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  • NYT on fire

    As the world burns, is anyone paying attention to the New York Times? Because if you’re not, you should: it’s catching fire as well. On May 23, the grand old newspaper published a report by Maggie Haberman about how former Trump aide Hope Hicks has an “existential” crisis over complying with a congressional subpoena. Granted, it’s been full of embers for a while now – as Jay Rosen has been saying for years – but this particular story bares the Times‘s ridiculous position vis-à-vis the Trump White House for all to see.

    The first giveaway that something is rotten isn’t in the lede but in the hero image, a glamorous photograph of Hicks as if the words to come were going to discuss her clothes. The words that do come then paint Hicks as an enigmatic ex-administrator caught between a rock and a hard place when in fact the matter is far simpler:  either comply with the subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee or find a legitimate reason to skip it, like (it appears) former WH counsel Donald McGahn II has been able. It’s not existentialism; it’s potentially criminal obstruction of justice.

    To quote from Rosen’s analysis above:

    [Times journalists] want the support, they also want to declare independence from their strongest supporters. … They are tempted to look right and see one kind of danger, then look left to spot another, equal and opposite. They want to push off from both sides to clear a space from which truth can be told. That would make things simpler, but of course things are not that simple. The threat to truth-telling – to journalism, democracy, the Times itself – is not symmetrical. They know this. But the temptation lives.

  • The Nehru-Gandhis’ old clothes

    The following tweet has been doing the rounds the last few days:

    It carries an important message from India’s recent past, that a time of free-as-in-free speech actually did exist only half a century ago. It stands in stark contrast to the public political clime today, where people are jailed for sharing harmless memes and journalists gagged for doing their jobs, not to mention scholars being disinvited from lectures, musicians being prevented from singing and universities becoming less plural and more parochial.

    However, Shankar’s cartoon, as depicted above, shouldn’t be paraded as a symbol of an era antithetical to this – 2014-2019 – alone but as one that doesn’t sit well with the politics of 21st century India altogether, including that of the Nehru-Gandhis. It is doubtful that whenever Rahul Gandhi comes to power, if at all he does, he is going to be okay with cartoons showing his great-grandfather’s clenched butt standing outside the doors of the UN, even if he might be willing to brook more dissent than the Bharatiya Janata Party has been.

    The party that he leads with his mother has championed sycophancy and nepotism since the 1970s, when Indira Gandhi assumed power. This has often meant that those critical of their family – the First Family, so to speak – have never been able to climb the ranks and/or lead important institutions during Congress rule, even if they are otherwise qualified to do so. Perhaps the most stark example of this in recent memory was when Mridula Mukherjee assumed directorship of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi after an opaque selection process, and proceeded to turn the institution into a building-sized panegyric for Sonia Gandhi et al.

    Indeed, the same can be said for any political organisation that is held together by hero worship, centralisation of power and dynasticism. Some examples from around the country include the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Shiv Sena, the Samajwadi Party and and the Rashtriya Janata Dal.

    Today, Shankar’s illustration seems only to describe the extent to which the BJP has vitiated civil discourse and the need vote it out. However, the cartoon does not say anything about the party I would like to vote in because it says everything about what free speech really means, the kind of tolerance that political parties must harbour and, most of all, the fact that there seems to be nobody who is capable of that anymore. Even should the UPA somehow emerge triumphant on May 23, this cartoon will likely trigger as much wistfulness as it does today.

  • Using ‘science’ appropriately

    Ref:

    (Setting aside the use of the word ‘faith’) The work that some parts of CSIR has done and is doing is indeed very good. However, I feel we are not all properly attuned to the difference between the words “science” and “technology”. I don’t accuse Mande of ignorance but possibly the New Indian Express, the publisher. In a writer-publisher relationship, the latter usually determines the headlines.

    Being more aware of what the words mean is important for us as mediapersons to use them in the right context, and this in turn is consequential because the improper overuse of one term can mask deficiencies in its actual implementation. For example, I would rather have used ‘Technology as saviour’ as the headline for Mande’s piece, and for various pieces in the Indian mainstream news space. But by using science, I fear these publications are giving the impression that Indian science is currently very healthy, effective and true to its potential for improving the human condition.

    Quite to the contrary, funding for fundamental research has been dropping in India; translational support is limited to areas of study that can “save lives” and are in line with political goals; and the political perception of science is horribly skewed towards pseudoscience.

    Before that one commentator jumps in to say things aren’t all that bad: I agree. There are some pockets of good work. I am personally excited about Indian researchers’ contributions to materials science, solid-state and condensed-matter physics, biochemistry, and experimental astronomy.

    However, the fact remains that we are very far from things being as they should be, and not as political expediency needs them to be. And repeatedly using “science” when in fact we really mean “technology” could keep us form noticing that. That is, if we were mindful of the difference and used the words appropriately, I bet the word “science” would only occasionally appear on our timelines and news feeds.

  • Clouds, rain and radar – Addendum

    My piece on May 12 calling out Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s baffling conviction in his knowledgeability about surveillance radar systems and atmospheric attenuation has prompted some criticism as to its scientific accuracy. Apart from the compulsively defensive bhakts, some scientists also wrote to me saying that Modi was technically in the right to have claimed clouds and rain could have worked in the Indian Air Force’s (IAF’s) favour on the day of the Balakot airstrikes in February.

    Much of this criticism hinged on the premise that military radar-surveillance systems operated on the X band (approx. 7-11 GHz), popular during World War II. However, many – if not most – of the surveillance units that the Defence R&D Organisation has built for the IAF operate over the L and S bands (1-2 GHz and 2-5 GHz, resp.). Consider the following official descriptions of four of them:

    Central Acquisition Radar – “a ground based mechanically scanning S-band pulse Doppler radar for air space surveillance to detect and track air targets with reliability, even under hostile EW operational environment for the Indian Air Force.”

    Tactical Control Radar – “a Tatra VVL mounted, mobile stand-alone medium range, all weather 3D surveillance radar for detection and identification of aerial targets. Pertinent data can be collected … 20 km away from the radar. The radar operates in S-band and [can track] airborne targets up to 90 km for fighter aircrafts and 65 km for UAVs, subject to radar horizon. The antenna is mechanically rotated in azimuth to provide 360º and 50º elevation coverage upto 10 km height.”

    BHARANI – “L-band 2D radar [is] a light weight, battery powered and compact sensor which provides 2D surveillance solution to alert Army Air Defence Weapon Systems mainly in mountainous terrain against hostile aerial targets like UAVs, RPVs, helicopters and fixed wing aircraft flying at low and medium altitudes.”

    ASLESHA – “a multifaceted ground based S-band 3D low level lightweight surveillance radar for deployment in diverse terrains like plains, deserts, mountain tops and high altitude regions. Aslesha detects and tracks heterogeneous air targets, including helicopters, fighters and UAVs at low and medium altitudes.”

    According to a USAF paper published in 1975, the amount of signal attenuation through clouds is exponentially higher at higher frequencies. According to the log-log plot (below) presented in the paper, it is nonexistent to minimal in the L band and is at best 0.1 dB/km for S band radiation passing through dense clouds. The X band that spans 7-11 GHz is susceptible to greater attenuation, up to nearly 10x when passing through dense clouds.

    However, rainfall attenuates S band radiation more than cloud-cover does. According to the same paper, radio waves with frequencies in the range 3-5 GHz are attenuated by up to 5-70-times as much as L band radiation when the rainfall rate is between 50 mm/hr and 150 mm/hr, resp. (apparently possible between December and March over Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province).

    Does this mean Modi was partly right? No, for the following reasons, which should clarify that the point of my piece was also different: The way Modi phrased his comment suggested his opinion came from a place of relative ignorance. The fact that the BJP Twitter handle tweeted and then deleted it shows they had no idea what they were talking about. So to claim Modi could have been right is disingenuous when he himself attributed it to “raw wisdom”, and made no effort to be clear or coherent despite the fact that he was on national television talking about national defence.

    Instead, I believe he was simply fortunate that his comment in this case was sufficiently vague to allow him to be right. And given his utterances in the last five years, I have no reason to believe he was in the know; if he was, that is not what he would have said. Finally, it was also silly to suggest the IAF hadn’t already thought about sources of attenuation. It is the foundation of this conviction that I felt compelled to criticise, for reasons I discussed in my piece:

    It has become clear that education has little to do with spewing pseudoscience … and a lot to do with brooking challenge and dissent. If the patriarch of a middle-class household is going to claim that the cosmic arrangement of a few stars thousands of light-years away is why he was fired that day, the absence of a counter-voice is only going to legitimise his spurious beliefs. And when Prime Minister Modi is this man, and it would seem he is, the simple dissemination of facts is not going to cure our society of this problem.

  • Clouds, rain and radar

    I am not a person jo saare vigyan ko jaanta ho – lekin maine kaha itne cloud hain, baarish ho rahi hai ki ek benefit hain ki hum radar se bach sakte hain.

    This is Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Translated to the English:

    I am not a person who knows knows all of science, but I said that there is so much cloud cover and rain, which could be advantageous in escaping from radar.

    (Hat-tip to my colleague Devirupa M.).

    Here is what he might as well have said:

    “I am not a person who knows everything about science, but I am going to keep talking because I am pretty sure what I am going to say next is going to make sense. This is because I am not a person who knows everything about science but who believes he knows something, and that that something is likely to be true simply by virtue of the fact that I – I – know it.”

    “I am going to claim to know something even as I am going to claim the humility for having acknowledged that I do not claim to know everything. This is not entirely straightforward because said humility will subtly but surely attest to my knowledgeability. Should I have claimed to have known everything, on the other hand, the implied hubris would have coloured the perception of my knowledge. Id est, I do not know everything but I know something, and that something is likely to be true because I do not know everything. How? Humility. And I rock.”

    “I said that clouds and rain could help shield radar with such conviction as to be able to claim – publicly, no less – with no evident self-doubt that I said so. Indeed, this is because no one else in the room guffawed in response to my suggestion as much as I had been emboldened to suggest it because no one else in the room is likely to have thought it up.”

    “I have said ‘all of science’ because I recognise it as a body of knowledge fenced-off from non-specialists by its specialised language, by its practitioners, their beliefs and social attitudes, and by the not-easily-accessible institutions in which scientific knowledge is acquired and organised. I will not attempt to scale these walls because they are inherently unscalable but I will assume – by some convolution of inductive reasoning – that I can leap over them.”

    “Hear ye, as I broadcast my belief, as well as ‘science’ is difficult to know and that I – the supreme leader – have conquered some of it, that ‘science’ is a complex maze with tall walls, where knowledge from one side cannot percolate through the barriers into the other. What is on one side must remain there; if they didn’t, and if knowing something about one thing allowed one to know something about another, then would it not have seemed ridiculous for me to announce that I claim to know how radar works when it would have promptly suggested that I know not two whits about how electromagnetic radiation and water vapour interact, that – oh! – I believe rainbows are unicorn farts, that a prism represents mystical alien technology, that cellphone signals are broadcast by satellites screaming messages towards the ground, and that we spend billions of dollars on developing reconnaissance technology that couldn’t do what amateur radio operators did in the 1920s.”

    Clouds and rain, eh?

  • Poisoned trees bear poisonous fruits

    Of late, there has been a clutch of Tamil films that have endeavoured to show the Hindu right-wing in poor light, associating its rituals with violence and oppression. The two most notable examples are Kaala and Petta, both starring Rajinikanth. Kaala was a modern adaptation of the Ramayana but told as if from Ravana’s point of view, although far from being an attempt to legitimise a ‘demon’ king, it is a story of a Tamil leader from Dharavi who fights off a Hindu thug. Petta on the other hand was less politically aware and more inclined to be entertaining, and found easy villains in the gau rakshak. So far so good.

    However, a problem quickly arises in Petta that doesn’t in Kaala, nor in Kabali, also starring Rajinikanth and also directed by Pa. Ranjith, and Kaala‘s thematic predecessor. Both Kabali and Kaala were anti-caste and pointedly targeted Hindutvawadis, who have discriminatory practices hard-coded into their spiritual culture, and so carefully guided their protagonists away from all the markers of conservative Hinduism.

    Petta is not so careful. It is not hard to sell the idea that a right-wing extremist is a bad person to an audience in a part of the country that largely thinks of itself as the last bastion of resistance against Hindutva nationalism. However, and like most Tamil movies that feature themes of Hinduism, Petta legitimises astrology. In a scene at the beginning of the film, an astrologer tells a goon that his ‘bad time’ has started because Kaali (Rajinikanth) is en route, referring to ‘astrological conditions’ that are unconducive to success and/or fulfilment.

    In so doing, it reveals that it is unmindful of the fact that a) astrology is a form of oppression, and b) astrology and right-wing extremism exist on a continuum. Aside from its pseudoscientific credentials, astrology derives its oppressive power from the following attributes:

    1. It centralises knowledge in the hands of a few practitioners — who tend to be upper caste when they’re also high-profile — who don’t have any kind of accountability
    2. It derives its authority from scriptural utterances whose authority cannot be questioned
    3. It is deterministic and undermines human endeavour

    Taken together, it is evidently a manifestation of the same superstitions and authoritarian tendencies that make right-wing extremism so potent, and so insidious. In turn, this renders Petta‘s positioning of the gau rakshaks hard to believe. If the gau rakshaks are one form of Hindu oppression, then Kaali is simply another, that somehow it is a question of kind and not degree when in fact it is one of degree.

    To argue that one practice is harmless and the other is harmful would be to actively ignore the harm that festers in both of them, as much as a poisoned tree bears poisonous fruits. And while hypocrisies inhabit all of us, it is important that we acknowledge them instead of denying that they exist.

  • Star Wars and the dynastic principle

    Late last week, I picked up Ram Guha’s Patriots and Partisans. I know shamefully little about India’s modern political history – before and after Independence – certainly beyond the virtual borders of its scientific and technological endeavours. And to someone as receptive to new ideas on this front as me, Guha’s writing is perfect: he’s lucid, coherent and – with kudos to his editor – his writing is well-structured. Two of the most interesting things I’m learning is M.K. Gandhi’s reformist beliefs of what it means to be a Hindu and the Gandhi family’s problems.

    On the latter count, in a chapter entitled ‘A short history of Congress chamchagiri’ (Hindi for sycophancy), Guha elaborates:

    The dynastic principle has damaged the workings of India’s pre-eminent political party, and beyond, the workings of Indian democracy itself. One manifestation … is the filling of important positions on the basis of [sycophancy] rather than competence. Another is that Mrs Indira Gandhi’s embrace of the dynastic principle for the Congress served as a ready model for other parties to emulate. With the exception of the cadre-based parties of left and right, the CPM and the BJP, all political parties in India have been converted into family firms.*

    Here Guha proceeds to provide examples: the DMK, “now the private property of M. Karunanidhi and his children”; Bal Thackeray “could look no further than his son” given his “professed commitment to Maharashtrian pride and Hindu nationalism”; the mantle of leadership in the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal passed from “Mulayam’s party passed on to his son, and in Lalu’s party to his wife”, respectively. He continues:

    The cult of the Nehru-Gandhis, dead and alive, is deeply inimical to the practice of democracy. For his part, Jawaharlal Nehru, following Gandhi, tried to base his policies on procedures and principles rather than on the force of his personality. Within the Congress, within the Cabinet, within the Parliament, Nehru worked to further the democratic, cooperative, collaborative ideals of the Indian Constitution. … Loyalty to the Leader, in person, rather than to the policies of her or her government – such was the legacy of Mrs Indira Gandhi, to be furthered and distorted by her progeny, and by leaders of other parties too. [And] What Indira did at the Centre was exceeded in the provinces…

    This adherence to the dynastic principle, which Rahul Gandhi reminded us all of when he appointed his sister to lead the Congress’s fight in the BJP’s Uttar Pradesh bastion, leaves a bad taste in the mouth. And as Guha has articulated so well, those who practice it deserve to be suspected of being undemocratic, and have their beliefs and actions similarly tainted. There is no reason why the Congress should not be able to look beyond the immediate members of its core family.

    The latest Star Wars teaser, for Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, is foreboding for the same reasons. Going beyond the franchise’s fixation on Western characters and insistence on keeping the protagonists white (to the unforgivable extent of casting Lupita Nyong’o and then using only her voice), the teaser suggests that Rey is a/the (?) new Skywalker. I’ll be as thrilled as anyone else if she was a new Skywalker, if the name becomes a label akin to the (clanless) Torchbearer in Star Trek: Discovery.

    But if she turns out to be the new Skywalker, then the franchise’s writers will finally have completed their betrayal of the infinite purpose of the fantasy genre itself. They will have been utterly lazy – if not guilty of a form of creative manslaughter – if Rey turns out to be biologically related to the Skywalkers, broadcasting the message that either you’re royalty or you’re not, much like the Gandhis themselves have.

    In fact, even if Rey doesn’t carry the Skywalker blood, and ‘Skywalker’ becomes a title that anyone can aspire to, it remains to be seen how Episode IX treats the dynasty itself: if it is afforded a soft landing and the luxury of a dignified exit (which seems likely given Luke’s farewell in The Last Jedi) or if it is brought down hard and blown to smithereens. Rather, and taking a step back, will the franchise endeavour to send any sort of clear message about the pitfalls of dynasty itself?

    Featured image credit: Erika Wittlieb/pixabay.

  • The black hole image’s question of kind

    In my latest op-ed for The Wire, where I defended the criticisms of some people who called the EHT’s black hole picture too blurry, there are two lines that aren’t entirely true. This post attempts to clarify its underlying science as well as to defend it in the immediate context of the op-ed. The lines are in bold (emphasis added):

    Compared to pictures of about-to-be-eaten food on Instagram and Hubble Space Telescope’s spectacular shots of distant cosmic events, the EHT’s image of the M87 black hole is blah. But this is a profoundly useless comparison; it wasn’t ever about matching up to the Double Negative gravity-renderer, for example. There is no historical record that anyone cares about that reads “first ever 60 MP image of a black hole”; if they are, then that is a case of the bottom scraping the bottom. One MP or 60 MP or 10 GP is a question of degree. What we have here is a question of kind.

    The first part of the line isn’t entirely true. One MP or even maybe 10 GP might be a question of degree, but somewhere along this resolution road, the story becomes a question of kind. This is because – alluding to one of the “cosmic coincidences” that Shep Doeleman mentioned at the NSF presser announcing the image’s release – the black hole itself was of just the right size to allow itself to be imaged by the EHT in the frequency window that the latter was interested in.

    If the black hole had been any smaller, any further away or not emitting the 1.3-mm radiation, or if the EHT’s baseline wasn’t high enough to achieve the necessary resolving power, the resulting image would’ve been even blurrier. A lot of things had to fall in place for it to be possible. If one of them had been out of place, or if the image had to be less blurry by a big enough factor, astrophysicists would’ve been tasked with building an EHT with a baseline greater than Earth’s diameter, which might’ve meant putting one of the telescopes in space. And that could’ve meant a change in kind, not degree. In effect, the emboldened lines from my op-ed are out of place.

    However, for as long as we’re talking about having an image of a black hole at all – as opposed to having no image – complaining that it was blurry and not sharp is at best a trivial, and at worst an illegitimate, quibble. In this one historical moment alone, that the fact that the EHT’s telescopes were each operating at full tilt to obtained their part of the final image shouldn’t matter because we’re crossing over a point of no return. Before this line, such pictures didn’t exist. After the line, there are two kinds of questions of degree: one of high/low resolution images and other of how we’re organising our telescopes – Earth- or space-based – to acquire them.

  • What it means to be scientific

    On April 1, a few days after India successfully completed its ‘Mission Shakti’ ASAT test, an editorial in the RSS mouthpiece Organiser read:

    In the initial days, scientists had to fight hard to prove their mettle and significance of the research they were undertaking. … In the last few years, whether in space programme or in the case of defence modernisation, political leadership has given a free hand to the scientist to carry out their experiments and scientific fraternity has also responded explosively by giving us, in most cases, more than what was expected. …

    As voters, we should also think about the future of Bharat and what is best for the future generations while voting. Instead of getting into rhetorics and sloganeering of yesteryears, who has the vision and constructive programme for the Bharat should be our primary consideration. Who can stand by the conviction of the masses is the key.

    Clearly there’s lots to debunk here, and much else to ignore, but the author offers a peek inside a mind that suggests right-wingers as far afield as the RSS believe their government is facilitating the research enterprise more than standing in its way, and that the ASAT test is evidence that the government has allowed scientists a “free hand” to pursue blue-sky research. One cannot facedesk enough.

    On April 3, the Indian Express carried a tidbit from this editorial in its ‘View from the right’ section with a surprisingly misguided title: “Scientific voting”. You can see what got my goat. What’s scientific about any of this?

    It’s as if the Indian Express read the Organiser‘s drivel and walked away believing the mouthpiece had actually explained what it meant when it wrote, “We as voters should learn a lesson from the scientists which can become a guiding force for us while voting.” It didn’t; if it’s self-evident, it’s certainly not scientific. So I’m more disappointed that the Indian Express seems so clueless about what “scientific” actually means – ironically or otherwise – than with the Organiser, which – to be fair – hasn’t let anyone down.

    In fact, if we’re looking for “a guiding force” from intellectual quarters, the Organiser will be pleased to know scientists issued a statement on April 3 that concluded thus:

    We appeal to all citizens to vote wisely, weighing arguments and evidence critically. We appeal to all citizens to remember our constitutional commitment to scientific temper. We appeal to you to vote against inequality, intimidation, discrimination, and unreason.

    (They haven’t said so in as many words but they’re asking the people to boot the BJP/RSS combine from the premises.)

    Now, to be clear, nothing about this statement or its cohort of authors is ‘scientific’ either. In fact, it brings to mind a scene from the second season of Star Trek: Discovery, where Sylvia Tilly quips that adding “time” in front of anything makes it sound cooler, like “time bends”. Similarly, folks seem to believe prefixing the title of some activity with “scientific” makes it more… tenable? And such contentions of tenability then come with their own scientistic compulsions, such as to accuse those who have not voted a certain way of having been “unscientific”.

    This is nonsensical. Claiming activity X has the optional attribute of being “scientific” is only as tenable as what people alreadyassociate with the scientific enterprise, and cultural, political and social forces influence this evaluation, not science or its method itself. So either you learn the historical/logical implications of what it means to be scientific (e.g. Mertonian norms) or you’re stigmatising the word to make a point you believe to be true but are too lazy to find out why.

    In this context, it seems the two publications are sloughing scientists off as a discernibly separate section of society. That – ludicrous as it sounds – they have a way of voting that non-scientists don’t, or vice versa, and that according to both the Indian Express and the Organiser, the scientists have something to teach the non-scientists on this count. But these boundaries don’t exist: scientists vote like the rest of us because they’re one of us. And whoever is drawing these lines – whether out of malice or ignorance – should stop.

  • Look right and left before you cross

    For as long as there were two political groups at loggerheads with each other, there has been an aspiration to be – or remain – on friendly terms with someone on the other side. “Don’t let politics get in the way of a friendship,” they said, and it was useful advice. However, with this political balance having prevailed for many decades, ‘friendship over politics’ has become a maxim directly associated with any kind of political or ideological dichotomy, and has been presumed to be good advice on all occasions.

    The political climate in India now stands to disrupt this. This is difficult to acknowledge but it is about time. If you are on the political left, it is almost always nearly impossible to remain on friendly terms with someone on the right without brooking the possibility that they are incompetent, selfish, insular or just mindless – none of which is a marker of good character.

    To quote at length from Rohit Kumar’s excellent open letter to a friend, in The Wire:

    You know I value friendships, because a good friendship is a rare and wonderful thing. But a good friendship is also based on shared, common values, wouldn’t you agree? Just how am I supposed to be good friends with you if you see nothing wrong in demonising an entire community? It’s a sincere question, not a rhetorical one.

    I would also like to tell you at this point that if are you ever in a situation where you need my help, I will be there for you. We have, after all, been friends for 15 years. I will try my best to be a blessing, but as far as being on the same wavelength and having the same free and frank camaraderie that we have shared over the last decade and a half, I really don’t know how to take that forward.

    Science has its part to play in this. The right’s prejudices have amplified the consequences of ignorance that, in a different time, could have been harmless, and lowered the quality of intellectual discourse. Some consequences include an inability to distinguish between science and technology, a generally poor sense of what constitutes a fact, as well as what is and is not scientific fact, ignorance of how research works and its purpose, ignorance of the need for and the role of topical experts in society, a tendency to ignore the differences between good and bad Western ideas, etc. This isn’t a war on science but a neglect of it.

    This said, the left isn’t exempt either. Indeed, it has been more socially responsible in India in the last five years and its discourse (in the media) has contributed significantly to the people’s understanding of science’s relationship with society. Significant examples include the ‘March for Science’, climate change – e.g. when analysing the impact of official climate action on lower class/caste groups – and forest conservation. But on some other issues, the leftists have run roughshod over decidedly good research and innovation because they are paranoid.

    For instance, upbraiding the Government of India for how it set up the Challakere ‘science range’ is just as socially responsible as mounting a Pyrrhic assault against GMOs is socially irresponsible. It may not make sense to claim the male and female brains are different but why do people need to scream at someone who wants to find out? (As in a curious person asking questions, not James Damore or Alessandro Strumia.) All of this inspires just as much displeasure towards the left as it does when the right goes bonkers. The quality of discourse matters just as much as the freedom people have to ask questions and have them answered.

    It is easily forgotten that the right does not have a monopoly on distorting science, and it is proving increasingly difficult to remain friends with those from the left who do it as well. Some other examples of their faith-based propaganda overshadowing fact-based conversations include nuclear power, hydroelectric power, evolutionary psychology (though not as much as in the 1980s), cellphone tower radiation, pesticide-based farming, “crystal healing”, etc.

    Staying friends, or making new ones, has got harder in the last five years but it hasn’t been easy for a long time. This is partly because the underlying mechanism is common to both groups. Science places fact over faith, so the problem arises when a person believes something as a matter of faith instead of as a matter of fact (beginning with something as amusing as why farting inside a plane doesn’t slow it down).

    The more extreme your political view, the more likely you are to distort facts so you don’t have to confront challenges to what you would like to continue believing. Of course, the left does have some redeeming qualities – in India and elsewhere – but it usually doesn’t matter which side of the spectrum you were on to begin with.

    The Wire
    March 25, 2019