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  • A new way to harass editors?

    There’s a new way to harass editors – or perhaps it’s an old way that we’re just finding out about, first-hand. We know that repressive governments have started using the US’s infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as a new means to censor content they do not like. But it now seems private parties have also discovered the utility of using alleged copyright infringement to target media coverage.

    In the first week of October, an individual with an address in Thane, Maharashtra, lodged a complaint with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which hosts The Wire websites, including The Wire Science, alleging that one of the latter’s articles contained ‘unlicensed copyright protected content’.

    It has been my experience, and that of every other editor, I imagine, that honest complaints of copyright infringment are addressed to the editor and the reporter in question – and not the website’s host. (My email ID is on The Wire Science homepage; our ombudsperson’s email ID is available on the ‘About’ page.) But in this case, the complaint was lodged with AWS, with a link to the corresponding article on The Wire Science.

    The AWS abuse team, in turn, has written to me and my colleagues multiple times asking us to specify what steps we have taken or will be taking to resolve the issue. We have written back but I am not sure if the members of the abuse team are equipped to understand the editorial issues involved. Their principal issue appears to be that the charge implies The Wire Science has violated AWS’s terms of service and could therefore have to be removed from its servers.

    Why would the complainant take this route to resolving an allegation of copyright infringement? The article in question could provide the answer: it is an investigative report by science writer Anusha Krishnan (April 3, 2021) about a device called ‘Shycocan’, whose makers have claimed it can “attenuate” particles of the novel coronavirus by simply emitting photons into the air of a room. The report cast doubt on ‘Shycocan’ as well as its maker’s claims.

    The news report

    One particularly important, but easily refuted, claim made by the company was that the device has the approval of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The truth comes in two parts: that the FDA found the device to fall in a category that could be distributed in the US without complying with certain regulatory requirements, and that according to ‘Shycocan’’s maker, the device belongs in the category of ‘sterilisers and disinfectants’, not ‘medical devices’ per se, meaning it doesn’t need clinical trials to prove its merit. Some claims had simply spun these loopholes in the maker’s favour.

    The maker’s representatives responded to our article on ‘Shycocan’ with a detailed statement sent to me seven weeks after the article was published, even though both the reporter and I had asked them many of the same questions during reporting (with many days to reply). I refused to publish it because I had no obligation to do so – plus it seemed to me to contain unclear science.

    For example, Umesh Kadhane, the head of the physics department at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, had told The Wire Science that the maker’s “claims that the electrons produced by their device will only kill the coronavirus is completely bogus. Electrons cannot distinguish between viruses or bacteria or any other thing.”

    The statement responded thus: “Most bacteria are negatively charged. The Coronavirus is a positive sense virus. Human cells have a negative potential. The electrons emanated by the Shycocan and due to this opposite polarity they attach themselves to the Coronavirus in real time thereby neutralizing or attenuating it.”

    By this logic, ‘most bacteria’ should not be able to affect human cells, so this part of the statement is likely incomplete. The electrons should also be affecting every susceptible particle they encounter once they are emitted – not just the coronaviruses in the air. Many atoms and molecules in air capture free electrons. As the report also said:

    “It’s … unclear how ‘Shycocan’, though capable of producing so many electrons – much more than air ionisers that are currently in the market as air purifiers – apparently doesn’t produce ozone, according to the company marketing it. When oxygen in the air encounters free electrons, it becomes ozone.”

    But the maker’s statement said our sentences lack “scientific basis” and that the device produces photons in the “trillions per second, which in turn produce photoelectrons when striking solid surfaces.” This raised two further issues:

    1. Photons need to have a specific energy to produce photoelectrons from specific materials, called photoemissive materials. Not all photons can elicit photoelectrons from all surfaces (“aerosols, microscopic impurities, viral particles, solid surfaces, walls, etc.,” as the statement says). 2. If all these surfaces are photoemissive (unlikely), why don’t their photoelectrons lead to the formation of ozone? And so forth.

    The Wire Science report also raised concerns about missing details in the documents ‘Shycocan’’s maker shared with us (requesting us to not share them publicly; we agreed). Independent experts Anusha Krishnan and The Wire Science spoke to said the documents lacked information about the testing methods and, in at least one case, efforts to eliminate bias.

    Arindam Ghosh, a physicist at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, had also told Indian Express last year: “The claim is that if you fire a lot of electrons, it affects and deactivates the S protein of the coronavirus. I do not know of any scientific document which proves this. To my understanding, there is no data available even outside the publication domain which proves it. I do not understand … how some weird electrons seek only the coronavirus to kill, leaving everything else unaffected.”

    As a result of these findings, The Wire Science report said: “As of now, there appear to be no published scientific studies, experiments or publicly available data (that other scientists can use) to establish the efficacy, safety or usability of ‘Shycocan’. All of the information on the device is to be found on the company’s website, in news articles, press releases and anecdotes related by the people marketing it.”

    The implicated para

    Now, the complaint with AWS alleges that The Wire‘s report contained one paragraph in the article that was copied from a magazine with a single ‘article’ hosted on Issuu. The article, which carries the date of March 30, 2021, is published by ‘jaiprakash36’ (who has published nothing else) and  contains precisely two paragraphs – one, the supposedly copied para, and two, a para that appears to be an advertisement for ‘Shycocan’:

    Shycocan Stands for Scalene Hypercharge Corona Canon you can buy it on amazon at the price of 24,999. According to the device makers Shyconcan can disable upto 99.9% virus in the installed area.

    Turn now to the paragraph which the complainant claims was copied:

    The company Eureka Forbes has also advertised the “Forbes Corona Guard, powered by Shycocan” as a device that could attenuate 99.9% of coronaviruses in enclosed spaces. In November 2020, after complaints from scientists, the Consumer Complaints Council of the Advertising Standard Council of India directed Eureka Forbes to withdraw its claims. Yet the company still lists the product as available, along with its purported effectiveness against the novel coronavirus.

    Shortly after receiving the first communiqué from the AWS abuse team, we responded with a timestamped document that clearly shows Anusha Krishnan and me co-editing a Google Doc document containing her report, with edits of the concerned paragraph dated before the Issuu ‘article’ was published, on March 30, 2021. (I suspect, sans proof, that the complainant published the single-page magazine after our article was published and then backdated the page).

    However, the AWS abuse team has been repeatedly emailing us asking us to describe the steps we will or are going to take to resolve this issue, unmindful of the proof we have provided. To them, it appears, this is a potential DMCA violation that can only be resolved by us responding to the complaint by making some changes at our end. To us, the abuse team doesn’t seem to be prepared to consider that the complaint is baseless.

    This has been a frustrating experience, and is still yet to be resolved.

    The Wire
    October 16, 2021

  • Will this blog be online a hundred years from today?

    For almost two weeks now, we at The Wire have been dealing with a complaint that someone from Maharashtra lodged against us with Amazon Web Services (AWS), our sites’ host, for allegedly copying one paragraph in one article sans consent from a source that the complainant allegedly owns, and thus violating AWS’s terms of use and becoming eligible – if found guilty – to have the offending webpage taken down. The paragraph is not plagiarised (I edited and published it) but the alleged source of the ‘original’ material is shady, and there’s reason to believe a deeper malice could be at work, as I’ve explained in an article for The Wire.

    The matter is still unresolved: the AWS abuse team has been emailing us almost every day asking us to tell them what we’ve done to ‘address’ the complaint, ignoring the proof we sent them showing that the article couldn’t possibly have been plagiarised (we shared the Google Doc on which the article was composed and edited from scratch, with date and timestamps). The abuse team remains unsatisfied and would simply like us to act, whatever that means. From my point of view, it seems like AWS doesn’t have the room to consider that the complaint could be baseless. I also think that any organisation that doesn’t know or want to deal with editorial complaints shouldn’t receive editorial complaints in the first place. Otherwise, you have a situation in which an unknown private entity can allege to a tech company that one of its clients has violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) – the overreaching American legal instrument that is the principal blunt weapon in this episode – forcing the tech company to bear down on the client to make the problem go away, without pausing for a moment to think if it’s been conned into becoming an agent of harassment. But why would it, considering so many tech companies registered in the US actually benefit from the overreaching character of the DMCA.

    (It’s doubly ridiculous when these agents are Indian and based in India, and who may not be aware of the full story of the DMCA but are required by their contracts of employment to enforce it.)

    The awfulness of this entire episode, still ongoing, strikes to me at the heart of questions about who gets to access the internet and how. The AWS abuse team has told us on more than one occasion that if the matter isn’t resolved to AWS’s satisfaction, they will have to remove the offending webpage from their servers. Obviously we can find a new host, but whichever host we find, the problem remains: one of the many mediators of our access to the internet, starting from the internet service provider, is the entity hosting those websites. And not just any entity but a predominantly American one, and therefore obligated to enforce the terms of the DMCA. I don’t have to point to any numbers to claim, safely, that a vast majority of the internet traffic today pings the servers of websites hosted by AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. Recently, Tim Bray blogged about what the consequences might look like if the biggest of AWS’s 24 datacentre “regions” – called simply us-east-1 – went offline. It would be an unmitigated catastrophe.

    My blog has been hosted with/on WordPress for 13 years now and I’ve seen a lot of competing platforms come and go.[1] (My very first blog was hosted by Xanga before I moved, a few months later, to WordPress.) A lot of people who like to talk or blog about blogging have expressed dissatisfaction with how some platforms “don’t talk to each other”, that they’re fans of the Quiet Web[2] or that static sites are the way to go for the speed, security and controllability. But to me, all these concerns pale compared to the question of whether a platform will actually stay online. One alternative I’ve been referred to is micro.blog – looks nice and has an agenda that some bloggers seem to love, but will it stay online? I don’t know. It’s easier for me to believe a) that WordPress will stay online because it has been online for 15 years now – which is a long time in the Internet Universe – and because it has been both profitable and conscientious about what it does; and b) that AWS will stay online because its market capitalisation and revenue mean it’s just too big to fail at this point (as Bray has also written). Heck, of all the blogging platforms that have come and gone, one of the longest-lived has been Google’s Blogger. Google clearly didn’t spend much time on it after a point but Blogger is still around, as are the bloggers who continue to publish there. And to my mind the ‘Persistent Web’ – a place that convinces you that it’s going to be around for a long time – is a better place to be (see ref. 2).

    [1] One of the platforms that I was really sad to see die was Posterous, which Twitter bought from the guys who built it and then killed it. These guys subsequently created Posthaven, and pledged that it would never get bought or be killed as long as at least one blogger paid to use it – except the guys have added no new features since 2017 nor updated the blog. Tumblr is pretty much a ghost city now even though its been bought by the foundation that runs WordPress, and even though it attracted a great deal of negative attention for its erotic blogs. Typed, made by a company that became profitable by building apps for Apple devices, was ridiculously short-lived. Silvrback‘s founder sold it a few years ago to some mid-level management professor who’s modified it – badly – back to the early 2000s. Svbtle is still around, and has a pledge like Posthaven’s, but is both extremely minimal in terms of its features and fairly opaque about how it’s doing as a company; also, it appears to be hosted on AWS. Medium‘s mood is just awful and doesn’t seem trustworthy as a company either, especially if you’re particular – as I am – but about not putting in with enterprises that treat editorial people badly. This is also why I’m put off of Ghost, whose maker John O’Nolan has seemed quite full of himself on occasion. Ghost itself is a great product, although it started off as a blogging company only to change direction to become a publishing company, leaving WordPress – which it sought to usurp as every blogger’s platform of choice – to dominate the blogging space. Squarespace is the sole long-lived, equally legitimate alternative to WordPress, but it doesn’t offer a self-hosted version. I could go on.

    [2] Brian Koberlein writes here that he defines the Quiet Web thus: “Exclude any page that has ads. Remove them if they use Google Analytics or Google Fonts. Remove them if they use scripts or trackers. It’s a hard filter that blocks the most popular sites. Forget YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter. Forget the major news sites. So what remains? … Most personal websites don’t pass the test. They are either ad-driven or managed on platforms like Blogger or WordPress. But the quiet personal sites are diverse and interesting.” I think he overlooks a huge part of the internet here, comprising websites that self-host WordPress instead of using it on WordPress.com. Many of the features he ascribes to the Quiet Web can be built with WordPress – including this site you’re reading. As celebrated web-designer Jeffrey Zeldman tech blogger John Gruber has written, WordPress shouldn’t be blamed for many of its users’ awful design choices. (Edited at 8:43 am on October 27, 2021, to attribute that comment to Gruber instead of Zeldman.)

    So when someone asks if my blog will be online and accessible a hundred years from now, I’d like the answer to be ‘yes’. And while I don’t like it, AWS is going to remain one of the options to make that happen with little effort on my part. I’m not a programmer except in the tinkering sense, and still struggle to understand how websites really work (esp. beyond the application layer). Pertinently this means I’d much rather host my blog, which is invaluable to me, with an entity that knows what it’s doing rather than try to cobble something together myself that could well break or be exploited a day later. And this in turn is why I’m really going to stick with WordPress, which continues to be an excellent alternative to every other similar option, with my fingers firmly crossed that the people managing it continue to do so the way they’re doing it currently.

  • The great Nobel Prize hypocrisy

    Katie Langin’s report for Science on October 12 is an eye-opening account of one reason why the committees that pick every year’s Nobel Prize winners almost never pick women: because they aren’t nominated. Given the Nobel Foundation’s frustrating policy of secrecy, there aren’t many numbers available for us to work with, but Langin’s report adds one more column to the mix. Quoting from her piece:

    The selection committees have generally been secretive about nominee statistics, citing a Nobel Foundation statute stipulating nominations be kept secret for 50 years. But committee members shared summaries of the data with Science. The total number of nominations for a physiology or medicine Nobel jumped from about 350 in 2015 to 874 this year. Over those years, the percentage of female nominees more than doubled, from 5% in 2015 to 13% this year. The chemistry committee saw a similar increase: At 7% to 8%, female nominees have doubled their share since 2018. A representative for the physics committee declined to share exact figures, but wrote in an email, “The number of nominated women has increased significantly in the last few years.”

    In Langin’s telling (here and in other parts of her piece), the committees and some of their quoted members sound like they’re constrained by the number of women nominated. There is, more broadly, a noticeable vein of objectivitism running through the article, reflecting what sort of arguments the committees themselves will and won’t admit vis-à-vis their decision-making process. Here are some telling lines:

    Members of the powerful selection committees that sort through the nominations say they aren’t satisfied with the progress. “The fraction of women among the nominated people is very low and I don’t think it represents the [fraction of] women that were doing science even 20 years ago,” says Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede, a biophysical chemist at Chalmers University of Technology who is one of two women on the eight-person chemistry committee.

    “We want to have more women nominated,” agrees Eva Olsson, an experimental physicist at Chalmers who is a member of the physics selection committee.

    This year, the physics committee had seven men and one woman, the chemistry committee was composed of six men and two women, and the physiology or medicine committee had the highest proportion of women, with 13 men and five women.

    “Thanks to new recruitments over the recent ten years or so, the proportion of women [on the committee] is now similar to the proportion of female full professors at the [institute],” Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the physiology or medicine committee and a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute, in an email to Science. [Paraphrased]

    The committees don’t consider gender when they discuss which discovery to award a Nobel Prize, Olsson says. “The focus is on science.”

    The reason I’m getting into this is that waiting for the number of women scientists nominated to increase or double or whatever before including them among the laureates seems like a red herring. The ‘availability’ of women in the pool of nominations, which committee members can then pick from, has never been the problem. We all know there are too few women scientists; Göran Hansson, the head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, even said yesterday that “it’s sad that there are so few women Nobel laureates and it reflects the unfair conditions in society, particularly in years past, but still existing.” The problem is that the Nobel Prize committees aren’t defying convention to pick and highlight women, that they’re waiting for the real world to fix the problem first before – from their point of view – simply reflecting that in the composition of their laureate lists. But when the laurel is as prominent and as storied as a Nobel Prize, we need affirmative action.

    But Hansson put paid to this possibility when he said in the same interview that the prizes will never have gender quotas, obviously mindless of the stunning hypocrisy. The most legitimate protests against the prizes are rooted not in the narrower domain of awarding more men than women but in the wider one of the prizes having never reflected the conditions in which science is practiced in the real world. (The prizes are not awarded posthumously, and only to three laureates at a time, for example.) And Langin’s article doesn’t touch on this possibility at all. In fact, it pushes the next weightiest argument against the Nobel Prizes to the last paragraph:

    “How people get on whatever list of possible nominees is a mystery to most people,” [Handelsman] says. “If women are unaware of whatever that political process is, then they can’t place themselves in the appropriate situations or [get] linked to the right people who can help them get nominated.”

    That is, the committee that deliberates on the nominations is not happy that so few women are being nominated, while no one (outside the Nobel Foundation) knows the people staffing the nomination committees. Now, it’s unlikely to be the case that the many more men who are nominated for the Nobel Prizes start off knowing what these political processes are; it seems likelier that the bias against women begins not from women not knowing what these processes are but from biases on the part of the ‘low-level’ nominators, so to speak (I don’t care if they don’t have many women to pick from or what their idea of the Nobel Prizes is).

    Handelsman may be right that women may not be ‘naturally’ clued in to these processes, but expecting them to assume this work, in addition to science work, seems like the wrong way to solve this problem. It’s also wronger that the nominators’ identities are such a secret, effectively blocking our view of them and their thought-processes behind the same veil that the likes of Anthony Fauci have used to separate science from society.

    What’s the right way to solve this problem? Dismantle the Nobel Prizes.

  • Are major science prizes a form of philanthropy?

    The Association for the Advancement of AI conferred its ‘Squirrel AI Award’ on Cynthia Rudin, and Duke University – her employer – published a press release celebrating it. Here’s one para from the release:

    “Only world-renowned recognitions, such as the Nobel Prize and the A.M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery, carry monetary rewards at the million-dollar level,” said AAAI awards committee chair and past president Yolanda Gil.

    The press release also had a curious headline:

    Duke Computer Scientist Wins $1 Million Artificial Intelligence Prize, A ‘New Nobel’

    1. If a prize carries a million-dollar purse, is it like the Nobel Prize? Follow-up: Being compared favourably to the Nobel Prize is one thing, but aren’t the ‘Squirrel AI Award’ folks offended that the virtues of their award aren’t being considered in their own right?
    2. If the prize money is so important, why did the Duke University release’s headline not say “A New Templeton”? (The Templeton Prize is awarded to work that harnesses “the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it.” Pertinently, the prize money was first set to be greater than the Nobel Prizes’ purse in order to grab the world’s attention. See Q. 6.)
    3. Does a prize have to be ‘like’ the Nobel Prize to be taken seriously?
    4. What is the greater cause célèbre – the prize or the work that wins it? (Ref. 1: Cynthia Rudin in the press release: “I want to thank AAAI and Squirrel AI for creating this award that I know will be a game-changer for the field. To have a ‘Nobel Prize’ for AI to help society makes it finally clear without a doubt that this topic – AI work for the benefit for society – is actually important.” Ref. 2: Piers Forster in The Conversation: “With a Nobel prize in physics under our discipline’s belt, it gives me and climate modelling colleagues the credibility and recognition we have yearned for: climate science is real science.”)
    5. Does a recognition need to have a million-dollar purse to be “world-renowned”? Follow-up: What does that say about what the world’s people in general consider to be ‘renown’?
    6. Does Yolanda Gil, the “awards committee chair”, expect the award to be Nobel-esque and/or renowned simply because her employers have attached a million-dollar purse to it? Follow-up: Does this mean the award has nothing else going for it?
    7. While university press releases are infamous for their hype, Duke University and AAAI appear to be colluding here to hype up the prize. Is this ethical from a public communication point of view?
    8. As I’ve written about the Infosys Prize, what is the point of giving a million dollars to one scientist who is already succeeding at their work? Follow-up: As with the Infosys Prize, is giving already-successful scientists a lot of money the conventional way to make the prize more prominent?

    (One simple and entirely non-drastic solution to many of these problems is to decouple the prize-money from the prize itself: give deserving laureates medals and certificates, and split and distribute the money less according to achievement and more according to potential for achievement.)

    §

    Awards as philanthropy?

    Bill Gates & co. have made a name for themselves through philanthropy, more precisely philanthrocapitalism. On October 9, Julieta Caldas wrote for Tribune magazine that philanthropists’ “brand of social justice … follows only the imperative for ruthless innovation,” that they “refer to the act of philanthropy using the euphemistic term ‘giving’, which both obviates the need to concretely mention money and stresses the generosity of donors,” that “the philanthropic system depends upon [the poor] remaining splintered and isolated as subjects” and “represents, at best, a capitalism generously willing to help alleviate the problems it causes,” and that “their justifications are cloaked in the language of collaboration and listening, but their guiding principles are nakedly technocratic”. She concludes in the headline itself that “philanthropy is a scam”. Now, with regard to the last question in the list above: are big-purse prizes a form of philanthropy?

    Unlike billionaires and/or their estates/foundations, it is hard – if not impossible – to accuse the Nobel Prizes, the Infosys Prizes, the Breakthrough Prizes, the Templeton Prize or any others like them of furthering a technocratic agenda by giving away their money to scientists working in this or that field. In fact, they may not have any agenda at all except to abide by the broad terms of the prizes themselves – or so it would seem.

    For example, the Nobel Prizes require their laureates’ work to have proved itself, so to speak, in some way in the real world, to have been of benefit of society. Here, society’s composition, needs and aspirations matter because they determine what scientific work is valourised, adopted, allowed to scale and ultimately become profitable (not just in terms of money, although that has often been a necessary condition). The Nobel Prizes are not outside society, much less beyond it, as its prize-giving body seems to believe: contrary to popular belief, they don’t have to be any kind of watermark on scientific achievement.

    In this context, awarding a million dollars to the recipients, whose work has by definition matured in terms of its application and appreciation to a great degree, glamourises their particular fields of study as well as lines of work and inquiry. And just as philanthropy of the Bill Gates variety perpetuates wealth inequality and preserves the socio-economic status quo, showering money on work that has already proven itself may widen a respectability inequality in the sciences.

    Of course, most – if not all – scientists who go on to win Nobel Prizes didn’t start their careers or their eventually award-winning work thinking they would win the prizes, ergo not pursuing one question over another based on the probability of a future laureateship. But on the flip side, scientific work until the 1980s or 1990s is not what it is now. There is an important truth to memes about how Peter Higgs or Albert Einstein may not have been able to produce their greatest work today because they wouldn’t have had jobs or brought in a large number of grants; both these tasks have become astoundingly more competitive today, accompanied by concomitantly less secure, more fluid terms of employment. As a result, the appetite for more exploratory and potentially riskier lines of inquiry are unlikely to be funded or supported beyond the best-funded research institutes.

    There is already some evidence that if the exponent of one topic wins a prominent prize, other scientists working on the same topic tend to become more productive over the subsequent decade.

    Our longitudinal analysis of nearly all recognized prizes worldwide and over 11,000 scientific topics from 19 disciplines indicates that topics associated with a scientific prize experience extraordinary growth in productivity, impact, and new entrants. Relative to matched non-prizewinning topics, prizewinning topics produce 40% more papers and 33% more citations, retain 55% more scientists, and gain 37 and 47% more new entrants and star scientists, respectively, in the first five-to-ten years after the prize. Funding do not account for a prizewinning topic’s growth. Rather, growth is positively related to the degree to which the prize is discipline-specific, conferred for recent research, or has prize money.

    Brian Uzzi et al., ‘Scientific prizes and the extraordinary growth of scientific topics’, Nature Communications

    This is just tremendous. The next time anyone from a Nobel Prize Committee blames society for preventing women from winning its exalted honours, someone tell them that whom they award their prizes to may just be influencing that field’s success, in turn influencing the scientific output and knowledge that is available for any society to make use of. But more importantly (for this post), it doesn’t seem to me to be hard to imagine that Big Prizes have an impact on society that is quite similar to the impact that philanthrocapitalism has on society: to extend the lifetime of what has already sunk deep roots, even if the resources it continues to demand are more in need elsewhere.

  • Political merch from a newsroom

    Shekhar Gupta, the editor of The Print, shared the following image on his Instagram profile a couple days ago:

    The post had the following note:

    Since we so love politics at ThePrint, we are developing a range of gifting merchandise. This mug is one such example. In the course of the next few days I will share more with you. Please do say what you think. We will soon make these available for sale…

    I will say what I think. This is a poor but on-point example of a news establishment convinced that it has a view from nowhere upon the world – wherefrom it can dispense both op-eds criticising one policy or the other, news reports that call out one political leader or the other, and merchandise that seeks to appease and profit from supporters of one political party or the other. This would be a view that affords the establishment the belief that the stuff of its reports, even when they get wholly dispiriting with stories of caste and class discrimination, state-sponsored harassment and unpunished demonstrations of physical violence, still only concern the shenanigans of one more political party in the long parade of India’s political parties – and not the symptoms of an unchecked autocracy toppling a democracy. That it is therefore okay to sell mugs and T-shirts emblazoned with images and symbols of different power-players to their supporters who are all, but of course, on equal footing.

    No; The Print‘s decision here is as simple as profiting from Hindutva fandom.

    Journalism professor Jay Rosen’s comments for the American political press, just before Trump’s ascent, are apt here:

    These are people who live daily with “the partisan divide,” a cliché they helped make into a cliché. But on the chance that they’re being sincere let me be equally straight with them…

    Every time you had to “leave it there” after ideologies clashed mindlessly, fruitlessly. Every dubious truth claim you had to let pass because challenging it might interrupt the flow or make you sound too partisan. Every time you defaulted to “will it work?” when the bigger question was “is it so?” Every dutiful effort you made to “get the other side” without asking if the number of sides was really two. Every time you asked each other “what’s the politics of this?” so you could escape the tedium and complexity of public problem-solving. Every time you smiled weakly to say, “depends on who you ask” before launching into a description of public actors who dwell in separate worlds of fact. Every time you described political polarization as symmetrical when it isn’t. Every time you denied that being in the middle was a position so you didn’t have to ask if it was a defensible one. Every time you excluded yourselves from a faltering political class.

    Every pox you put on both houses because it felt good to float above it all. Every eye you rolled at the humorless scolds who rage at the White House Correspondents dinner. … Every time you pointed with pride to the criticism you were getting from both sides, assuming it meant you were doing something right when you might have been doing everything wrong. Every operative you turned into an expert. Every unprincipled winner you admired for their savvy. Every time you thought it was not up to you to judge when it was on you — especially on you — to assess, weigh and, yes, judge.

    All of it, every moment like that had the effect of implicating you in this mess.

    Jay Rosen, ‘Tone poem for the “leave it there” press’, PressThink

    India today is not the land of a civil contest between different political parties but, more broadly, a contest for survival between one entity that has seized control of the national government, while being openly dissatisfied with the demands of running the country with a democratic apparatus, and a people who are constantly assailed by a pressure to conform to the upper-caste orthodox Hindutva way of life or suffer physical, social and mental violence. (Did the love of politics miss this?)

    If, in this context, The Print is able to claim that it belongs to no camp, it quite simply belongs to that camp.

    (Aside: Don’t come at me saying other political parties screw up, too. They do very much, but calling their bullshit out doesn’t require distancing oneself from objecting to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s nationalist programme – journalist or not – in the name of objectivity.)

    Edit, 10:56 am: I’m told NewsLaundry has been selling similar merchandise for some time now, but the operational term seems to be ‘similar’. As one friend said about this T-shirt, for example: “The difference is between lampooning (NL’s brand) and apparently celebrating (Yogi as the Vitruvian man, Modi as Leonardo?).”

    Featured image: Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Red Fort, August 15, 2021. Credit: Prime Minister’s Office/Wikimedia Commons.

  • India and the 2021 medicine Nobel Prize

    The Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for 2021 has been awarded to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for discovering the receptors in the human body responsible for our ability to feel heat and cold.

    Science

    Central to the discovery of how we sense temperature is a chemical compound called capsaicin. Its technical designation is 8-methyl-N-vanillyl-6-nonenamide. It looks like this:

    The vertices and tips are carbon atoms, a single edge is a single bond and a double edge (the parallel lines) is a double bond. Capsaicin belongs to the vanilloid type of compounds. These compounds have a vanillyl group – the ringed structure on the left plus the OH and O–C ends. Many vanilloids, including capsaicin, bind to a receptor in the body called TRPV1.

    It is somewhat common knowledge these days that the first step of the novel coronavirus hijacking a cell in the human body is to bind to a receptor on the cell’s surface, called ACE2. Not all cells express the ACE2 receptor on their surface, but those cells lining the human respiratory tract do. Similarly, capsaicin binds to a receptor called TRPV1, which is expressed by cells of the central nervous system. And once it does, it triggers a severe burning sensation.

    The Nobel Foundation has credited David Julius with discovering that TRPV1 is the receptor – encoded by the TRPV1 gene (gene names are italicised by convention) – responsible for our bodies being able to sense acidity and heat, especially noxious heat, i.e. a temperature that could damage tissue. This also means these receptors are involved in our body’s ability to regulate its acidity and temperature levels.

    Julius, and others, did this by studying capsaicin’s effects on the body. All cells in the body have proteins called ion channels. These proteins are porous, and produce small electric fields that allow some ions to pass through their pores and in quantities determined by the cells’ needs. According to the Nobel Prize website, Julius discovered that the receptor to which capsaicin binds is TRPV1 (which is an ion-channel-type receptor). Once it binds, TRPV1 allows positively charged ions, especially those of calcium, to pass through, producing an electric signal that travels through the nervous system to the brain.

    Democracy

    Capsaicin doesn’t actually burn or damage tissue. Its contact with TRPV1 simply prompts the brain to react as if the tissue is being burnt. Of course, this will be of little solace the next time you inadvertently bite into a chilli.

    But this doesn’t mean capsaicin is harmless either. The burning sensation is still a real sensation, and India has some dubious connections with capsaicin that highlight this truth, which is unfortunate.

    In 2014, the then Member of Parliament from Seemandhra, L. Rajagopal, was quite opposed to the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh, which had yet to occur. But hours after the Lok Sabha passed the controversial Bill, Rajagopal stood up in Parliament and released ‘pepper spray’ from a canister into the room, triggering a commotion and forcing his fellow lawmakers to scramble outside. The then Lok Sabha speaker Meira Kumar called the incident a “blot” on democracy.

    Rajagopal’s canister didn’t contain pepper, or even chilli, powder. Instead, it held capsaicin that had been converted into a resin, emulsified with water and pressurised into the can. In 2014, Mohan Kameswaran, a senior ENT surgeon in Chennai, had told this correspondent that “the spray contains an irritant that doesn’t burn but causes a reaction like a burn”. It can’t be washed away with water either. Kameswaran also said that “in people with conditions like asthma or allergic conjunctivitis, [capsaicin exposure] could worsen the conditions and make them critical.”

    Another way capsaicin hurts is by causing the brain to respond for too long to its effects, eventually desensitising TRPV1 to the presence of capsaicin. At this point, the ion channel closes and the body begins to stop being able to feel noxious pain. Since pain is often a signal to the body that it is doing something it shouldn’t be, it is easy to see how being unable to feel pain could be dangerous.

    Violence

    Capsaicin is available in significant quantities in fruits of plants of the genus Capsicum. These fruits include chillies. The spiciness of chillies is measured by Scoville heat units (SHUs). The modern way to measure the SHU of a chilli variety is to directly determine its capsaicin content (it helps that capsaicin glows in the dark). Pure capsaicin has an SHU of 16 million.

    Famously, in 2007, a chilli called ghost pepper, a.k.a. ‘Naga chilli’, from Northeast India became the hottest known variety at the time: it had an SHU in excess of 1 million. Such varieties are called ‘super-hots’, and ghost pepper was among the first to be found. And in 2015, scientists from the US reported something unique about them. As Kendra Pierre-Louis wrote for The Atlantic: “Conventional wisdom holds that a pepper’s power is concentrated in the placenta – the central core of the fruit that contains the seeds, otherwise known as the pith – and the thick veins that attach the placenta to the pepper wall. Removing the seeds, then, usually results in removing the placenta and veins, thus cooling the fruit’s heat.” But the scientists found that ‘super-hots’ also contained capsaicin in their fleshy parts.

    The ghost pepper was of course a non-violent connection between India and capsaicin, but the Indian military establishment saw differently.

    Specifically, it saw an opportunity. In 2010, Col. R. Kalia told Associated Press that scientists at the Defence Research and Development Organisation had found a way to pack capsaicin into grenades. When tossed, these grenades would release the substance into the air and disperse rioters or flush out terrorists, as the case may be.

    In 2016, after Indian security forces killed militant leader Burhan Wani in Anantnag, unrest erupted around the Kashmir Valley. The security forces responded, among other ways, by shooting protestors with pellet guns, wounding and maiming thousands for life. The use of these sub-lethal weapons came under criticism.

    In response, Lt. Gen. D.S. Hooda said a committee appointed by the Centre to look into alternatives was also considering the ghost-pepper powered ‘chilli grenades’. The committee subsequently recommended the use of grenades loaded with a substance called nonivamide, technically pelargonic acid vanillylamide (PAVA; note the ‘vanillyl’). Research has shown that though both capsaicin and PAVA are naturally occurring capsaicinoids capable of ‘activating’ the TRPV1 receptor, PAVA could be less potent – but still more painful than CS gas, the principal component of tear gas.

    Official bean counters are always asking “what is the use” of research. Nothing makes a scientist happier than for her discovery to be useful to people. But sometimes science also becomes complicit in the ill-treatment of human beings.

    The Wire Science
    October 4, 2021

  • ISRO’s national interest bullshit

    For data and other objects, like images and videos, it places in the public domain, the Indian government attaches the GODL license – short for ‘government open data license’. The terms of this license are fairly straightforward: that

    … all users are provided a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, adapt, publish (either in original, or in adapted and/or derivative forms), translate, display, add value, and create derivative works (including products and services), for all lawful commercial and non-commercial purposes, and for the duration of existence of such rights over the data or information.

    There is then an attribution requirement:

    The user must acknowledge the provider, source, and license of data by explicitly publishing the attribution statement, including the DOI (Digital Object Identifier), or the URL (Uniform Resource Locator), or the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) of the data concerned.

    But despite the breadth of its permissions, the license isn’t obviously liberal because of some exceptions (emphasis added):

    The license does not cover the following kinds of data: a. personal information; b. data that is non-shareable and/or sensitive; c. names, crests, logos and other official symbols of the data provider(s); d. data subject to other intellectual property rights, including patents, trade-marks and official marks; e. military insignia; f. identity documents; and g. any data that should not have been publicly disclosed for the grounds provided under section 8 of the Right to Information [RTI] Act, 2005.

    Note the last one, (g). I have been interested in the GODL license because it is the license on images produced by ISRO and uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons catalogue. I have written about the problems with this licensing setup at length here (principally, a. the license only covers objects published after 2012 and b. ISRO retains the copyright on all its products through a separate statement on its website). In this context, the exception under Section 8 of the RTI Act is notable: it seems quite reasonable, except for the fact that the Indian government has of late applied this limitation to the most innocuous of queries under the Act.

    A new case in point came with Pradeep Mohandas’s newsletter this morning. Twitter user @frustratedpluto filed an RTI applicatio with ISRO seeking answers to 10 queries, transcribed below from screenshots the user shared on Twitter. Look at the responses they received.

    1. Provide what constitutes in Lander Sensor Performance Test (LSPT) Phase-3 test in general?

    The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state / country.

    2. Has LSPT Phase-3 test for Chandrayaan-3 has been conducted? If yes, provide me when was it done? If no, provide when will it likely to be conducted?

    The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state / country.

    3. Provide me the number of Lander Actuator Performance Test (LAPT) were done for Chandrayaan-2?

    The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state / country.

    4. Provide me if any LAPT test done for five engine configuration?

    The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state / country.

    5. Are there any LAPT planned for Chandrayaan-3 mission? If yes, then provide me names of ISRO facilities would be used to conduct it?

    The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state / country.

    6. Provide me the location of NASA LRA Payload onboard Vikram lander of Chandrayaan-2? (Please illustrate on a diagram if possible).

    The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state / country.

    7. Provide me finalised design of Chandrayaan-3 mission

    The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state / country.

    8. Provide me the expected launch timeline of Aditya L1 and Exposat mission

    Based on the present assessment and taking into account the COVID restrictions, the launch is planned in third Quarter of 2022.

    9. Provide me the number of payloads for Aditya L1 have been received to ISRO from PI institutes?

    The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state / country.

    10. Provide me how much time will Aditya L1 take to reach L1 point after being lifted off from ground?

    Mission planning is under progress and it will be decided in due course.

    This is an absolute travesty. Given the extent to which ISRO has invoked exemptions under Section 8 of the RTI Act, you might think Chandrayaan 3 is an orbital weapon, not an S&T mission. These replies, such as they are, have one of two possible implications: either, as @frustratedpluto has noted, they reflect an irresponsible laziness on the part of ISRO staff responsible for addressing RTI applications or they provide a peek into what the government considers to be proprietary information in the nationalistic sense – something to be fiercely guarded against threats as considerable, and as vague, as the national interest.

    A notable government official said at a meeting I attended early last year that one shouldn’t attribute to malice what could be explained by incompetence. But here, confronted with a choice between these two causes of ISRO’s reticence, accusing it of something as slight as incompetence would be laughable.

    This is more so when:

    a) We have all been witness to a significant decline in ISRO’s outreach efforts over the last half-decade or so and, more importantly, the people’s and journalists’ ability to access its scientists for information on ISRO missions;

    b) K. Sivan’s leadership of the organisation has been marked by statements from his and his colleagues’ offices that seem grossly out of touch with reality (perhaps most famously: Sivan’s comment that the failed Chandrayaan 2 mission was a “98% success”)

    (A related point here is that by claiming that details of tests like the LAPT and the LSPT are central to India’s scientific and technical interests to the extent that ISRO can’t share their details, the organisation is letting itself, and its mandate and goals, become appropriated by the political establishment, as well as – thanks to its troll army – helping sustain narratives that the establishment is hard at work protecting India from previously unknown threats, one of which might be people like @frustratedpluto asking ‘dangerous’ questions about science missions); and

    c) The country’s political leadership has made subtle attempts to coopt ISRO missions to its electoral advantage.

    In fact, the importance The Party places on giving the impression that is in complete control of The Situation (which can be any situation) is impossible to overstate:

    The current Government of India is clearly determined to constantly be right and constantly on higher ground, nothing less. To realise these conditions, it lies, evades, deceives and hides when a time comes for it to say it was wrong. When there is a mistake, or even when something entirely out of its control happens, it tries to lie the problem away, either to give the impression that the problem didn’t exist in the first place or that it has found a solution against all odds.

    ‘India COVID-19 Response Suggests ‘Scientific Superpower’ Tag an Impossible Dream’, The Wire Science, December 2020

    On top of all this, @frustratedpluto has been trolled on Twitter for seeking details of the final design of Chandrayaan 3. I really cannot see a straight line between this question and the answer that sharing this information would “affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest” of India, but it is tempting to see here glimpses of the Supreme Leader’s Midas touch and its ongoing disruption of our scientific enterprise.

    In this context, the GODL license may be small fry – but the fact remains that the government could take it away or limit its terms, in turn further affecting our access to even the photos and videos that ISRO produces, if the government behind it senses even a small threat to its sense of control, leave alone perfectly harmless details about upcoming science missions.

    Featured image: ISRO’s PSLV C45 before launch (with modified colours). Credit: Twitter/ISRO.

  • The Nobel Prize, its men and climate change

    The sciences part of this year’s Nobel Prize announcements have concluded. These are the new laureates:

    • Physics – Syukuro Manabe 🇯🇵 🇺🇸, Klaus Hasselmann 🇩🇪 and Giorgio Parisi 🇮🇹
    • Chemistry – Benjamin List 🇩🇪 and David W.C. MacMillan 🇬🇧
    • Medicine/physiology – David Julius 🇺🇸 and Ardem Patapoutian 🇺🇸

    I have yet to come across a more overt vestment of faith in the notions of prestige and genius whose increasingly unjust nature does little to diminish its value than the science Nobel Prizes. I seem to repeat this like clockwork every year but it bears repeating: few seem to care that the Nobel Prizes overlook the achievements of women (and people of other gender and racial identities) too often for them to be legitimate markers of achievement. Yet they continue to be so. This year, I have one more grouse… of sorts. It is at the least a sad irony at the centre of the 2021 physics and chemistry prizes. The citations for four of their recipients, out of five, connect their work to climate change directly or indirectly: Manabe and Hasselmann (“for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”), and List and MacMillan (“for their development of a precise new tool for molecular construction [that] has had a great impact on pharmaceutical research, and has made chemistry greener”). By awarding its prizes for these citations to no one else, the Nobel Foundation has found one more way to exclude women and others from our narratives of climate change. This may seem like a roundabout concern, if not too tenuous to matter at all, but there is something to be said about justice here – especially what we deem to be steps too inconsequential to achieving it.

    Beating climate change won’t just require us to lower our greenhouse-gas emissions. More fundamentally, it demands that we abandon modes of social and economic development that privilege wealth accumulation and gender stratification, among other things. However, the Nobel Prizes seem determined to gather white men at the centre of our conception of how science works and/or progresses (and thereon to how we can “develop” or “progress” as a nation), to the exclusion of people who, simply put, haven’t caught the prize-giving body’s attention by publishing in high-profile journals, by collaborating with notable researchers and/or at good universities, or simply by slipping past the surfeit of biases at research centres around the world – from who can win grants to whose work is appreciated, from who’s selected for lucrative jobs to who’s rejected on the basis of ‘fertility discrimination’. And when so many people, including most scientists, kneel at the altar of the Nobel Prizes, they help normalise the marginalisation of non-white (and non-trans) men from the public imagination of ‘important’ science and scientific achievements. This point of view obviously banks on the hope, however misguided, that the Nobel Foundation could become interested in wedding its considerable clout to an agenda to improve the fortunes of those who are held back by society’s prejudices – instead of simply continuing to treat scientific contributions to be wholly independent of the people who make them, and the social circumstances in which they do. This irrational division only entrenches science’s myth of objectivity, and supports fallacious claims that leaving out everyone but (non-trans) men doesn’t deprive science, and its application to human betterment, of novel, valuable and more just perspectives.* In fact, the Nobel Prizes must strive towards this agenda, to echo what I recently wrote about the Bhatnagar Prizes in India: that these prizes “will fall by the wayside if they continue to fail to provide society with a way to recognise its members’ achievements without conforming to a view of science that became dated decades ago.”

    But of course, few care. 🙂

    * Aside: The Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1938 comes to mind. The prize-giving committee awarded it to Richard Kuhn in spite of his ardent support for Nazism and his shameful conduct towards his Jewish colleagues two years earlier.

    Featured image: Gösta Florman’s portrait of Alfred Nobel, late 19th century. Credit: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

  • Railroad to zealotry

    “It would not be unusual for finger-stick testing to be met with skepticism,” says a spokesman for Theranos. “Patents from that period explain Elizabeth’s ideas and were foundational for the company’s current technologies.”

    Vanity Fair received this statement from Theranos, the company entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes founded claiming to revolutionise healthcare but ended up being sued by investors, employees and patients for fraud, in response to a query from the magazine presumably asking about how/why Holmes thought her idea would work despite many medical experts telling her it wouldn’t. The idea in question: to use just a pinprick of blood from each patient to check for more than 200 conditions/diseases/etc. using a portable machine. In effect, Holmes, and Theranos, were attempting to shrink the blood-testing process, make it cheaper and more automated. It would have revolutionised healthcare if it weren’t for two things: the machine didn’t work, and Holmes/Theranos raised capital and made promises to investors, patients and US government institutions to the effect that it did. Holmes founded the company in 2003, reached great (Silicon-Valley-esque) heights around 2014-2015, and was dissolved in September 2018. Holmes’s trial began on August 31, 2021, earlier this week. Her colleague Ramesh Balwani is also to stand trial, and that’s expected to begin early next year. In case you’d like to catch up too, I recommend watching the HBO documentary about Holmes and Theranos, The Inventor, and reading articles by John Carreyrou (Wall Street Journal) and Nick Bilton (Vanity Fair) published between 2015 and 2018.

    Towards the end, The Inventor dwells for a bit on Holmes’s state of mind: at a time when Theranos was besieged by allegations of fraud, conspiracy and knowingly subjecting its customers (technically, patients) to dysfunctional medical tests that endangered their lives, and when nobody believed its blood-testing machine, called ‘Edison’, could ever work as promised, Holmes carried on as if nothing was wrong and, in fact, according to people still at Theranos at the time, she exuded hope and confidence that the company was on the verge of a turnaround. She was clearly swindling people – diverting the money they’d invested and paid into supporting a lavish lifestyle – but seemed to believe she wasn’t. The Inventor offers (only) one explanation, that Holmes was a zealot: “a person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their … ideals”. Without knowing more about what went on inside Theranos, especially since it’s downfall began, it’s hard to dispute this characterisation. (However, CNBC reported on August 28: “In a bombshell revelation just days before her criminal fraud trial, defense attorneys for Elizabeth Holmes claim she’s suffered a ‘decade-long campaign of psychological abuse’ from her former boyfriend and business partner Ramesh Balwani.”)

    Until the end of The Inventor, and the stories by Carreyrou and Bilton, Holmes holds her ground that Theranos’s revolutionisation of healthcare is only a day away. If we assumed for a moment that Holmes really didn’t believe, in any corner of her mind, that she’d knowingly cheated people and had known that ‘Edison’ and Theranos were both part of one big sham, we’re confronted with some discomfiting questions about how we define our successes. Did Theranos conflate scepticism with impossibility – i.e. “this can’t work because the laws of nature don’t allow it” versus “this can’t work because it is disruptive”?

    The Theranos story is about many things — one of them is that it highlights a highway Silicon Valley has built to its arbitrarily defined form of success that starts from one of the same points from which many success stories in the rest of the world, the real world but especially the world of scientific research, begin: “I wonder why that doesn’t work”. So it’s easy to get confused – as many journalists, investors and Holmes’s fellow entrepreneurs did – and to believe that you’re taking one highway when you may just be starting on the other. And I wish I could say the rest of the real-world highway has some checks and balances to kill bad ideas, and these the Silicon Valley highway lacks. Problems in scientific publishing, including and leading up to the replication crisis across subjects, would prove me wrong; in fact, these parallels are quite important, if only for us to reflect on why reputation-based measures of success exist. One of my favourite examples in history is that of Dan Shechtman, described here. A common example from India would be any institute that attempts to evaluate scientists’ application for promotion based on the journals in which they’ve published their papers, instead of the papers’ contents. A common and more global example: ‘prestige’ journals’ historic preference for papers with sensational results (over all papers with reliable results). And a more recent example: the Australian Resarch Council’s announcement last week that it wouldn’t consider preprint papers towards scientists’ applications for many fellowships it funds.

    According to one of Bilton’s articles: “On the Friday morning that they gathered in the war room, Holmes and her team of advisers had believed that there would be one negative story from the [Wall Street Journal], and that Holmes would be able to squash the controversy. Then it would be back to business as usual, telling her flawlessly curated story to investors, to the media, and now to patients who used her technology” (emphasis added). Such ‘curation’ had allowed Theranos to be valued at $9 billion (her stake at $4.5 billion), count Henry Kissinger as a board member, Walgreens as a partner, a prominent investment firm as an investor and Joe Biden as a supporter.

    This said, there’s still one big difference between the two highways: one has a better, if still quite inchoate, understanding of failure. Failure in science comes in many forms, but I know of at least two ways in which the research enterprise often ‘moves on’. One of course is retractions — and there are more scientists today than there were in decades past who are coming on board the idea that retractions are a good thing, not something to be stigmatised. The other is an increasingly deeper understanding of research fraud, the different circumstances in which it manifests, and the steps scientists and science administrators must take to prevent them from recurring. For all its lucre, the Silicon Valley highway in Theranos’s case didn’t appear to offer Holmes the opportunity of a graceful exit, so much so that it wasn’t a highway to success so much as a railroad to zealotry. That even when your product fails, you haven’t failed until you can raise no more money, until you can keep up the appearance of being successful and have a shot at being actually successful. This is also why Carreyrou, among others, has said: “It’s going to be a wake-up call for venture capitalists and young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. If you go too far, if you push the envelope and hype and exaggerate to the point of lying, it becomes securities fraud.” It fails to surprise me that even ‘pushing the envelope’ – presumably a euphemism for ‘smaller’ lies – is okay and that it becomes wrong/bad only when it grabs the SEC’s attention (even when most of us outside the American billionaire class aren’t likely to forget the house of cards that was the 2008 financial disaster).

    Hopefully Holmes’s trial and eventual conviction will be the moment Silicon Valley stops stigmatising failure, begins to disconnect the appearance of success from success itself, and ultimately allows companies to fail without condemning their leaders at the same time. And yes, I know how ridiculous such hope sounds.

    Featured image: Elizabeth Holmes in 2013. Credit: US Department of Defence, public domain.

  • Long ideas

    Thus far, the composition of claims in my pieces has followed a simple pattern, even a rule: I break down a claim into a series of reasons that, when processed in serial fashion, leads up to the final thing. This has made writing pieces easy. As long as I had a claim, and deemed it to be good by whatever parameters, all I had to do was break it down into a linear chain of reasons, to be understood in sequence.

    This sort of communication has an obvious disadvantage: it doesn’t lend itself to the composition of long ideas. By these I mean claims that can’t be understood by parsing one reason after another, like pulling on Ariadne’s thread. Instead, they require an Ariadne’s weave, so to speak – multiple reasons understood at once. Think of it like a particularly long series of instructions, and that to understand each instruction, the reader should be expected to have only two pieces of information: that contained in the immediately preceding instruction and that contained in the current instruction. I think I can do this well. What I’ve struggled to do, and in fact have frequently avoided (by reconfiguring what I’m trying to say), is to require the following: to compile a long series of instructions with three pieces of information at a time – that contained in the immediately preceding instruction, that contained in the present one and that contained in an arbitrary prior instruction. It’s hard for me to construct such claims or arguments fundamentally because I don’t fully understand how the reader might cognate them. (I assume here, of course, that making sense of claims made one after another is the simplest way to cognate complex ideas.)

    For example, in the movie Arrival, the aliens communicate using circular logograms. Each logogram is equivalent to a full sentence written in English. But while an English sentence constructs meaning by placing down one word after the next (so that the order of words can change the overall meaning as well as that the claims made towards the end of the sentence are overemphasised, by virtue of being more recent in time, and thus memory), the aliens’ logograms make meaning by presenting all the parts of each ‘sentence’ at once, forcing their interlocutor to cognate them at once, in parallel as it were. There is an analogy in a post I published recently (‘Climate: The US needs to do more – and India needs to, too’, August 31, 2021). Here, I write that understanding claim X* requires us to consider two sub-claims at once; let’s call them P and Q*. In my post, I specify P and Q, and then I explain Q before explaining P. I did this so that the post would have flow – of the narrative moving (as) seamlessly (as possible) from one argument to the next. (You may notice that most articles in the news, especially those published by Indian mainstream English newspapers, almost always reject flow in favour of laying out P and Q, whatever they are, in that order.) Which of the two ways is better? Neither, in my view; instead, I’d prefer a visual layout that more faithfully reflects the structure of the argument:

    * X = despite its rating on Climate Action Tracker, India’s climate actions are insufficient; P = climate change will affect India more than it will affect most other countries; Q = ‘they aren’t cutting emissions, so we won’t either’ is a real, if misguided, argument.

    This way, the reader doesn’t have to consider P and Q one after the other but can in parallel. (Of course, literary purists may consider this to be an abdication of the writer’s duty to write in such a way that the reader isn’t at all confused about the relative weight of two sets of arguments (P and Q), but if we had to pacify purists to begin with, I wouldn’t be writing this post. (This said, I must say that I don’t like listicles for the same reason: each one of them represents a failure on the writer’s part to not give a damn about things like flow, structure, etc. – and each instance is in effect an abdication of the writer’s responsibility to write. However, on this slippery slope, both listicles and visually representing the writer’s intended location of arguments in the reader’s psyche are higher up than demanding that we must fully embrace our immutable linearity of the human condition at all times.)(Strained argument, I know.))

    I’m writing all of this down because I recently composed a long idea, and noticed it as I was doing so. The long idea was for the post ‘They’re trying to build a telescope’ (published August 19, 2021) – specifically, the following portion:

    And now, astronomers in China have published a paper expressing their excitement about having spotted a new location at which to mount a telescope, themselves overlooking considerations of whether the people who are already there might be okay with it. As a result they may have effectively shut one option out. This is an important factor because, as Rao has written (see excerpt below), many people seem to think that Hawaiians’ resistance to the TMT and others of its kind on the islands is fairly recent; this is not true. They expressed their opposition how they could; the rest of us didn’t pay attention.

    Here, I’m talking about how astronomers didn’t allow Hawaiians to say a telescope couldn’t be erected at a particular site by framing the terms on which they commenced negotiations in a way that precluded the option of not having a telescope. Making my point here required me to draw on the conclusion of the post until that point in the narrative and, more importantly, a point Rao builds up to in the excerpt (from his article) that follows. As a result, I ended up effectively telling the reader: this is what I’m saying; Rao’s words will prove my point, but unfortunately, you’ll have to read them yourself; I won’t be able to guide you to the end; once you finish reading the excerpt from his article, I hope you will be able to see what I’m trying to say. Alternatively, if I had to represent this visually, the narrative diagram would look something like this:

    That is, Q follows P, but at the same time they ought to be considered together in order to understand what follows. I don’t know about you, but psychologically, I’d find any argument presented this way to have greater potential to be misconstrued than an argument that is entirely, and straightforwardly, linear. Axiomatically, I edit any text to ensure that an idea it contains that is already likely to be misunderstood (due to certain historical connotations, say) is couched in a narrative that is linear to the extent possible; any bit of non-linearity will allow readers to order reasons the wrong way – particularly, placing effect before cause – and construe a claim that isn’t being made at all. Finally, I acknowledge that this post may seem wholly confused, in which case I apologise for wasting your time; I also didn’t conduct a literature review before I started, and am more than likely to have recreated something scholars already know, may have articulated better, and in fact may have debunked as well. If you’re aware of any such things, please let me know (by email or on Twitter, where I’m @1amnerd).