Op-eds

Arup Dasgupta’s incisive article about ISRO’s human spaceflight mission, published on The Wire Science yesterday, is drawing a lot of civil, critical engagement from our readers. While this is good news from the newsroom’s perspective – civil engagement is always golden – I’d like to highlight two parts of it.

First: Dasgupta’s article is a more informed as well as a more authoritative version of one I penned in August last year, right after Prime Minister Narendra Modi first formally announced India’s human spaceflight mission. Though I may not have mustered the same argumentative gravitas that Dasgupta has been able, I stand by my arguments: Gaganyaan sounds cool, but what next?

However, the two articles have been received markedly differently. Mine was only trolled; there was no engagement worth speaking of. That Dasgupta’s take was more topically informed explains the difference, though I suspect only a part of it. I believe Dasgupta’s authority also mattered to the audience – an audience that appears to have trained itself to recognise the proxies of sense over sense itself. (Dasgupta is former deputy director, ISRO Space Applications Centre.)

For example, the following argument drawn from my article is common to both our pieces:

It’s not necessary for scientists and engineers to develop human spaceflight capability to be able to do other things. So why they’re doing it is a question of payoffs. Although its romanticism has been in flux, the accomplishment of sending humans to space remains prestigious enough to be a goal in and of itself. The deeper, more fundamental, question therefore is what the prestige stands for…

I also suspect the Bharatiya Janata Party’s defeat in three state assembly elections last year made a difference. They constituted the first major electoral failure the BJP had experienced since assuming power at the Centre in 2014. After this, the party’s Twitter troll-army suffered a small – but not entirely significant – loss of conviction just as it indicated to the party’s opponents that they were making headway.

Of course, none of this is meant to subtract from Dasgupta’s text, which has given many a reader pause, encouraging them to reflect on what exactly ISRO is trying to do with Gaganyaan.

I should mention two caveats:

1. When Siddharth Varadarajan tweeted a link to the article, it received a lot of retweets and likes – as well as a flood of replies that suggested the users assumed he was making yet another hare-brained allegation (from their PoV) without even bothering to read the text. That who shares what matters isn’t a new idea at all, but it is useful to know that the troll-army gravitates to him like moths to a flame lightning to a lightning rod and that when the background noise they represent has been removed, there is a signal.
2. It’s possible that my article came out too quickly, suggesting that I was being critical of Modi’s announcement out of habit instead of having something legitimate to say. However, this would be no reason to dismiss my arguments.

Second: some responses to Dasgupta’s article have tried to take ISRO’s side, asking why the writer would assume the organisation does not have a long-term plan for human spaceflight when it’s possible that there might be a private document to that effect. This line of thinking is tenable, albeit briefly, because of ISRO’s near-complete lack of public outreach.

Where it fails is in the fact that Gaganyaan is a public enterprise in three ways. First: it is publicly funded. Second: the BJP has prepossessed its sanction for the programme as a sign of its own supposed enterprise. The latter happened with the Mars Orbiter Mission as well: the Congress, in power when it was sanctioned, took part of the credit and the BJP, in power when it was launched, the rest.

The third reason is the most important and draws from the first two. Gaganyaan, like the Moon and Mars missions before it, was green-lit not only because ISRO was able to persuade the powers that be using scientific arguments – given all three missions are scientific in nature – but also because whichever party was in power, and the BJP especially so, found a way to spin the narrative to their advantage.

In light of these issues, the demand for ISRO to publicise what information and wisdom it has vis-à-vis Gaganyaan is two-pronged. First, public sanction for a public project must place the project in full public view. Second, the people have a right to be able to access all particulars of a tax-funded project, especially if there is reason to believe it is founded on questionable premises. And the particulars must be constantly interrogable, and interrogated, to ensure that it remains accountable.

The burden of proof is on ISRO here. If they don’t provide the proof of their own volition, they deserve the criticism they’re getting.

Featured image: A GSLV Mk III rocket at the launchpad in Sriharikota. This is ISRO’s vehicle of choice for its human spaceflight mission, slated for 2022. Credit: ISRO.

The following notes are specifically about VijayRaghavan’s post. My overall reaction to the stupidity on display at the ISC is recorded here.

At a conference at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in August 2018, K. VijayRaghavan said that the media pays disproportionate attention to the pseudoscience that goes down at every Indian Science Congress, more so than legitimate science itself. This is a fair observation – but probably at odds with what journalism is expected to do.

Pseudoscience at the science congress receives more attention because it deviates from the normal. The science at the science congress is a muddle of technical discussions interspersed with popular talks and announcements. It’s a popular festival that thousands of school and college students attend across four or five days. This is certainly worth a report, and many outlets do publish such reports.

But when a scientist or a lawmaker says something nonsensical on stage, to an audience of hundreds, it’s a breach of professional conduct on multiple levels and that’s why it’s also news: not because it’s sensational but because it’s something we as a society constantly work to prevent. And when it does come to pass, it’s the media’s responsibility to help find out why – whether through reports or debates.

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VijayRaghavan also mentions this issue in a blog post he wrote about the Indian Science Congress, on January 5. (The Wire republished it in full, here.) Excerpt:

A few [of the talks at the congress] are superb, some good, many unremarkable and few, usually one or two, outright preposterous. The last part gets disproportionate national and global attention.

And he sees this as a problem:

This [media] attention stays over the year, till the next congress, assigned to the #pseudoscience bin. It is a fascinating reflection of our mindset that this bin is taken to be emblematic of scientists and to be an official endorsement [by the govt. of such utterances].

I think this conclusion underestimates the country’s English readership and overlooks the science congress’s own reputation among many as a flawed event. Anyway:

Someone … asked me how one (presumably the government) could give a platform to such preposterous talks at the science congress. Well, the organisers rightly don’t have a filter and the government rightly has no role in the matter. Scientists say what they say, and if they talk nonsense, they will feel the heat from the community.

It was news to me that the Government of India has such a small role in organising the congress – even though it’s an appointment on every prime minister’s calendar, its website is hosted on the government domain (.nic.in), and – as Rahul Siddharthan pointed out – claims to be under “DST, MST, GoI”.

So while it’s good that VijayRaghavan, as a government official, has said that the government doesn’t endorse the congress’s speeches, that in turn prompts the question whether it should, in fact, assume a bigger role.

VijayRaghavan writes that the government “rightly” doesn’t have control over how the congress is organised or what its speakers do/don’t say. This may be fair in the literal sense but given that it’s always inaugurated by the prime minister, it doesn’t look nice – whether to the minister or the rest of the country – when so much pseudoscientific drivel emerges during its course.

If the government did play a bigger role, it may be able to better curate the talks and use the occasion to discuss issues of national importance. (I suggest ditching the Nobel laureates and inviting winners of national prizes instead.) In fact, if it does so through some of the more efficient scientist-officers in its ranks, including VijayRaghavan, then it could also serve to minimise bureaucratic interference.

But if it’s reluctant to do so, the MST should at least consider having some general oversight over the Indian Science Congress Association (ISCA), at whose feet the “pseudoscience at the congress” blame ultimately lies.

(And I don’t think suggesting that the government – through DST, DBT, DAE and/or MoES – co-organise the congress with the ISCA and other scientists is precarious. If it seems so [as it did to me], it’s probably because the incumbent government doesn’t inspire much trust 😄.)

It’s worth repeating that the government can distance itself from the event as much as it wants but the congress gives the appearance of having official sanction. And even if it doesn’t, it’s the largest event of its kind in the country and which also invites foreign participation. It affects the people reading about it because of the prime minister’s presence, and the school and college students attending it simply because it advertises itself as a confluence of scholastic intellect.

Of course, the ideal situation would be for the scientific community at large to assume responsibility for it. But given that that’s not likely to happen thanks to the congress’s near-zero currency, limited accessibility, a general academic culture of focusing on one’s work and a profusion of other responsibilities, it’s an opportunity for others to step in and make a difference. It’s undeniable that some process isn’t working the way it should be, letting the congresses play out as they have in the last few years, and need(s) to be pulled up for it.

Can the science academies be the ones to do this? I doubt it. VijayRaghavan calls them “very vocal” in his post but I disagree. They have issued statements of protest in the past but not nearly as often as they should’ve. Those who were present at the conference at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences will also remember that VijayRaghavan pulled up the science academies then for staying quiet on the day’s most contentious issues.

My last note vis-à-vis VijayRaghavan’s post is perhaps the most straightforward of the lot. He writes:

The Science Congress has an overall theme each year, There is a wide range of topics that are covered in the talks. A group of scientists, chosen by the ISCA, requests applications to speak and chooses speakers. Once chosen there is no censorship on what the person actually speaks.

Quality-controlling the talks to be given at the congress is not the same as censorship. Everybody enjoys the freedom of expression but the freedom vanishes when people want to present non-facts as facts. So keeping talks like that of G.N. Rao (the Andhra University VC who said Indians had stem-cell tech millennia ago) from happening would not be censorship. In fact, it would ensure that the audience – especially the students – is exposed only to discourse of a certain quality.

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One more response to the post I found worth highlighting:

You have smartly sidestepped the real issue. You highlight issues which are important in the western context but don't resonate with state of affairs in India. Was it an intentional effort to divert attention to 'safe' pseudoscientific issues?

— Aniket Sule (@aniket_sule) January 5, 2019

The Print should not have published its list of “intellectuals pick their successors” at all. Its editors knew that it had no women and were aware of how that was a problem. They also had to have known that the list was predominantly Hindu and upper-caste. But by publishing it, The Print signalled that it still wanted to attract responses, to display to the world that it had attempted such an exercise, to salvage from its complete failure something that it could still publish and draw attention to itself, and to finally broadcast its atonement by publishing other pieces that corrected its mistakes. The whole exercise stinks.

The latest such piece of atonement is a list of women intellectuals curated by Salil Tripathi. He writes in his piece:

I am glad ThePrint produced its list; it made us think of what such a list should look like. The lists won’t change anything. But if such a list leads us to step out of our comfort zones and read—or familiarise ourselves with—the works of those we haven’t known, it would have made an interesting contribution.

I’m curious about how the women on Tripathi’s list feel about their inclusion in such an exercise, considering its flawed provenance. I myself smell something patronising, though I’m unable to put my finger on it.

To be sure, Tripathi’s is a resourceful compilation. I’ve read the writing of some of the women listed there and they’re all must-reads. But it is disappointing that Tripathi’s list didn’t exist until The Print‘s did, and The Print‘s list wouldn’t have existed if not for the apathy of its editor(s). Even by publishing pieces that call out its own mistakes, The Print hasn’t exonerated itself. It is still only engaging in a profoundly useless exercise: the cycle it has initiated and is participating in is of its own making, a bad case of a journalism platform fabricating the news instead of reporting it.

I can think of at least four different words newsrooms use to describe the bundles of content they work with: story, piece, article and copy (‘content’ itself isn’t one of them). With a few exceptions, all four labels are used interchangeably. ‘Copy’ is perhaps the most common, especially since most copy-editors use that name for the thing they work their magic on, but so is story for its gentle glamour. The question is whether this orgy of labels is actually a problem or just a triviality.

(A lot more people in J-schools say they “want to produce longform journalism” than the number engaged in finding good things to write about first. That an aspiration like this even exists – and was nurtured without question at the J-school I attended – was the first sign that the glamour had overtaken the substance.)

Put another way: is dissecting the labels a useful way of looking at the world?

Some time in 2012, my heresy about the ‘Columbia style’ – my name for a ‘narrative technique’ that began by introducing a protagonist, following them for three or four big paragraphs, before introducing the meat of the matter through the protagonist’s pain – took root. I called it ‘Columbia style’ at the time because many of those who practised it in India had graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism.

When a piece is written like this, it is decidedly a story, at least in the mind of the writer. As many people have pointed out, stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. ‘Columbia style’ pieces do too, as well as a protagonist through whose eyes the reader is to find footing and guidance, and a conclusion that I bet ends with eyes set on the horizon with a heart full of hope.

However, most practitioners of this form don’t use it right. To work the ‘Columbia style’, you need a very, very good story first – one that lends itself to dramatic narratives. E.g., I’ve always thought stories of agrarian distress shouldn’t be laid out this way but they often are. Second, the ‘Columbia style’ implicitly demands that the piece be a feature article, 2,000 words or longer (in The Wire‘s lexicon). So it would be technically sound if a writer adopted the ‘Columbia style’ after they’d found a suitable narrative, but what usually happens is journalists adopt the style first and then set about reporting, eventually producing something with little substance and a lot of fluff.

Earlier today, Rosen – with a short thread on Twitter – laid out his issues with framing the news as stories. He argued that when journalists become storytellers, they open themselves up to being lured by the “seduction of the narrative” and, second, let the story’s needs edge out space that needs to be devoted to other “central” components of good journalism: “truth-telling, grounding public conversation in fact, verification, listening”, etc. To be sure, and at the risk of repetition, this criticism is directed at those who report to write stories and not at those who set out to report, find a story and then determine if can be narrated in a certain form.

To paraphrase Jeff Jarvis from his Christmas Day article that Rosen cites, we must ask ourselves “whether our compulsion to make news compelling (yes, entertaining) leads us astray.” He elaborates: 

The real problem is that we have let our means of production determine our mission rather than the other way around. I hear journalists say their primary role is as storytellers. No. I hear them say their task is to fill a product – a newspaper or magazine or show. No. Our job is to inform the public conversation. And now that we can hear people talking and join in with them, I’ve updated my definition of journalism to this: to convene communities into civil, informed, and productive conversation. This means our first job is not to write but to listen to that conversation so we can find what it needs to function. Then we report. Then we write – or convene or teach or use other forms now available to us. First listener, not storyteller.

In short: when we intend to tell stories, we close ourselves off to parts of the conversation that we don’t think can fulfil the story’s needs.

I find some consolation in this conclusion because I’ve felt similarly before and it’s nice to discover Rosen and Jarvis have as well: science stories – particularly in the ‘Columbia style’ – are typically about science’s connection to the human condition in some form or other. It’s quite difficult to frame a science-related issue as a story that doesn’t have this connection. Stories are fundamentally human. So when reporters preemptively gravitate towards this narrative style, they also preemptively – and often heedlessly – begin to ignore details that may not help them write these stories, details that have nothing to do with the human condition. A lot more on this here.

There are of course those labelled ‘great storytellers’, and you might argue that even if you didn’t have an awesome story to tell, you could spin an ordinary one that way if you excelled at the telling. This argument seems to have some logic in theory but I’ve never seen it done in practice.

Postscript: I’m also glad that Jarvis said the following (emphasis added): “… our first job is not to write but to listen to that conversation so we can find what it needs to function. Then we report. Then we write – or convene or teach or use other forms now available to us.”

In his definition, a lot more people become journalists because it precludes novelty of information and because it decouples the activity from how we choose to disseminate what we’ve found. The latter isn’t only about multimedia journalism but also about context-specific measures. For example, I consider science explainers to be a form of science journalism because science education is a bit of a disaster in India.

John Horgan asked 15 people – scientists, social psychologists, philosophers – one question, in a seemingly clever effort to mark the end of 2018:

Unless you are too stoned or enlightened to care, you are probably dissatisfied with the world as it is. In that case, you should have a vision of the world as you would like it to be. This better world is your utopia. That, at any rate, is the premise of a question I’ve been asking scientists and other thinkers lately: What’s your utopia?

Some of the answers are insipid, others are quite revealing and most of them are somewhere in between. But look closer and you might notice that all of them engage with the possibilities in front of them largely on one of three levels: really personal (Solomon, Woit, Maudlin, Volk, Holt), from a great distance (Hossenfelder, Aaronson, Wolfram, Rees, Herbert) or in abstract terms (Chomsky, Dawkins, Deutsch, Hanson).

Some of them also talk about climate change and economic distress insofar as day-to-day issues are concerned. But by and large – with the exceptions of Hossenfelder and Aaronson – there seems to be no deeper reflection on sociopolitical issues, and whether the utopias they seek will make the world a better place for them alone or for all of us.

To be fair, it’s probably the format that doesn’t lend itself to lengthy analyses of our times, what exactly they’d like to improve, why and how they’d go about it. Most answers to Horgan’s question are pretty short; it would be fair to assume Horgan gave his interlocutors a small word-limit so that 15 such answers wouldn’t be that long a read. More importantly, the reason I want to cut the answers any slack is because all the people on the list are (or have been) smart cookies.

Slack for what, eh? At this point, look even closer and tell me you don’t find it odd that there’s just one woman in the list of 15 intellectuals, odder still that all men and women on the list are white people, and odder yet that they’re all from developed nations.

Now ask yourself whether this could be why none of the utopias seems concerned with issues that assail non-white, non-male, non-first-world scholars, that too not because they’re scholars but at a more essential level: because they’re non-white, non-male, non-first-world people. Apart from Hossenfelder and Aaronson (and maybe Chomsky), I don’t even find reason to believe that the intellectuals quoted were thinking of a world beyond their neighbourhood.

I’m aware my anger is more entropy than heat in this context. Horgan probably simply asked 15 famous people and requested they keep their replies short. The famous people responded, and Horgan compiled the responses into an interesting article for the Scientific American. The article isn’t going to change the world, influence leaders (I think) or contribute to governance and policymaking. It’s an interesting read is all it is. But even then it’s not okay that the list has zero cultural diversity and the absolute bare minimum of gender diversity.

If anything, the list could be useful as ‘Exhibit A’ in favour of those with the energy and articulacy to repeatedly push back against the dispiriting assertions of biologist-blogger Jerry Coyne. ICYMI, Coyne recently ridiculed a Princeton University course called ‘Science After Feminism’, which – among other things – proposes to answer two questions:

Is science gendered, racialized, ableist, and classist?

Does the presence or absence of women (and other marginalized individuals) lead to the production of different kinds of scientific knowledge?

These questions have come to symbolise a kind of detector. You hold it up to a person and, depending on how they answer, you can tell which of the following groups they belong to:

1. ‘No’ and ‘no’ because there’s not evidence to back these claims up ⇒ you’re one of the devout quants who lives and dies in a data bubble, refusing to acknowledge the effect of cultural forces in our lives
2. ‘No’ and ‘no’ because science is not the same as scientists ⇒ you’re one of the rationalists who believes science exists as an absolute truth incorruptible by the practice of some humans
3. ‘Yes’ and ‘yes’ because science is meaningless outside of its practice ⇒ you’re one of the rationalists who believes science’s relationship with humans goes deeper than just being a source of knowledge

Coyne is of the second type. (His post even exemplifies the sort of pedantry the people of this group resort to in arguments.)

Horgan’s list goes to show what a difference the representation of non-male and marginalised members of society in the scientific enterprise can make. They don’t simply improve nominal diversity and affirmative action. More seriously, their inclusion influences what knowledge we do and don’t produce through time, and that in turn affects the power-relations within and between different societies. Coyne fails to see that while there could be a scientific ideal for each scientist to aspire towards, the history of science reveals that what we’ve known as science has been inseparable from the people we’ve called scientists at the time.

https://twitter.com/ejwillingham/status/1074107793945157632

James English had a wonderful piece in Public Books recently, discussing how the Nobel Prize for literature:

1. Is a prize that has always struggled to be meaningful, given how its laureates are shortlisted, the capital that incentivises its exercise and the historical Eurocentric elitism of its adjudicators
2. Had been irreversibly diminished by the controversies surrounding Jean-Claude Arnault and his apologist Horace Engdahl, and the disgusting “horse trading” that followed (Sara Danius for Katarina Frostenson)
3. Had only made itself more interesting by having had its inherent politics and drama exposed to the wider world (“The Nobel Prize in Literature thrived in the 20th century not despite eruptions of outrage over the judgments of the Swedish Academy but because of them”)

What will it take for everyone to see that the Nobel Prizes for physics, chemistry and medicine work the same way? And that they don’t have to be assailed by public controversies to be acknowledged as imperfect prizes, whose status was seeded by a similar, if not the same, “admixture of capitals”.

There’s nothing to these prizes if not their prestige. But while that’s something any prize should aspire to have, it’s the wider zeitgeist of the Nobel Prizes’ appreciation that makes them interesting. Perhaps, as English argues, accepting this brokenness could pave the way to a more culturally appropriate celebration of what the prizes stand for, one that doesn’t quietly raise its glass to traditionalism on every December 10.