Root Privileges

Op-eds

artificial intelligence Bharatiya Janata Party blogging CERN Chandrayaan 2 climate change Covaxin COVID-19 COVID-19 pandemic Donald Trump Elon Musk Facebook fantasy fiction Gaganyaan Higgs boson India-based Neutrino Observatory Indian Council of Medical Research Indian Space Research Organisation ISRO journalism K Sivan Large Hadron Collider NASA nationalism Nobel Prizes novel coronavirus Open Access particle physics peer review Prime Minister Narendra Modi pseudoscience Quantum mechanics Science science communication science fiction science journalism science writing scientific publishing scientific research scientism social media SpaceX The Hindu The Wire Twitter

  • Of socks in black-holes and wasted stone tablets

    Dennis Overbye, one of the New York Times‘s star science writers (the other being Carl Zimmer), had a curious piece up November 19 about why “we should leave some mysteries alone” and what mysteries he would like to leave alone personally. He wrote,

    Jim Peebles, the famed cosmologist at Princeton University, once told me that if someone offered him a tablet of stone that held all the answers to the mysteries of the universe — how old it is, where it’s going — he would throw it away. The fun, he said, is in the attempt to find out. So here are some stone tablets that I would throw away.

    The ‘curious’ aspect was made more so because Overbye was the author: he has a reputation as a lucid and articulate science writer. However, this piece is kind of a swamp.

    The fundamental basis for Overbye’s provocative suggestion is that we “might be disappointed by the Big Reveal”. I’m not sure I agree with it – although it is in fact Overbye’s opinion and there is nothing I can or want to do about it.

    I would choose differently for two reasons.

    First: We will always have fantasies about the things around us, about the things we do or do not know of. Overbye says he does not want to know what is inside a black hole because finding out might force him to stop believing that a pair of socks he lost might be there. This is a perfectly harmless belief today. And I think it will be a perfectly harmless belief even after we find out what black-hole guts are made of.

    Overbye doesn’t write serious science articles about his socks being inside a black hole faraway even though we don’t know what is inside black holes. This is because “we don’t know” is also a state of knowledge. It is not a void, an empty vessel to be freely populated with our whimsies, but an area carefully fenced-off and with restricted entry. When “we don’t know” isn’t stopping Overbye from assuming his socks are there, there is no reason “we do know” should.

    If you are going to say, “It is because we might know how hot it is inside a black hole,” let me stop you right there. A logical breakdown is not helping anyone – and certainly not Overbye. Otherwise, his fantasy would have collapsed the moment he stopped to consider how his socks got inside the black hole in the first place. He is free to believe, as he does, that his socks are just there.

    I personally believe the cheela really exist and that there are some kinds of stars out there whose outer surface is simply a curtain hiding a very advanced alien civilisation living on the inside. Because why not?

    Second: I also firmly believe there will always be something we don’t know we don’t know – a.k.a. ‘unknown unknowns’ – and/or something we just don’t know – a.k.a. an unanswered question. We might be disappointed by the next “Big Reveal”, and the one after that, and the one after that, but I’m willing to bet it is turtles all the way down. There is never going to be a last “Big Reveal”. Which means we can always hope that the next reveal will be a big one, and we can always nurture this or that fantasy.

    Now, the more interesting thing I wanted to discuss about Overbye’s piece was one line towards the end. Like many parts of his piece, it has a problem – and this one’s is elitism:

    If we’re not smart enough to figure out [some futuristic tech by ourselves but instead do so by decrypting a note of alien origin], we don’t deserve to survive.

    I realise this is a species-wide aspiration that Overbye is articulating and he probably means that we should deserve what we have. But it is too laconic for a line in its situation because it elides over human politics and suggests, at least to me, that every person only deserves to have what they have earned for themselves. If this is what he, or anyone, actually believes, then I do wish some kind of alien intervention proves them wrong with the hope that it levels the ‘playing field’.

    We don’t deserve what we earn, we deserve what is right. It is hard to define this “right”; it could stand for different things in different contexts and cultures. The British writer George Monbiot provides a fitting example: ‘private luxury, public sufficiency’ might have been reasonable words to live by in a fully egalitarian society but in the Anthropocene epoch, they need to be ‘private sufficiency, public luxury’. ‘What is right’ is also certainly fair(er) because it addresses our moral responsibility to eradicate inequalities instead of pandering to the pseudo-superiority of biological smartness.

    I would certainly enjoy reading a fantasy novel about an alien message being discernible only by adivasis because of some special vestment they acquired thousands of years ago, and for them to suddenly ascend to the top of the political pyramid. Would the adivasis have “figured it out”? We don’t know. But would the adivasis have deserved it? Absolutely. (Is everyone happy about it? Of course not, and for various reasons. Read the book to find out.)

    What this means for Overbye’s wish is that we would deserve to survive if we figured out future technologies by reading an alien note instead of figuring it ourselves. This is because our own entirely human world already works this way. The inequalities we have perpetrated ensure that some people may never experience a better quality of life without quick and important interventions that empowers them to leap over systemic barriers. Whether that’s affirmative action or an extraterrestrial doodle doesn’t matter.

    Even a very charitable interpretation of Overbye’s line above doesn’t come off properly. Will someone somewhere ever solve some of humanity’s problems to its overall benefit and availability? Definitely not. The prevailing world order does not admit it. In fact, as things stand, one of the wishes expressed in his article might just come true but not in a way Overbye might like. He writes:

    And if we ever do stumble upon a message from some extraterrestrial civilisation, I don’t know want to know what it says. Knowing that aliens exist and imagining what they were up to would be enough to keep us busy for centuries.

    We might not know that aliens exist if they do. The Atlantic recently had a wonderful feature about how the Chinese are likelier than any other to make first contact. If this does come to be – assuming it hasn’t already – what’s to say they won’t just keep the message to themselves? They have no obligation to share it with all of humanity, and their national government has cultivated the kind of authority necessary to keep such information a secret for however long it deems necessary.

    In all, it seems Overbye’s reality is already populated with things that would be fantasies for most of the rest of the world, and the line he draws between what is already true (“what we do know”) and what he has a choice to believe (“what we don’t know”) is blurred by socio-political brushstrokes that he seems blind to. As a result, the choices he makes about which “stone tablets” he would throw away to preserve the mysteries surrounding them quickly becomes pernicious to those of us for whom many of these tablets are what we need to enjoy the kind of life that Overbye already has.

    In this world – of not just the Chinese but more generally of those doing an atrocious job of balancing economic development with social justice – some stone tablets just should not be thrown away, sir.

  • Engineering a way out of global warming

    After its licentious article about Earth having a second moon, I thought National Geographic had published another subpar piece when I saw this headline:

    Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warming for Years

    The headline is click-bait. The article itself is about how regional nuclear war, such as between two countries like India and Pakistan, can have global consequences, especially on the climate and agriculture. That it wouldn’t take World War III + nuclear winter for the entire world to suffer the consequences of a few – not hundreds of – nuclear explosions. And that we shouldn’t labour with the presumption that detonating a few nuclear bombs would be better than having to set all of them off. So I wouldn’t have used that headline – which seems to suggest we should maybe implanting the atmosphere with thousands of tonnes of some material to cool the planet down.

    I don’t think it’s silly to come to that conclusion. Scientists at the oh-so-exalted Harvard and Yale Universities are suggesting something similar: injecting the stratosphere with an aerosol to absorb heat and cool Earth’s surface. Suddenly, global warming isn’t our biggest problem, these guys are. Through a paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, they say that it would be both feasible and affordable to “cut the rate of global warming in half” (source: CNN) using this method. From their paper:

    Total pre-start costs to launch a hypothetical SAI effort 15 years from now are ~$3.5 billion in 2018 US $. A program that would deploy 0.2 Mt of SO2 in year 1 and ramp up linearly thereafter at 0.2 Mt SO2/yr would require average annual operating costs of ~$2.25 billion/yr over 15 years. While these figures include all development and direct operating costs, they do not include any indirect costs such as for monitoring and measuring the impacts of SAI deployment, leading Reynolds et al (2016) to call SAI’s low costs a solar geoengineering ‘trope’ that has ‘overstayed its welcome’. Estimating such numbers is highly speculative. Keith et al (2017), among others, simply takes the entire US Global Change Research Program budget of $3 billion/yr as a rough proxy (Our Changing Planet 2016), more than doubling our average annual deployment estimates.

     

    Whether the annual number is $2.25 or $5.25 billion to cut average projected increases in radiative forcing in half from a particular date onward, these numbers confirm prior low estimates that invoke the ‘incredible economics’ of solar geoengineering (Barrett 2008) and descriptions of its ‘free driver’ properties (Wagner and Weitzman 2012, 2015, Weitzman 2015).

    My problem isn’t that these guys undertook their study. Scientifically devised methods to engineering the soil and air to slow or disrupt global warming have been around for many decades (including using a “space-based solar shield”). The present study simply evaluated one idea to find that it is eminently possible and that it could deliver a more than acceptable return per dollar spent (notwithstanding the comment on unreliable speculation and its consequences). Heck, the scientists even add:

    Dozens of countries would have both the expertise and the money to launch such a program. Around 50 countries have military budgets greater than $3 billion, with 30 greater than $6 billion.

    I’m all for blue-sky research – even if this particular analysis may not qualify in that category – and that knowing something is an end in and of itself. I.e., knowledge cannot be useless because knowing has value. Second: I don’t think any government or organisation is going to be able to implement a regional, leave alone global, SAI programme just because this paper has found that it is a workable idea. Then again, ability is not the same as consideration and consideration has its consequences as well.

    My grouse is with a few lines in the paper’s ‘Conclusion’, where the scientists state that they “make no judgment about the desirability of [stratospheric aerosol injection].” They go on to state that their work is solely from an “engineering perspective” – as if to suggest that should anyone seriously consider implementing SAI, their paper is happy to provide the requisite support.

    However, the scientists should have passed judgment about the desirability of SAI instead of copping out. I can’t understand why they chose to do so; it is the easiest conclusion in the whole enterprise. No policymaker or lawmaker who thinks anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real is going to consider this method to deal with the problem (or maybe they will, who knows; the Delhi government thinks it’s responding right by installing giant air filters in public spaces). As David Archer, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, told CNN:

    It will be tempting to continue to procrastinate on cleaning up our energy system, but we’d be leaving the planet on a form of life-support. If a future generation failed to pay their climate bill they would get all of our warming all at once.

    By not judging the “desirability of SAI”, the scientists have effectively abdicated their responsibility to properly qualify the nature and value of their work, and situate it in its wider political context. They have left the door open to harmful use of their work as well. Consider the difference between a lawmaker brandishing a journal article that simply lays out the “engineering perspective” and another having to deal with an article that discusses the engineering as well as the desirability vis-à-vis the nature and scope of AGW.

  • A fair trial

    BBC News Africa undertook an excellent investigation to reveal that a group of men who killed four unarmed civilians – two women and two children – in 2015 belonged to the Cameroonian military. Fourteen journalists worked on the story, together with Amnesty International, using Google Earth imagery, satellite images, social media, prior news reports and one anonymous source.

    The journalists described their process in a tweet thread in September 2018, which has been retweeted over 57K times since. But oddly, towards the end of the thread, the BBC News Africa account makes a troubling suggestion that departs in spirit from the rest of the enterprise, which appears to have been level-headed and measured.

    We all understand – and the BBC also establishes – that the killings were abhorrent. But the two tweets above, which appeared in that order, seem to suggest that the soldiers should not be given a fair trial because they did not give the women and children they killed a fair trial.

    All trials must be fair irrespective of the heinousness of the crime or the moral vacuum of their perpetrators. This is an unpopular opinion these days but an unfair trial will only jeopardise the authority of humanitarian justice, not to mention delegitimise the judiciary and make it difficult for Cameroon to get the support of other governments.

    A court is highly unlikely to find the soldiers innocent, thanks to the efforts of BBC News Africa, and if that happens, it will likely be due to an unfair trial. But if the soldiers are found guilty, the legitimacy of the process should cement it, not detract from it. The fourteen journalists + Amnesty followed that process. They should ask that Cameroon’s institutions do so as well.

  • Let the arrogators write

    Bora Zivkovic, the former ‘blogfather’ of the Scientific American blogs network, said it best: journalists are temporary experts. Reporters have typically got a few days to write something up on which scientists have been working for years, if not decades. They flit from paper to paper, lab to lab; without the luxury of a beat, they often cover condensed matter physics one day, spaceflight the next, ribosomes the day after, and exomoons after that. Over time, they become the somewhat-jacks of many trades, but there is only one that they are really trying to master: writing.

    The editors they work with to have these stories published are also somewhat-jacks in their own right. Many of them will have been reporters, probably still are from time to time, and further along the road (by necessity) to understanding what will get stories read.

    However, there is a tendency among many of the scientists I work with to trivialise these proficiencies, as if they are products of a lesser skill, a lesser perseverance even. There have even been one or two so steeped in the notion that science reporters and editors wouldn’t be employed if the scientists hadn’t undertaken their pursuits of truths that they treat editors with naked disdain. Some others are less contemptuous but still aver that journalists are at best adjacent to reality, and lower on some imagined hierarchy as a result.

    If these claims don’t immediately seem ludicrous to you, then you are likely choosing to not see why.

    First: If a person in any profession believes that it is easy to reach the masses and then cites Facebook and Twitter as proof, it is not that they don’t know how journalism works. It is that they don’t know what journalism is as well as are professing ignorance of their personal definition being wrong. The fourth estate is responsible for keeping democracy functional. It is not as simple as putting all available information in the public domain or breaking complex ideas down to digestible tidbits. It is about figuring out how “write a story people will like reading” is tied to “speak truth to power”.

    Second: I am not going to say reporting and editing engage the mind as much as science does because I wouldn’t know how I would go about proving such a thing. Axiomatically, I will say that those who believe reporting and editing are somehow ‘softer’ therefore ‘lesser’ pursuits (machismo?) or that they are less engaging and/or worthwhile are making the same mistake. There is no way to tell. There is also no admission of the alternative that editors and reporters – by devoting themselves to deceptively simple tasks like stating facts and piecing narratives together – are able to find greater meaning, agency and purpose in them than the scientist is able to comprehend.

    Third: This tendency to debase communication and its attendant skills is bizarre considering the scientist himself intends to communicate (and it is usually a ‘him’ doing the debasing). If I had to guess, I would say these beliefs exist because they are proxies for a subconscious reluctance to share the power that is their knowledge, and the expression of such beliefs a desperate attempt to exert control over what they may believe is rightfully theirs. There is some confidence in such speculation as well because I actually know one scientist who believes scientists attempting to communicate their work are betraying their profession. But that story is for another day.

    All these reasons together is why I would ask the arrogators to write more for news outlets instead of asking them to stop. It is not that we get to cut off their ability to reach the masses – that could worsen the sense of victimisation and, thus, entitlement – but that we have an opportunity to chamfer their privilege upon the whetstone of public engagement. This after all is one of the purposes of journalism. It works even when we let the powerful write instead of the powerless because its strength lies as much in the honest conduct of it as its structure. The plain-jane conveyance of information is a very small part of it all.

    Featured image credit: Edgar Guerra/Unsplash.

  • Expertise’s place

    Over 1,600 scientists have signed a letter of protest addressed to the White House against its proposed definition of ‘gender’ that purportedly disidentifies transgender and intersex people. According to a press statement issued alongside the letter,

    The letter was a grassroots effort. Immediately following the publication of the New York Times article about the administration’s proposal, with its “grounded in science” claim, scientists began voicing their objections on social media. Twenty-two biologists and other scientists in related fields planned and wrote the letter collaboratively.

    The letter asks for the administration to withdraw the draft policy and for the petitioners’ “elected representatives to oppose its implementation”. It has been signed by over 1,600 people working as “biologists, geneticists, psychologists, anthropologists, physicians, neuroscientists, social scientists, biochemists, mental health service providers,” and in other fields.

    However, subject expertise has little role to play in the context of the letter, and certainly shouldn’t let the Trump administration off the hook simply because it believes only ‘scientific things’ are entitled to legal protection.

    If technical expertise were really necessary to disabuse the Trump administration of its misbelief that gender is a biological construct, the experts at the forefront should have included those qualified to comment meaningfully on how people build and negotiate gender. But even this wouldn’t save the letter from its principal problem: it seems to be almost exclusively offended by the Trump administration’s use of the phrase “grounded in science” over anything else, and devotes three paragraphs underlining the lack of empirical knowledge on this count. This is problematic.

    In transgender individuals, the existence and validity of a distinct gender identity is supported by a number of neuroanatomical studies. Though scientists are just beginning to understand the biological basis of gender identity, it is clear that many factors, known and unknown, mediate the complex links between identity, genes, and anatomy.

    In intersex people, their genitalia, as well as their various secondary sexual characteristics, can differ from what clinicians would predict from their sex chromosomes. In fact, some people will live their entire lives without ever knowing that they are intersex. The proposed policy will force many intersex people to be legally classified in ways that erase their intersex status and identity, as well as lead to more medically unnecessary and risky surgeries at birth. Such non-consensual gender assignment and surgeries result in increased health risks in adulthood and violate intersex people’s right to self-determination.

    Millions of Americans identify as transgender or gender non-conforming, or have intersex bodies, and are at increased risk of physical and mental health disorders resulting from discrimination, fear for personal safety, and family and societal rejection. Multiple standards of health care for transgender and intersex people emphasise that recognising an individual’s self-identified gender, not their external genitalia or chromosomes, is the best practice for providing evidence-based, effective, and lifesaving care. Our best available evidence shows that affirmation of gender identity is paramount to the survival, health, and livelihood of transgender and intersex people.

    A socio-cultural description of some of the ways in which Americans interpret gender, the challenges they may face and what they believe could be the appropriate way to address them are all conspicuous by absence. People are not rallying to this cause because science doesn’t yet know; that would be disingenuous. Instead, they are speaking up because the cultural experience of gender is missing from the White House’s articulation.

    Finally, more than following Trump’s draft policy into its hole of cultural elision, the letter itself seems to fail to distinguish between sex and gender. It says:

    The relationship between sex chromosomes, genitalia, and gender identity is complex, and not fully understood. There are no genetic tests that can unambiguously determine gender, or even sex.

    The relationship between sex chromosomes and genitalia is much better understood than the relationship between the two and gender identity. Further, sex can indeed be determined to a large extent by genetic tests. It is gender that is harder to associate with one’s genes because it is a social/cultural/political construct and genes aren’t its sole determinants. Sex is entirely biological and doctors around the world routinely determine the sex of newborns by studying their chromosomes.

    The following para also notes:

    In transgender individuals, the existence and validity of a distinct gender identity is supported by a number of neuroanatomical studies.

    It is doubtful if these studies demonstrate causation together with correlation.

    Notwithstanding the legal protections afforded to people of non-binary gender and the terms of their provision, the letter would have benefited by calling the policy out for framing it as an insular problem of science, not putting up an equally insular counter-argument and by being more wary of the language it employs to defend its stance. But as it stands, it proves to be by itself controversial.

  • Climate fear

    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently published a report exhorting countries committed to the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to an additional 1.5º by the end of this century. As if this isn’t drastic enough, one study has also shown that if we’re not on track to this target in the next 12 years, then we’re likely to cross a point of no return and be unable to keep Earth’s surface from warming by 1.5º C.

    In the last decade, the conversation on climate change passed by an important milestone – that of journalists classifying climate denialism as false balance. After such acknowledgment, editors and reporters simply wouldn’t bother speaking to those denying the anthropogenic component of global warming in pursuit of a balanced copy because denying climate change became wrongful. Including such voices wouldn’t add balance but in fact remove it from a climate-centred story.

    But with the world inexorably thundering towards warming Earth’s surface by at least 1.5º C, if not more, and with such warming also expected to have drastic consequences for civilisation as we know it, I wonder when optimism will also become pulled under the false balance umbrella. (I have no doubt that it will so I’m omitting the ‘if’ question here.)

    There were a few articles earlier this year, especially in the American media, about whether or not we ought to use the language of fear to spur climate action from people and governments alike. David Biello had excerpted the following line from a new book on the language of climate change in a review for the NYT: “I believe that language can lessen the distance between humans and the world of which we are a part; I believe that it can foster interspecies intimacy and, as a result, care.” But what tone should such language adopt?

    A September 2017 study noted:

    … the modest research evidence that exists with respect to the use of fear appeals in communicating climate change does not offer adequate empirical evidence – either for or against the efficacy of fear appeals in this context – nor would such evidence adequately address the issue of the appropriateness of fear appeals in climate change communication. … It is also noteworthy that the language of climate change communication is typically that of “communication and engagement,” with little explicit reference to targeted social influence or behaviour change, although this is clearly implied. Hence underlying and intertwined issues here are those of cogent arguments versus largely absent evidence, and effectiveness as distinct from appropriateness. These matters are enmeshed within the broader contours of the contested political, social, and environmental, issues status of climate change, which jostle for attention in a 24/7 media landscape of disturbing and frightening communications concerning the reality, nature, progression, and implications of global climate change.

    An older study, from 2009, had it that using the language of fear wouldn’t work because, according to Big Think‘s break down, could desensitise the audience, prompt the audience to trust the messenger less over time and trigger either self-denial or some level of nihilism because what else would you do if you’re “confronted with messages that present risks” that you, individually, can do nothing to mitigate. Most of all, it could distort our (widely) shared vision of a “just world”.

    On the other hand, just the necessary immediacy of action suggests we should be afraid lest we become complacent. We need urgent and significant action in both the short- and long-terms and across a variety of enterprises. Fear also sells. it’s always in demand irrespective of whether a journalist is selling it, or a businessman or politician. It’s easy, sensational, grabs eyeballs and can be effortlessly communicated. That’s how you have the distasteful maxim “If it bleeds, it leads”.

    In light of these concerns, it’s odd that so many news outlets around the world (including The Guardian and The Washington Post) are choosing to advertise the ’12-year-deadline to act’ bit (even Forbes’s takedown piece included this info. in the headline). A deadline is only going to make people more anxious and less able to act. Further, it’s odder that given the vicious complexities associated with making climate-related estimates, we’re even able to pinpoint a single point of no return instead of identifying a time-range at some point within which we become doomed. And third, I would even go so far as to question the ‘doomedness’ itself because I don’t know if it takes inflections – points after which we lose our ability to make predictions – into account.

    Nonetheless, as we get closer to 2030 – the year that hosts the point of no return – and assuming we haven’t done much to keep Earth’s surface warming by 1.5º C by the century’s close, we’re going to be in neck-deep in it. At this point, would it still be fair for journalists, if not anyone else, to remain optimistic and communicate using the language of optimism? Second, will optimism on our part be taken seriously considering, at that point, the world will find out that Earth’s surface is going to warm by 1.5º C irrespective of everyone else’s hopes.

    Third: how will we know if optimistic engagement with our audience is even working? Being able to measure this change, and doing so, is important if we are to reform journalism to the extent that newsrooms have a financial incentive to move away from fear-mongering and towards more empathetic, solution-oriented narratives. A major reason “If it bleeds, it leads” is true is because it makes money; if it didn’t, it would be useless. By measuring change, calculating their first-order derivatives and strategising to magnify desirable trends in the latter, newsrooms can also take a step back from the temptations of populism and its climate-unjust tendencies.

    Climate change journalism is inherently political and as susceptible to being caught between political faultlines as anything else. This is unlikely to change until the visible effects of anthropogenic global warming are abundant and affecting day-to-day living (of the upper caste/upper class in India and of the first world overall). So between now and then, a lot rests on journalism’s shoulders; journalists as such are uniquely situated in this context because, more than anyone else, we influence people on a day-to-day basis.

    Apropos the first two questions: After 2030, I suspect many people will simply raise the bar, hoping that some action can be taken in the next seven decades to keep warming below 2º C instead of 1.5º C. Journalists will make up both the first and last lines of defence in keeping humanity at large from thinking that it has another shot at saving itself. This will be tricky: to inspire optimism and prompt people to act even while constantly reminding readers that we’ve fucked up like never before. I’d start by celebrating the melancholic joy – perhaps as in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1891) – of lesser condemnations.

    To this end, journalists should also be regularly retrained – say, once every five years – on where climate science currently stands, what audiences in different markets feel about it and why, and what kind of language reporters and editors can use to engage with them. If optimism is to remain effective further into the 21st century, collective action is necessary on the part of journalists around the world as well – just the way, for example, we recognise certain ways to report stories of sexual assault, data breaches, etc.

  • What the Nobel Prizes are not

    The winners of this year’s Nobel Prizes are being announced this week. The prizes are an opportunity to discover new areas of research, and developments there that scientists consider particularly notable. In this endeavour, it is equally necessary to remember what the Nobel Prizes are not.

    For starters, the Nobel Prizes are not lenses through which to view all scientific pursuit. It is important for everyone – scientists and non-scientists alike – to not take the Nobel Prizes too seriously.

    The prizes have been awarded to white men from Europe and the US most of the time, across the medicine, physics and chemistry categories. This presents a lopsided view of how scientific research has been undertaken in the world. Many governments take pride in the fact that one of their citizens has been awarded this prize, and often advertise the strength of their research community by boasting of the number of Nobel laureates in their ranks. This way, the prizes have become a marker of eminence.

    However, this should not blind us from the fact that there are equally brilliant scientists from other parts of the world that have done, and are doing, great work. Even research institutions do this; for example, this is what the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, New Jersey, says on its website:

    The Institute’s mission and culture have produced an exceptional record of achievement. Among its Faculty and Members are 33 Nobel Laureates, 42 of the 60 Fields Medalists, and 17 of the 19 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as many MacArthur Fellows and Wolf Prize winners.

    What the prizes are

    Winning a Nobel Prize may be a good thing. But not winning a Nobel Prize is not a bad thing. That is the perspective often lost in conversations about the quality of scientific research. When the Government of India expresses a desire to have an Indian scientist win a Nobel Prize in the next decade, it is a passive admission that it does not consider any other marker of quality to be worth the endorsement. Otherwise, there are numerous ways to make the statement that the quality of Indian research is at par with the rest of the world’s (if not better in some areas).

    In this sense, what the Nobel Prizes afford is an easy way out. Consider the following analogy: when scientists are being considered for promotions, evaluators frequently ask whether a scientist in question has published in “prestigious” journals like Nature, Science, Cell, etc. If the scientist has, it is immediately assumed that the scientist is undertaking good research. Notwithstanding the fact that supposedly “prestigious” journals frequently publish bad science, this process of evaluation is unfair to scientists who publish in other peer-reviewed journals and who are doing equally good, if not better, work. Just the way we need to pay less attention to which journals scientists are publishing in and instead start evaluating their research directly, we also need to pay less attention to who is winning Nobel Prizes and instead assess scientists’ work, as well as the communities to which the scientists belong, directly.

    Obviously this method of evaluation is more arduous and cumbersome – but it is also the fairer way to do it. Now the question arises: is it more important to be fair or to be quick? On-time assessments and rewards are important, particularly in a country where resource optimisation carries greater benefits as well as where the population of young scientists is higher than in most countries; justice delayed is justice denied, after all. At the same time, instead of settling for one or the other way, why not ask for both methods at once: to be fair and to be quick at the same time? Again, this is a more difficult way of evaluating research than the methods we currently employ, but in the longer run, it will serve all scientists as well as science better in all parts of the world.

    Skewed representation of ‘achievers’

    Speaking of global representation: this is another area where the Nobel Foundation has faltered. It has ensured that the Nobel Prizes have accrued immense prestige but it has not simultaneously ensured that the scientists that it deems fit to adorn that prestige have been selected equally from all parts of the world. Apart from favouring white scientists from the US and Europe, the Nobel Prizes have also ignored the contributions of women scientists. Thus far, only two women have won the physics prize (out of 206), four women the chemistry prize (out of 177) and 12 women the medicine prize (out of 214).

    One defence that is often advanced to explain this bias is that the Nobel Prizes typically reward scientific and technological achievements that have passed the test of time, achievements that have been repeatedly validated and whose usefulness for the common people has been demonstrated. As a result, the prizes can be understood to be awarded to research done in the past – and in this past, women have not made up a significant portion of the scientific workforce. Perhaps more women will be awarded going ahead.

    This arguments holds water but only in a very leaky bucket. Many women have been passed over for the Nobel Prizes when they should not have been, and the Nobel Committee, which finalises each year’s laureates, is in no position to explain why. (Famous omissions include Rosalind Franklin, Vera Rubin and Jocelyn Bell Burnell.) This defence becomes even more meaningless when you ask why so few people from other parts of the world have been awarded the Nobel Prize. This is because the Nobel Prizes are a fundamentally western – even Eurocentric – institution in two important ways.

    First, they predominantly acknowledge and recognise scientific and technological developments that the prize-pickers are familiar with, and the prize-pickers are a group made up of all previous laureates and a committee of Swedish scientists. Additionally, this group is only going to acknowledge research that is already familiar with and by people its own members have heard of. It is not a democratic organisation. This particular phenomenon has already been documented in the editorial boards of scientific journals, with the effect that scientific research undertaken with local needs in mind often finds dismal representation in scientific journals.

    Second, according to the foundation that awards them, the Nobel Prizes are designated for individuals or groups who work has granted the “greatest benefit on mankind”. For the sciences, how do you determine such work? In fact, one step further, how do we evaluate the legitimacy and reliability of scientific work at all? Answer: we check whether the work has followed certain rules, passed certain checks, received the approval of the author’s peers, etc. All of these are encompassed in the modern scientific publishing process: a scientists describes the work they have done in a paper, submits the paper to a journal, the journal gets the paper reviewed up the scientist’s peers, once it is okay the paper is published. It is only when a paper is published that most people consider the research described in it to be worth their attention. And the Nobel Prizes – rather the people who award them – implicitly trust the modern scientific publishing process even though the foundation itself is not obligated to, essentially as a matter of convenience.

    However, what about the knowledge that is not published in such papers? More yet, what about the knowledge that is not published in the few journals that get a disproportionate amount of attention (a.k.a. the “prestige” titles like Nature, Science and Cell). Obviously there are a lot of quacks and cracks whose ideas are filtered out in this process but what about scientists conducting research in resource-poor economies who simply can’t afford the fancy journals?

    What about scientists and other academics who are improving previously published research to be more sensitive to the local conditions in which it is applied? What about those specialists who are unearthing new knowledge that could be robust but which is not being considered as such simply because they are not scientists – such as farmers? It is very difficult for these people to be exposed to scholars in other parts of the world and for the knowledge they have helped create/produce to be discovered by other people. The opportunity for such interactions is diminished further when the research conducted is not in English.

    In effect, the Nobel Prizes highlight people and research from one small subset of the world. There are a lot of people, a lot of regions, a lot of languages and a lot of expertise excluded from this subset. As the prizes are announced one by one, we need to bear these limitations in mind and choose our words carefully, so as to not exalt the prizewinners too much and downplay the contributions of numerous others in the same field as well as in other fields and, more importantly, we must not assume that the Nobel Prizes are any kind of crowning achievement.

    The Wire
    October 1, 2018

  • An epistocracy

    The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has proposed a new textbook that will discuss the ‘Indian knowledge system’ via a number of pseudoscientific claims about the supposed inventions and discoveries of ancient India, The Print reported on September 26. The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) signed off on the move, and the textbook – drawn up by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan educational trust – is set to be introduced in 80% of the institutions the AICTE oversees.

    According to the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan website, “the courses of study” to be introduced via the textbook “were started by the Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology under the Delhi Kendra after entering into an agreement with the AICTE”. They include “basic structure of Indian knowledge system; modern science and Indian knowledge system; yoga and holistic health care”, followed by “essence of Indian knowledge tradition covering philosophical tradition; Indian linguistic tradition; Indian artistic tradition and case studies”.

    In all, the textbook will be available to undergraduate students of engineering in institutions other than the IITs and the NITs but still covering – according to the Bhavan – “over 3,000 engineering colleges in the country”.

    Although it is hard to fathom what is going on here, it is clear that the government is not allowing itself to be guided by reason. Otherwise, who would introduce a textbook that would render our graduates even more unemployable, or under-employed, than they already are? There is also a telling statement from an unnamed scholar at the Bhavan who was involved in drafting the textbook; as told to The Print: “For ages now, we have been learning how the British invented things because they ruled us for hundreds of years and wanted us to learn what they felt like. It is now high time to change those things and we hope to do that with this course”.

    The words “what they felt like” indicate that the people who have enabled the drafting and introduction of this book, including elected members of Parliament, harbour a sense of disenfranchisement and now feel entitled to their due: an India made great again under the light of its ancient knowledge, as if the last 2,000 years did not happen. It also does not matter whether the facts as embodied in that knowledge can be considered at par with the methods of modern science. What matters is that the Government of India has today created an opportunity for those who were disempowered by non-Hindu forces to flourish and that they must seize it. And they have.

    In other words, this is a battle for power. It is important for those trying to fight against the introduction of this textbook or whatever else to see it as such because, for example, MHRD minister Prakash Javadekar is not waiting to be told that drinking cow urine to cure cancer is pseudoscientific. It is not a communication gap; Javadekar in all likelihood is not going to drink it himself (even though he is involved in creating a platform to tell the masses that they should).

    Instead, the stakeholders of this textbook are attempting to fortify a power structure that prizes the exclusion of knowledge. Knowledge is power, after all – but an epistocracy cannot replace a democracy; “ignorance doesn’t oppress in the same way that knowledge does,” to adapt the words of David Runciman. For example, the textbook repeatedly references an older text called the ‘Yantra Sarvasva’ and endeavours to establish it as a singular source of certain “facts”. And who can read this text? The upper castes.

    In turn, by awarding funds and space for research to those who claim to be disseminating ancient super-awesome knowledge and shielding them from public scrutiny, the Narendra Modi government is subjecting science to power. A person who peddles a “fact” that Indians flew airplanes fuelled by donkey urine 4,000 years ago no longer need aspire to scholarly credentials; he only has to want to belong to a socio-religious grouping that wields power.

    A textbook that claims India invented batteries millennia before someone in Europe did is a weapon in this movement but does not embody the movement itself. Attempts to make this textbook go away will not make future textbooks go away, and attempts to counter the government’s messaging using the language of science alone will not suffice. For example, good education is key, and our teachers, researchers, educationists and civil society are a crucial part of the resistance. But even as they complain about rising levels of mediocrity and inefficiency, perpetrated by ceaseless administrative meddling, the government does not seek to solve the problem as much as use it as an excuse to perpetrate further mediocrity and discrimination.

    There was no greater proof of this than when a member of the National Steering Committee constituted by the Department of Science and Technology to “validate research on panchgavya” told The Wire in 2017, “With all-round incompetence [of the Indian scientific community], this is only to be expected. … If you had 10-12 interesting and well-thought-out good national-level R&D programmes on the table, [the ‘cowpathy’] efforts will be seen to be marginal and on the fringe. But with nothing on the table, this gains prominence from the government, which will be pushing such an agenda.”

    But we do have well-thought-out national-level R&D programmes. If they are not being picked by the government, it must be forced to provide an explanation as to why, and justify all of its decisions, instead of letting it bask in the privilege of our cynicism and use the excuse of our silence to sustain its incompetence. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s textbook exists in the wider political economy of banning beef, lynching Dalits, inciting riots, silencing the media and subverting the law, and not in an isolated silo labeled ‘Science vs. Pseudoscience’. It is a call to action for academics and everyone else to protest the MHRD’s decision and – without stopping there – for everyone and the academics to vocally oppose all other moves by public institutions and officials to curtail our liberties.

    It is also important for us to acknowledge this because we will have to redraft the terms of our victory accordingly. To extend the metaphor of a weapon: the battle can be won by taking away the opponent’s guns, but the war will be won only when the opponent finds its cause to be hopeless. We must fight the battles but we must also end the war.

    The Wire
    September 27, 2018

  • Political activation

    … all forms of knowledge are implicated in political structures in one way or another. If the people who actually have expertise in that form of knowledge are not the ones activating it politically, then someone else is going to do it for them.

    – Curtis Dozier, publisher of Pharos. Source of quote here.

    Scientists communicating their work to the people is a way for them to take control of the narrative such that they can guide it the way they want it to go, they way they think it should go. But this is a small component of the larger idea of science stewardship. Without stewards – who can chaperone scientific knowledge through corridors of power as much as they can through the many streams of public dialogue – science, even if just the label, is going to be appropriated by “someone else” to be activated politically unto their ends. When the “someone else” is also bound to an enthno-nationalistic ideology, science is doomed.

  • I don’t want your ideas

    Tommaso Dorigo published a blog post on the Science 2.0 platform, where he’s been publishing his writing, that I would have liked to read. It was about whether neural networks could help design particle detectors on accelerators of the future. This is an intriguing idea considering neural networks have been pressed into improving diagnostic and problem-solving tasks in various other fields in an effort to leapfrog over barriers to the field’s expansion. And particle physics is direly in need of such efforts given the increasing gap between theoretical and experimental results.

    However, I couldn’t concentrate on Dorigo’s piece because the moment I realised that he was the author (having discovered the piece through its headline), my mind was befouled by the impression I have of him as a person – which is poor. This was the result of an interaction he had had on Twitter with astrophysicist Katherine Mack last year, in which he came across – from my POV – as an insensitive and small-minded person. I had written shortly after on the basis of this interaction that as much as we need more scientific insights, they or their brilliance should not excuse troubling behaviour on the scientist’s part.

    In other words, no matter how brilliant the scientist, if he is going to joke about matters no one should be joking about and simply being juvenile in his conduct, then he should not be accommodated in academia – or in public discourse – without sufficient precautions that will prevent him from damaging the morale of his non-male colleagues and peers. I am aware that there is no way Dorigo’s unwholesome ideas can affect my life but at the same time I don’t want to consume what he publishes and so contribute to the demand for his writing (even passively). This isn’t a permanent write-off: Dorigo is yet to apologise for his words (that I know of); silent repentance is not useful for those who witnessed that very public exchange with Mack.

    However, at the end of all this, there is no way for me to remove the idea of neural networks designing particle detectors from my consciousness. Plus given that ideas in science have to be attributed to those who originated them, this means I can’t explore Dorigo’s idea without reading more of Dorigo’s writing.

    At this point, I am tempted to ask that publishers, distributors, aggregators and platforms – all entities that share and distribute content on various platforms and through different services – ensure that the name of the author is present and accessible in the platform/service-specific metadata. This is because more and more people are starting to have discussions about whether genius should excuse, say, misogyny and concluding that it shouldn’t. People are also becoming more conscious of whose writing they are consuming and whose they are actively avoiding for various reasons. These decisions matter, and content distributors need to assist them actively.

    For example, I came upon Dorigo’s article via a Google News Alert for ‘high-energy physics’. The corresponding email alert looked like this:

    screen-shot-2018-09-21-at-18-40-03

    The headline, publisher’s name and the first score or so words of the article are visible in the article preview provided by Google. In the first item: the fact that it is also a press release is mentioned, but I am not sure if this is a regular feature. Although it is not immediately evident if the publisher is who it says it is, Google does not mask the URL if you hover over the link, there is only a forwarding prefix (`google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=<link>`).

    I have essentially framed my argument as a contest between discovering new ideas and avoiding others. For example, by choosing to avoid Dorigo’s writing, I am also choosing to avoid discovering the arguably unique ideas that Dorigo might have – and in the long-run give up on all that knowledge. However, this is an insular counterargument because there is a lot to be learnt out there. There is no reason I should have to put up with someone like Dorigo. Should a subsequent question arise as to whether we should tolerate someone who is doing something unique while also being misogynistic, etc.: the answer is still ‘no’ because it remains that nothing should excuse bad behaviour of that kind.