of the extent to which their willingness to swim against the current has benumbed their ability to recognise and respond to valid criticism.)

  3. The article neglects to mention the potential dangers of allowing people to interpret the findings of their own studies. For example, google “Retsef Levi” and one of the top five results is a link to his Google Scholar profile. Click on it, and on the landing page, sort Prof. Levi’s papers by year (instead of by number of citations). The ninth article should be a paper published by Scientific Reports – a Nature journal – and coauthored by Prof. Lefi, Christopher Sun, and Eli Jaffe. The numbers and names you must have seen in the course of this clickthrough should tell you three things:

  a) A note atop the paper’s page, dated May 2022, says the journal’s editors are reviewing criticisms that the paper’s conclusions are problematic.;

  b) Scientific Reports is a peer-reviewed journal, but peer-review didn’t prevent it from publishing this paper (and then flagging problems about it, rather than before it enters the scientific literature). This is because peer-review has several limitations.;

  c) According to Google Scholar, this paper has been cited 19 times – but it doesn’t say anything about the contexts of citation. If I write a paper criticising studies of poor design or quality and cite Prof. Levi’s Scientific Reports paper as an example, the citation count of the paper increases by one, but beyond this one-dimensional number, the reputation of the paper has actually declined (or ought to have).

  4. How can we be sure that Prof. Levi is interpreting, to his audience at large, all the other studies he cites in his video in a fair manner? The way the Times of India article its written, we can’t. We need to find (without any links) and follow-up on each one (without access to expertise) separately.

  For example, consider the “Harvard Medical School” study that purportedly found unattached spike proteins in the blood of young people with post-vaccination myocarditis. In this study, researchers worked with 16 people with post-vaccination myocarditis and 45 people without post-vaccination myocarditis, and found that those with the condition had unattached spike proteins in their bloodsteams.

  Conclusions: a) post-vaccination myocarditis is rare, which both Prof. Levi and Times of India leave out; b) the results are indicative because the cohort sizes are too small to reliably elucidate rare side-effects and the real extent of their rarity; c) per the paper itself, “the mRNA vaccine-induced immune responses did not differ between individuals who developed myocarditis and individuals who did not”; and d) spike-protein overproduction could be implicated in the mechanism connecting mRNA vaccination and myocarditis.

  This is just one study that Prof. Levi has invoked.

  Again, irrespective of the legitimacy (or not) of Prof. Levi’s various claims in his video, Times of India was duty-bound to raise these issues – or at least flag their relevance. The newspaper may believe it is ‘simply reporting’ something that someone somewhere said and is therefore free of blame, but that’s like saying you’re simply erecting a billboard reproducing Nick Naylor’s comments on smoking and are expecting to be free of blame. At least in the realm of reason and facts.

  2023.02.01