Root Privileges

Month: October 2024

  • To WordPress

    I used to love WordPress unconditionally. Then Gutenberg replaced Calypso and the user experience became quite poor. Then WordPress.com rejigged their subscription plans, got it wrong, and fortunately switched back. Finally, Matt Mullenweg’s actions and words of late have really tested my sentiments. I’m not a software expert, just technologically curious and technically inclined. Since 2008, WordPress has hosted my blog; I’ve also brought many of my friends who wanted to blog online through WordPress; built or moved their startups’ websites here; and launched The Wire on a self-hosted setup in 2015. All platforms have their problems but WordPress has of late had more than most, thanks to Mullenweg.

    After he banned WP Engine from accessing resources on WordPress.org via their API, I high-tailed my site to Ghost.org, a good alternative for being not bloated and more blogging-friendly but on the flip side more expensive and less customisable. Sometime later I wondered if I should return but then Mullenweg published an acerbic post on his blog (that he later took down) directed at David Heinemeier Hansson. The incident left me quite unsure about how Mullenweg would react to a post criticising him in a blog hosted by his own company.

    Ownership is at the heart of the ongoing dispute. Mullenweg has made a big deal of it. Since his campaign against WP Engine became public, it has become clear he believes WordPress.org is his personal fiefdom, where he is immune to the rules that apply to his colleagues, and that there is little in the form of reason in his decision to target WP Engine alone. His attempts to spin the dispute as one of trademark violation, presumably to take the focus away from his own mercurial actions and ad hoc imposition of sanctions, further deepen the place of ownership, the rules that do or don’t apply to owners, and their accountability.

    On October 20, Mullenweg finally offered to stop commenting on the dispute in public while citing his own freedom of speech. I can’t say if this post inspired confidence in others to believe Mullenweg wouldn’t censor them by invoking trademark or some other similar instrument of convenience. (It didn’t in Bullenweg.) I just really wanted it to because WordPress is so valuable.

    This whole fracas may have reinforced in a more technically capable person the importance of owning the infrastructure that hosts one’s digital assets. I’m not one of them; instead, I and frankly most of the world depend on solutions that are less fundamental, more pre-configured, and more accessible to keep and use our assets. WordPress.org and WordPress.com are two such solutions. Important places on the internet are hosted with/on either of them. W.org and W.com were once quite different (even with the confusion surrounding their domain names) but now, after Mullenweg’s unilateral attack against the most successful competitor to W.com, they’re evidently similarly vulnerable to the threat of his discretion.

    Acquiring the technical chops to take full ownership and control of my sites, etc. would be a waste of my time, and rendering my presence on the internet contingent on the existence of an ideologically congruent and fully ethical CEO at the helm of a hosting company would be futile. I admit Mullenweg’s actions of late constitute a difference in kind rather than degree: no other hosting company CEO has behaved in a way that endangered the properties of their own customers and the wider community of people vested in their product. But leaving WordPress.com because Mullenweg crossed this particular line is to make my choice about where to host a site a matter of where I draw the line and where, when it moves, I’m going to draw it next. That’s exhausting.

    It seems better to me to (completely rather than partially) decouple where I host my blog from how the hosting company’s owner behaves simply because I can’t afford it. My other alternatives at this time are Ghost, Drupal, minimalist alternatives like Bear or Mataroa (self-hosting WordPress may be too but I don’t want to leave for a host that, if it becomes successful, could become Mullenweg’s next target, at least not until the court’s verdict in the dispute restricts such behaviour). And each one of them has deal-breaking problems. I suppose I’m just too well-settled at WordPress. But it’s no longer unconditional love for WordPress either, and it won’t be the first platform on my mind when a friend asks me for suggestions for where they could start blogging or where a news site should be hosted.

    In one of his posts Mullenweg had asked customers to vote with their wallet and quit using WP Engine. Voting with your wallet is expensive, requires a specific kind of web-hosting literacy, and, importantly, time and mental bandwidth. Yes, it’s important to make rational and informed choices about the things that are important to us, but we also need to pick our battles. The wisest courses of action (for someone in my position) here seems to be how we expect Mullenweg v. WP Engine is going to in court as well: to place one’s trust in only the laws and terms governing the provision of these services and the reasonably full and free expression of one’s own beliefs, ideas, and expectations. Everything else is going to be the price to be paid to keep a blog online, uncensored, and written.

  • Build it, they will more than come

    From ‘KSTOA seeks alternative road to Bengaluru airport amid increasing commuter challenges’, The Hindu, October 23, 2024:

    The Karnataka State Travel Operators’ Association (KSTOA) has raised concerns over the existing connectivity to Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) in Bengaluru. In a recently written letter addressed to the Central and State Governments, the association has highlighted the urgent need for an alternative road of international standards to accommodate the rapidly growing demand from both domestic and international travellers.

    The way urban planners respond to traffic congestion is so reminiscent of India’s tobacco and firecracker control policies: to attempt to change consumer behaviour alone in order to lower demand instead of changing things on both the demand and the supply sides. Research and experience have shown that traffic will swell to fill roads, so we need to control the vehicular population and improve public transport (which move more people per unit of time and/or space), not build more roads. And yet…

  • What’s ailing the Indian Railways?

    ‘What are the stress factors for Indian Railways?’, The Hindu, October 20, 2024:

    The operating ratio (OR) — the amount the Railways spends to earn ₹100 — in 2024-2025 is estimated to be ₹98.2, a small improvement from 2023-2024 (₹98.7) but a decline from ₹97.8 in 2016. A higher OR leaves less for capex and the Railways more dependent on budgetary support and Extra-Budgetary Resources (EBRs). In 2016-2017, the BJP government brought the railway budget under the regular budget after nine decades of separation. One outcome was easier access for the Railways to gross budgetary support. As for EBRs: the Railways’ dues have ballooned to 17% of its revenue receipts today from 10% in 2015-2016.

    Read the full story.

  • On the 2024 Nobel Prizes and the Rosalind Lee issue

    The Nobel Prizes are a deeply flawed institution both out of touch with science as it is done today and with an outsized influence on scientific practice at the most demanding levels. Yet these relationships all persist with the prizes continuing to crown some of the greatest achievements in the history of modern science.

    The prizes are exclusive by design and their prestige is enforced through a system of secrecy: the reasons for picking each laureate are locked away for 50 years even as the selection process happens behind closed doors. In keeping with a historical tradition of all prizes being distinguished by their laureates, the Nobel Prizes are sought after so scientists can enter the same ranks that hold Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, etc.

    Of course the institution like others of its kind reinforces the need for itself, creating self-fulfilling conditions by mooching off the reputation of scientists who have laboured for decades in specific social, economic, cultural, and political contexts to produce knowledge of incredible value and in return conferring a reputation of a different kind. This is why Jean-Paul Sartre tried to decline the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964.

    Then again, the way the award-giving foundation conducts the prizes’ announcements has also helped to ameliorate the neglectful treatment many sections of the mainstream media, especially in India, have meted out to the sort of scientific work the prizes fete, even if the foundation’s conduct also panders to the causes of such treatment.

    The prizes

    I think the Nobel Prizes for physiology/medicine and for physics caught many science communicators off guard because they were both concerned with very involved pieces of work with no direct applications. The medicine prize was for the discovery of microRNA and post-transcriptional gene regulation, which when it happened overturned what biologists had assumed was a complete picture of how the body’s cells regulate genes to make different proteins.

    The physics prize was for the first work on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which produced a machine-friendly version of cognition by drawing on ideas in biology, neuropsychology, and statistical mechanics. If this work hadn’t happened, ChatGPT may not exist today, but several other developments built on the first ANNs to produce more new knowledge whose accumulation eventually led to ChatGPT et al. Ergo, calling ChatGPT et al. an application of the first ANNs would be thoroughly misguided.

    The chemistry prize — for the development of computational tools to design proteins and to predict their structures — presented a slightly different problem: the tools’ advent meant humans suddenly found themselves spending much less time on deciphering the structures, yet the tools didn’t, and still don’t, say why proteins prefer these structures over others. Scientists still need to figure out the why by themselves.

    All this said, I’m grateful this year as I’ve been before for the prizes’ ability to throw up an opportunity for all sections of the media to discuss scientific work many of them would most likely have neglected otherwise. Reading the research papers that first reported the existence of microRNA and the papers that explained how models to understand exotic states of matter lent themselves to the first ANN concepts allowed me personally to refresh my basics as well as be reminded of the ability of blue-sky scicomm — as a direct counterpart of blue-sky research, one that isn’t fixated on applications — to wow us.

    This post benefited from feedback from Thomas Manuel and Mahima Jain.

    The Rosalind Lee issue

    To reiterate from the introduction, the Nobel Prizes are one institution with deep and well-defined flaws. And I have learnt from (journalistic) experience that there’s no changing its mind. It’s too big to change and doesn’t admit the need to do so, and its members have had no compunctions about articulating that in public. The vast majority of scientists also subscribe to the prizes’ value and their general desirability. So it is my view today that we work around the prizes and/or renounce the prizes altogether when dealing with the award-giving group’s choices.

    A third option is to change the foundation’s mind but this requires a considerable amount of collective work to which I doubt more than a few would like to dedicate themselves. Mind-changing work is demanding work. Then again the problem is if you fall anywhere in between these two more-viable options, you risk admitting other possibilities vis-à-vis the Nobel Prizes that (I imagine) you’d rather not.

    For a background on the Rosalind Lee issue, I suggest you browse X.com. My notes on it follow:

    (i) The Nobel Foundation has historically reserved the Nobel Prizes for persons who conceived of important ideas and made testable predictions about them. The latter is important. IIRC this is why SN Bose didn’t win a Nobel Prize for coming up with Bose-Einstein particle statistics. Albert Einstein could have won instead because he built on Bose’s ideas to predict the existence of a particular state of matter: the Bose-Einstein condensate. Who came up with the testable predictions in the paper that won Victor Ambros a share of the medicine Nobel Prize?

    I’m not directly defending the exclusion of Rosalind Lee, who was the first author of that and in fact many of the more important papers Ambros published in his career. Instead, I’m pointing to an answer that could explain her exclusion with a reminder that the answer is flawed and that it has always been flawed. I suppose I’m saying that we couldn’t have expected better. 🙃

    (ii) Physics World recently published an interview with Lars Brink, a physicist who has been part of the decision-making for many physics prizes the last decade. Brinks bluntly states at one point that the Nobel Academy doesn’t give the prizes to collaborations or in fact even more than three people at a time because they don’t want 5,000 people (for example at CERN) claiming they’re Nobel laureates all of a sudden. There is an explicit and deliberate design here to keep the prizes exclusive, like Hermes handbags.

    (iii) The first author is often the one who designs the experiment, performs it, collects the data, analyses it, etc. — basically everything beyond, but not necessarily excluding, the act of having an idea itself and including most of the legwork. The Nobel Prizes however are not awards for legwork. This sucks because it’s a profound misunderstanding of the people required to produce good-quality scientific knowledge.

    Thanks to the influence the prizes exert on the scientific community, the people who are left out also fade further — in the public view and also in terms of not being able to benefit from the systematic rewards vouchsafed for the Nobel laureates who are now institutions unto themselves. The fading is likely compounded for people already struggling to be noticed in the scientific literature: the “technicians” who equip, maintain, and operate laboratory instruments, among others (a.k.a. the Matthew effect). Of course the axis of discrimination is gendered as well: as one friend put it, “the ‘leg work’ of science is historically feminised”, and when awards and other forms of recognition exclude such work they perpetuate the Matilda effect.

    Overall, whether the prize-giving body is aware of these narratives and issues is moot. What matters is that it acknowledges and responds to them — which it has signalled it won’t do. QED.

    (iv) In fact, all these rules of the Nobel Prizes are arbitrary. It’s effectively a sport and a poorly managed one at that. You make up a playing field, publicise some of the rules, keep the governing body beyond reach or reproach, hide the scorecard, and then you say you have to jump five feet in the air to qualify. The outragers are raising their voices for Rosalind Lee (what does she want, by the way?) but not for the first authors of all the other papers by other laureates over the years. If they don’t belong to marginalised social groups, is it okay to leave them out? Then again these are moot questions, pursuits leading nowhere at all thanks to the Nobel Prizes’ presumption that they’re not of this world.

    The Nobel Prizes have also wronged many women, but I can’t claim to know whether there’s a case-by-case explanation (with arbitrary foundations) or if it was a systematic program to do so. Both seem equally likely given how slow attitudes have been to change on this front. This said, just because women have been wronged doesn’t mean all forms of reparation will be equally useful. More specifically, what will breaking the (arbitrary) rules do to change for women in science?

    Obviously this is part of a broader question about the influence of the Nobel Prizes on doing science. Mukund Thattai ran a survey on Twitter years ago asking scientists about why they got into or stayed in science. “Because of a Nobel laureate” received the fewest votes in a large pool of respondents. It wasn’t a representative survey but it does hint at an important piece of reality. Once we start to argue that including Rosalind Lee would have been better, we also tacitly admit the Nobel Prizes matter for who chooses to stay in science and who is condemned to fade — but do they?

    On the other side of this coin lie all the other prizes that did fete Rosalind Lee along with Victor Ambros. If we’d like to have any prizes at all (I don’t but YMMV), shall we celebrate the Newcomb Cleveland Prize more than the Nobel Prizes? Likewise, by railing against Rosalind Lee’s exclusion on arbitrary grounds, what do we hope to achieve? It may be more gainful to spread awareness of the Nobel Prizes’ flaws and finitude and focus on the deeper question of how the opportunities to win X award can influence the way science is done, who does it, and why.

  • Off the rails

    Either Matt Mullenweg’s screws have fallen off or I deeply overestimated how sensible a person I thought he was. On October 3, Mullenweg wrote on his blog that Automattic had offered those of its employees who disagreed with his actions vis-à-vis WP Engine a buyout and that 8.4% of the company’s workforce took it. He wrote that he and Automattic (one and the same, really) wanted to make the buyout as enticing as possible, fixing the severance pay at $30,000 (Rs 25 lakh) or six months’ salary, whichever is higher. Excerpt:

    159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay! … It was an emotional roller coaster of a week. The day you hire someone you aren’t expecting them to resign or be fired, you’re hoping for a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Every resignation stings a bit. However now, I feel much lighter. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay.

    I’m sure he knows no group of people turned down $126M to stay, each individual in this mass simply turned down “$30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher” to stay. They decided that way because they agreed with him, didn’t disagree with him strongly enough, needed to have a job beyond six months or some other reason. Similarly the 159 that took the buyout decided to leave because they disagreed strongly enough with him, because they needed the money or some other reason.

    But no: Mullenweg is convinced he’s still in the right and that all those people who left Automattic did so because the messaging from WP Engine and its principal investor got to them, not because Mullenweg is toying with them.

    Silver Lake and WP Engine’s attacks on me and Automattic, while spurious, have been effective. It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.

    We also know Mullenweg has been moderating his blog’s comments section to allow only those comments that are favourable to him and his worldview. All bloggers whose blogs have comments sections do this. But the public response to the ongoing Mullenweg v. WP Engine saga has been strongly polarising whereas the comments Mullenweg has been letting through are are strictly and overwhelmingly in his favour. Mullenweg also said during a recent talk-show the criticism has been getting to him — but evidently not in a way that makes him reconsider his words or actions.

    The comments that he’s been approving on his blog open windows into his internal narrative. This one under the post about the buyout caught my eye:

    I see that twitter is treating this story as some sort of apocalypse for A8C and and don’t get it why. You shouldn’t collaborate with those who aren’t interested in working with you. Instead, you definitely want to team up with those who chose not to hit the piñata and decided to focus on the band at the candy factory.

    Mullenweg wrote he called the buyout an “Alignment Offer”. At least one Automattic employee who decided to stay has spun the buyout as “financial freedom” for dissenters to “stand by their choice”. The irony of an echo chamber in this place, at this time, is too much to bear: WordPress was started and existed for a long time as a tool that people could use to publish themselves online, to converse with people around the planet, discover new perspectives, and ultimately change others’ minds or their own. Mullenweg’s September 21 post on WordPress.org was concerned with the hosting provider’s decision to disable users’ ability to track post revisions. He wrote there:

    WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred.

    Content is sacred because of its potency (although “sacred” isn’t the word I’d use). The ideas in the heads of the people who will soon leave Automattic are ‘content’ in this way too. When in 2022 WordPress.com (which Automattic owns) consolidated its multiple subscription plans to a single “Pro” plan, I wrote a post critiquing the move and it stayed at the front page of Hacker News for almost a day. It drew so much attention — agreement as well as disagreement — that then WordPress.com CEO Dave Martin responded to say, among other things, “Your content isn’t going anywhere.” This was laudable because it’s important for content to be able to hang around.

    Let’s assume a bunch of people at Automattic disagreed with Mullenweg. His response was to entice them to leave with a supposedly lucrative offer on their way out rather than engage with their disagreement, attempt to change their minds and/or his own, and from here take Automattic to a new position of strength. All good organisations contend with disagreement; those that are able to do so to the company’s benefit and without altogether sundering employer-employee relations emerge the better for it. Those that can’t or won’t are signalling they can only work if an important human degree of freedom is sliced off.

  • Numbed by numbers

    Couple things in my news feed this morning that really woke me up — one a startling statistic and the other a reminder of what statistics miss. The first from Nature, ‘How to win a Nobel prize: what kind of scientist scoops medals?’:

    John W. Strutt, who won a physics prize in 1904 for his work on the properties of gases, has 228 academic descendants with Nobels — his students, their students and so on. … An incredible 702 out of 736 researchers who have won science and economics prizes up to 2023 are part of the same academic family — connected by an academic link in common somewhere in their history. Only 32 laureates … have no connection to the bigger academic family.

    Meaning it’s nearly impossible for ‘true’ outsiders to break in. Either you become part of the The Network or you have a very low chance of winning a Nobel Prize. Of course the prize-giving apparatus isn’t a machine. There are humans making these decisions and clearly in a famously human way: not really paying attention to the consequences of their preferences or assuming that that doesn’t, or even shouldn’t, matter.

    But what does The Network say about science itself, especially about good* science and where that gets done? That is, what institutional mechanisms and/or forces are (even passively) encouraging the scientists who do such work to clump together?

    One factor that immediately comes to mind is funding: in the typical Indian experience, because most places of research have traditionally not been well-funded, the government or some philanthropic entity endeavours to set up a few facilities focused on research and funds them well, while the rest struggle on.

    On a related note, should the diffusion of researchers who produce good-quality research (and know how to do it) into previously neglected locales be desirable?

    Next, the reminder of what statistics miss:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    The French researcher and physician Didier Raoult has been banned from practising medicine for two years. It is the latest and probably most significant sanction against Raoult after he became infamous during the pandemic for his enthusiastic support for hydroxychloroquine even though the drug lacked evidence of its efficacy against COVID-19.

    His claims brought the spotlight on him as he probably intended but then expanded to reveal he had published too many papers — much more than should be humanly possible. But Raoult took pride in his research metrics, so even as research integrity investigators including Elisabeth Bik revealed dire problems in his published** papers — including image manipulation and ethical lapses in clinical trials that rendered them illegal — Raoult and his supporters came out swinging on social media.

    He also filed a lawsuit against Bik alleging she and others were besmirching his name without reason. Raoult eventually lost these disputes and in the process the trust and respect of the research community. Now his medical license has been revoked. He was retired but the action was clearly symbolic: Raoult is done.

    It took Bik’s and her peers’ scepticism to reveal the extent of Raoult’s misdemeanours. His metrics betrayed nothing of it except through their largeness.

    As if on cue, The Hindu published an excellent opinion piece by S. Swaminathan today about why and how we educate people, including those who become professional scientists:

    The metrics-focused system has created a situation which implies that education is a market rather than a citizen’s right and the state’s duty.

    * “Good” here means worthy of winning a Nobel Prize, not good per se.

    ** Remember that they were published, meaning the journals that did are answerable, too.