Month: March 2023

• Who’s to blame for the American right’s distrust of science?

  This study unambiguously suggests that scientific journals do the institution of science no favor when they insert themselves so directly in the political debate, especially at a time when trust in the scientific community continues to decline on the right wing.

  This is the surprisingly misguided interpretation, in an article published by Politico, of a study published in Nature Human Behaviour on March 20 that found Trump’s supporters’ trust in the journal Nature tanked after it endorsed Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 US presidential elections.

  “Trust in the scientific community … on the right wing” is on the decline because the right wing wants to bend the rules and processes of the scientific enterprise to fit a worldview in which racism is desirable, vaccine mandates are anti-freedom, it’s okay to force women to have babies they can’t have, sexual harassment is tolerable, eugenics is justifiable, and democratic mandates can be overturned with violence. It’s a worldview in which a conspiracy abounds in every critique, yet the Politico article suggests that when journals “insert themselves so directly in the political debate”, they’re being unfair to the “institution of science”. It doesn’t compute.

  The American’s right’s decision to distrust science is the product of scientists’, and journals’, unwillingness to change what they do and how they do it to fit the right’s cynical requirements as well as to engage with someone who doesn’t come into a conversation being okay with changing their mind as well as often engages in bad-faith tactics designed to subdue, rather than disprove, their interlocutors. See for example the following passage from an excellent April 2013 paper by Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry (that you should also read in full if you’re inclined):

  Believers of the paranormal and supernatural have often tried to turn the tables on skeptics, finding various ways to shift the BoP [burden of proof] back to the latter. In particular, rhetorical moves of the type “you can’t prove it wrong” (Gill 1991; Caso 2002) are unfair requests that fail to appreciate the proper BoP procedure. In some cases, such requests can be straightforwardly fulfilled (e.g., it is very easy to prove that the co-authors of this paper, at this very moment, have far less than $1 M dollar in their pockets), but even then, the skeptic is doing the accuser a favor in taking on a BoP that does not really fall on him (we are under no obligation to empty our pockets after each such gratuitous insinuation). Similarly, if ufologists claim that some crop circle was left by a space ship, the BoP is firmly on their side to come up with extraordinary evidence. If the skeptic chooses to take on their sophistic challenge to “prove that there was no spaceship,” … by way of providing direct or circumstantial evidence that that particular crop circle was in fact a human hoax, they are indulging the believers by taking on a BoP that, rationally speaking, does not pertain to them at all.

  (One of my all-time favourite essays is this by Laurie Penny, on just this topic.)

  There are two fallacies in Politico‘s interpretation. (It’s really an interpretation suggested by the study’s sole author, Stanford University business PhD student Floyd Zhang – “These results suggest that political endorsement by scientific journals can undermine and polarize public confidence in the endorsing journals and the scientific community” – but I blame Politico more for running with this suggestion in such assertive terms.)

  The first is that the scientific community – from the people who conceive of experiments that eventually become written up in papers to the editors of journals that publish them – alone is responsible for increasing or maintaining public trust in science. They are not, but this view straightforwardly arises out of the notion that science is scientists’ business, instead of the “institution” being acknowledged as the public institution that it is (and the democratic institution it ought to be). We might collectively desire higher public trust in science yet we still demand the unqualified freedom to engage with and spread unscientific (or, more specifically, counter-scientific) ideas, to demand solutions to specific problems, to expect scientists to ‘go along’ with the political mandate of the day, and to foist on them the burden of proof to varying degrees in different spheres. This is reminiscent of Ashis Nandy’s conclusion that science has become a reason of state, and is obviously not going to work well.

  By assuming part of the mantle to improve the quality and type of trust in science (tempered by deeper questions about what role we’d like science to play in our societies), we also restore scientists’ freedom to exercise their democratic rights.

  The second fallacy is that science is inherently non-political and that politicising it from this state of ‘purity’ is wrong. Yet both positions are wrong, as the public anti-Trump stances of Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, Scientific American, and others demonstrated (and as I have written before here and here, for example). Science is already, and always has been, a politically negotiated enterprise; starting from a position that denies this truth, as the Nature Human Behaviour paper and the Politico article seem to do, is disingenuous and bound to reach conclusions at odds with reality, such as laying the blame for the right’s distrust of science at the feet of an untenable separation of science and politics.

  The Politico article concludes thus*:

  If Nature’s Biden endorsement had little or no effect on readers except to make some Trump supporters disdain Nature in specific and the scientific establishment in general, why did the publication endorse any candidate?

  The publication endorsed any candidate because it could. That’s exactly how it should be.

  2023.03.30

• Lord of the Rings Day

  Happy Lord of the Rings Day. 🙂

  About a week ago, I began rereading book 7 of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. This followed my realisation earlier this year that I had somehow lost the ability to read fiction. I had neither the interest in the genre nor – unlike in the pre-pandemic era – the ability to force myself to read the first few pages of a book and automatically get into it.

  A friend had lent his copy of M. John Harrison’s Viriconium short-stories, a classic of the high-fantasy genre. Though I could appreciate the higher quality of writing and why Harrison’s style is so celebrated, the stories themselves didn’t take. When I returned it to my friend, I noticed his collection of the Malazan books (to which I’m proud to have introduced him many years past), and asked to borrow book 7 – considered by many to be the series’s best installment (and by me to be the second-best).

  The Malazan series is epic fantasy – in my view the highest form of fiction simply by virtue of the amount of invention involved followed by the discipline required to rein it in and make it all make sense – and I didn’t expect to be able to read it, beyond snippets here and there. But in four days, I finished 588 consecutive pages. (I’m currently on a two-day break to read a shorter non-fiction book.) It has been a pleasant yet unrelenting surprise. It seems I can read fiction, yet the thought of reading some other work in the genre remains off-putting. Why?

  I have been thinking about this on and off, and today, I think I have the beginnings of a hypothesis. Epic fantasy fiction is one of the few things I truly love because it has fiction’s ability, through pure storytelling, to recapitulate a uniquely human experience of reality, or any particularly interesting part of it, as well as achieve that, and frequently expand it, to situate, deconstruct, and explore the human through different kinds of realities.

  (I’m speaking, of course, of good epic fantasy, which J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth stories did in a limited yet genre-defining way in the early 20th century, and which to me today continues to be exemplified by the work of Steven Erikson.)

  To begin reading a book of fiction is to begin a journey of pure discovery; to begin reading epic fantasy should only be more so. And so: I believe I have lost, hopefully temporarily, the appetite for discovery ab initio. Perhaps I’m afraid of what I will find, but it’s almost certainly that increasingly grim sensation that it will just be more of the same, related through new turns of phrase, new dramatis loci, and new points of view. Nothing new.

  Non-fiction, in this regard, can be comforting because it helps to explain and de-threaten what is already known and has exhibited an unsettling tendency to repeat itself. (I particularly like monographs.) At this time, to me, the Malazan series is also practically non-fiction: less in the sense that I believe the series chronicles real events from an alternate reality and more that I read the books a decade ago, have vague memories of their various narrative arcs, and to reread them now is to not discover but rediscover.

  Rediscovery is not repeated discovery just the way multiplication is not repeated addition; it is a second-order thing, something greater than the sum of its parts, containing both the prospect of discovery and the memory, so precious as I become more cynical, of its effect on the mind. Yes: I suppose I am, or like to think that I am, rereading the Malazan series to relive this effect and beat back the dark clouds of nothing-new-is-possible. And so far, I think it is working.

  Perhaps once I (re)finish all the Malazan books, I can return to good old Tolkien himself…

  2023.03.25

• AI v. our ability to build AI

  A lot of this article, by Sean Ekins, Filippa Lentzos, Max Brackmann, and Cédric Invernizzi, published by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on March 24, makes good sense – except the following two sentences:

  Nature took millions of years to design proteins. AI can generate meaningful protein sequences in seconds.

  The bigger question to ask here would be: if AI had to design complex life-forms from scratch, would it design protein sequences at all, forget in seconds? More broadly, “nature took millions of years to design proteins”, which knowledge was then used to train AI models, and which then generated new proteomic possibilities. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this but it’s hard not to see in throwaway lines like these the reflection of our seemingly normalised oversight of the invisible trainers and the oft-acquired-without-permission knowledge that go into making technologies like this possible. It’s also a symptom of what we have come to typically prize more: the ability of a machine to do ‘cool’ things rather than our ability to create such machines on the back of not inconsiderable human and intellectual exploitation.

  2023.03.24

• BLR road-widening is a sham

  While I’m told that discussions on a plan to widen Bengaluru’s Sankey Road, between Bhashyam Circle and Malleshwaram 18th cross – a stretch that’s one of the contributors to the city’s reputation for horrific traffic – have progressed in the last two months to become less unilateral and more consultative, the idea that road-widening can help ease traffic remains just as hare-brained, not to mention the widening itself will be marginal since this stretch is already surrounded by built property and a large fenced water body, and the city had planned to cut 50 old trees in the process.

  Several studies (e.g. this, this, and this) have shown that widening roads and adding new highway lanes only temporarily eases congestion: people start to believe that the widened road is less congested than another and are encouraged to drive there, and over time, the widened road becomes similarly congested as before. Economists have a term for this: induced demand, wherein demand for X increases when the supply of X increases. The lack of exceptions to this rule should have meant urban planners should be taking it to be fact, yet they don’t, and soon, there will be even more congestion on Sankey Road.

  The way the concept of induced demand operates itself says something about the manner of people’s engagement in decision-making vis-à-vis roadways. The immediate response to the supply of roadway increasing is less congestion. But the way people think also changes in response to the higher supply. This happens passively, out of sight of social media feeds and news reports, and over a few months – but plausibly sooner given the volume of vehicles that follow routes determined by Google Maps. And just as quietly, the road becomes recongested.

  Or maybe planners do admit the certainty of recongestion but press ahead anyway because their priority is something other than public convenience and safety. In the interest of not reaching for malice when incompetence is within reach: easing congestion on roads has another, more laborious solution in the form of reducing the production of and disincentivising the use of cars and bikes and building better public transport. There is some talk every now and then about the latter, a lot more than the former, but on either count nothing happens.

  In 2016, IISc researchers reported based on some analyses that Bengaluru is one of India’s worst cases of urban sprawl, amplified by, among other things, ad hoc land-use planning (almost an oxymoron) and iffy public transport.

  At the same time, wider roads will mean more tarred area will mean more heat trapped and localised in/over that area will mean that part will become even more unlivable. Wider roads will mean more motorised vehicles will mean more emissions and pollution will mean the city will become even more unlivable. Wider roads will mean more tarred area will mean more repair work when it rains will mean more news cycles over nothing. And wider roads will mean more contracts will mean more opportunities for money to move around.

  2023.03.23

• India’s devious reason to not spend more on culture

  ‘Difficult to allocate public fund to art and culture: Centre’, The Hindu, March 19, 2023:

  Given the high disparity it experiences in elementary rural infrastructure like health, education and transportation, it might not be “tenable” for a developing nation like India to allocate a considerable proportion of its public fund to the promotion of art and culture, the Culture Ministry has said. … [Officials], however, observed that the Ministry has been consistently able to increase its budgetary outlays over the years except during the COVID-pandemic period where priority was given to other social sector Ministries.

  This is a curious claim by the Union Ministry of Culture, in response to a parliamentary committee finding that India was underspending on arts and culture compared to Australia, China, Singapore, the UK, and the US. On the one hand, it is hard to imagine that the expenditure on this front in India could rival the allocations for defence, healthcare, education, or social welfare. But on the other, the justification – in terms of poor “elementary rural infrastructure” for “health, education and transportation” – is dubious: the Ministry appears to say that it can’t spend more on health because its expenses on the latter are sizeable, but a) India’s economy and annual budget are both big enough to accommodate increases on both counts, and b) India’s expense on elementary rural infra for health, etc. isn’t coming from the arts and culture budget.

  But in saying what it did, the Ministry is setting up a fallacious narrative: that if expenses on one count are lower, it’s because they’re higher on the other count, the fallacy being that the national government can’t ‘route’ money from anywhere else. Yet it can, by all means, by cutting its spending on defence or the Ministry of AYUSH, for just two examples, just a little. This narrative is also dangerous because it pits the two enterprises — culture and rural infra — against each other, as a foundation for the government to justify its questionable privatisation drive (emphasis added):

  The Ministry was also trying and evolving innovative methods to maximise the participation of non-government organisations in the field of promotion and conservation of art and culture like in some of the countries mentioned above, they said giving the example of the Monument Mitra scheme. Under this scheme, the government aims to hand over around 1,000 monuments under the control of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) to the private sector for their upkeep.

  “Culture should be an area where a large part of expenditure needs to be sourced from non-government sources” and hence the Ministry was also supporting non-governmental and voluntary organisations through its various schemes for participating in overall propagation, preservation and promotion of all forms of art and culture, the report submitted by the Department Related Standing Committee on Transport Tourism and Culture quoted the Culture Ministry as saying.

  Why should culture “be an area where a large part of expenditure” is from “non-government sources”? The privatisation itself is questionable because, as Nachiket Chanchani, an associate professor of South Asian art and visual culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, enumerated on March 1, 2023, the problems include:

  • “Giving businesses, rather than trained professionals, a chance to build museums and interpretation centres and develop their content threatens India’s understanding of its own past.”
  • Privatisation “sidelines the mandate of the ASI and abandons The Sarnath Initiative, guidelines devised by the ASI, the Getty Trust, U.S., the British Museum, and National Culture Fund to safe keep excavated objects and present them to visitors in an engaging manner.”
  • “Many monuments selected for the scheme … already have tourist infrastructure. What is driving the need for new ticket offices and gift shops?”
  • It’s not acceptable to “let businesses occupy prime public land and build their own brands … at the cost of further diminishing grounds around iconic monuments”
  • “It will undermine local communities and their relationships with historical sites.”

  There we have the final irony, in the same vein as the environment ministry that’s weakening environmental protections and the law ministry whose minister appears to be threatening some judges: a culture ministry that’s eroding India’s cultural heritage. And if you want it to do better, maybe say goodbye to “elementary rural infrastructure”.

  2023.03.20

• Nature paper says bad news is good news

  ‘Negativity drives online news consumption’, Claire E. Robertson et al., Nature Human Behaviour, March 16, 2023:

  Here we analyse the effect of negative words on news consumption using a massive online dataset of viral news stories from Upworthy.com—a website that was one of the most successful pioneers of click-bait in the history of the Internet²³.

  The tendency for individuals to attend to negative news reflects something foundational about human cognition—that humans preferentially attend to negative stimuli across many domains^24,25. Attentional biases towards negative stimuli begin in infancy²⁶ and persist into adulthood as a fast and automatic response²⁷. Furthermore, negative information may be more ‘sticky’ in our brains; people weigh negative information more heavily than positive information, when learning about themselves, learning about others and making decisions^28,29,30. This may be due to negative information automatically activating threat responses—knowing about possible negative outcomes allows for planning and avoidance of potentially harmful or painful experiences^31,32,33.

  Previous work has explored the role of negativity in driving online behaviour. In particular, negative language in online content has been linked to user engagement, that is, sharing activities^{22,34,35,36,37,38,39}. As such, negativity embedded in online content explains the speed and virality of online diffusion dynamics (for example, response time, branching of online cascades)^{7,34,35,37,39,40,41}. Further, online stories from social media perceived as negative garner more reactions (for example, likes, Facebook reactions)^42,43. Negativity in news increases physiological activations⁴⁴, and negative news is more likely to be remembered by users^45,46,47. Some previous works have also investigated negativity effects for specific topics such as political communication and economics^{34,48,49,50,51,52}.

  The framing here is curious. The paper’s authors hypothesised that readers prefer bad news (determined by words signalling negativity in the headline) based on the fact that bad news is “more ‘sticky’ in our brains”, because people use bad news to know how to plan ahead. They further justify their choice – a reasonable one, to be sure – based on the effects of negativity on readers’ news recall and physiology.

  Second, after their study seemed to proved their hypothesis, the authors delved into which negative emotions invoked stronger interest from readers:

  … high-arousal negative emotions such as anger or fear have been found to efficiently attract attention and be quickly recognizable in facial expressions and body language^31,59,60. This may be because of the social and informational value that high-arousal emotions such as anger and fear hold—both could alert others in one’s group to threats, and paying preferential attention and recognition to these emotions could help the group survive^27,32. This may also be why in the current age, people are more likely to share and engage with online content that is embedding anger, fear or sadness^21,41,61,62. Therefore, we examine the effects of words related to anger and fear (as high-arousal negative emotions), as well as sadness (as a low-arousal negative emotion).

  Across both analyses as well as throughout the paper, there seem to be two implicit assumptions: a) that news producers have an option to choose between good and bad news (loosely defined), and b) that the network of outlets producing mis- and dis-information in the guise of ‘news’ has no role to play.

  On the former: Journalists often don’t. In fact, good journalism in a country with a government that fixates on some arbitrary ‘good news’ even at the worst of times needs to counter-fixate on what national leaders are keen to ignore. And the news reports produced thus are not this way to encourage click-throughs but because they are, in fact, what’s happening.

  Of course, the authors’ data source is limited to the content published by Upworthy.com and its readers in the US, which limits what conclusions they can reach – but it also leaves ambiguous whether their not reaching certain conclusions is due to these limitations, because it didn’t fit their hypothesis or because they didn’t even consider the possibility.

  On the latter: The authors only admit that it’s important to understand “the biases that influence people’s consumption of online content … especially as misinformation, fake news and conspiracy theories proliferate online” – but even here suggesting that journalists wield negativity as a way to manipulate people into consuming the news. Throwaway lines like “Even publishers marketed as ‘good news websites’ are benefiting from negativity” aren’t helping; what is this supposed to mean anyway?

  Similarly, the ‘Discussion’ section of their paper concludes thus:

  Knowing what features of news make articles interesting to people is a necessary first step for this purpose and will enable us to increase online literacy and to develop transparent online news practices.

  This sentence spells out a logically straightforward premise that suggests we can use the study’s results to look through or past headlines that seem to say something but actually say nothing at all (you know these). Yet it is also infused with an assumption that readers’ news-consumption habits don’t influence journalists’, and newsroom-runners’, choices.

  I’m not saying “we’re just responding to readers’ demands”; instead, I’m saying that news consumption is a combination of publishing and consuming habits. Like news publishers are competing for readers’ attention, readers are often competing to discover the ‘best’ or a ‘better’ news source, especially on topics also associated with considerable misinformation (e.g. vaccines), and which – as studies based on Facebook use have demonstrated – they can admit into their echo chambers. We need clarity on how they make their choices in this process of discovery, and why, in different parts of the world.

  Without this knowledge – which the authors appear to have sidelined based on the idea that journalists have an option to not be negative – we’ll never “develop transparent online news practices”.

  2023.03.18

• What’s the anomaly in a Nobel for Modi?

  I’m sure you’ve seen the reports doing the rounds today that some person on some Nobel Prize Committee said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was very deserving of the vaunted peace prize, followed by less widely circulated reports that the person was misquoted (or dysquoted) and in fact that he never said such a thing. I don’t think highly of the Nobel Prizes and believe they should be dismantled.

  This said, if Narendra Modi did win the Nobel Prize for peace, what would that mean? Would it mean that he and his companions would have infiltrated the prize-giving committees or that the committees had decided to give Modi et al. the concession of their prize’s prestige? Obviously it will be hard to say without access to the fundamental facts of the case, which brings the philosophy of the Planck units comes to mind.

  Our common units of measurement, such as metre, kilogram, and second, help us make sense of the world around us in quantities that the human mind can readily grasp. However, the universe is both too vast and too small for these units to apply just as easily to cosmic problems. In 1899, the German physicist Max Planck found that combining four physical constants of our universe in different ways gave rise to values of distance, duration, mass, and temperature. That is, he found that these were the smallest values of these attributes that we can express using these constants (shown in the table here).

  Both the combinations of the constants and the values hold special significance. The values have since been called the Planck scale: that is, when you measure an event that happens in some small multiple of the Planck time (5.391 x 10^-44 seconds) or across a distance in some small multiple of the Planck length (1.616 x 10^-35 metres), the event is said to be happening at the Planck scale. The forces at work in our universe are products of the constants, so they don’t reveal the universe’s workings happening at or below the Planck scale. This is why our theories of gravity and quantum mechanics are expected to break down, fail, at the Planck scale. Beyond this scale, nature is opaque to us.

  The combinations are important because they allow us to ‘view’ the universe in a way that maintains its various proportions instead of skewing them to the human perspective. For example, the mass of the proton – the charged particle inside all atomic nuclei – has several contributions. One is from its gravitational binding energy, the energy required to gravitationally unbind this proton from other nearby particles. It turns out that this binding energy is extremely small, smaller than what physicists calculated it should be. Is this because the force of gravity is so weak or because the proton’s mass is so small? Which is the anomaly?

  The anomaly is the proton’s mass because the strength of the gravitational force is determined by the gravitational constant G, one of the three universal constants in Planck’s combinations. That is, the strength of gravity is a fundamental fact of our universe, one of its many but finite defining characteristics, whereas the mass of the proton is a non-fundamental emergent value, and that’s the one that needs explaining.

  Similarly, is there an essential equation, or argument, logic or sensibility, to which we can defer when we seek the real anomaly: that Modi has wrangled himself a Nobel Prize or that the prize-giving committee made that decision of its own volition? If there is, we will have our new overlord. If there isn’t, well, what else is new?

  2023.03.16