Root Privileges

Science

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  • Joi Ito’s nerd tunnel vision

    On August 15, Joi Ito, the director of MIT’s famed Media Lab, published a post apologising for fraternising with Jeffrey Epstein. His wording mimics a bit of George Church’s as well, in that Ito says he “was never involved in, never heard him talk about, and never saw any evidence of the horrific acts that he was accused of”.

    This ignorance is ridiculous coming from the director of an institution whose research draws from and influences different forms of media. Ito’s account exemplifies the ‘nerd tunnel vision’ that Church spoke about: where scientists are willing to ignore the adverse ethical or moral implications for them and their work if an endeavour will benefit them directly or indirectly. It’s like Epstein was looking for the sort of investments that would shield him from unfavourable attention and found it all among scientists because they don’t ask too many questions.

    However, as Church is careful to note, there’s no excuse for not keeping abreast of the news. It seems Ito has known Epstein since 2013 – giving him six years to discover that one of his major funders is a notorious sexual predator. Instead, he chose to step up only after the American media turned a glaring spotlight on the scandal.

    Indeed, Church noted that labs usually don’t have to bother about the moral/ethical quality of funding and that that is checked by a different part of the university administration. While this is suboptimal, I find it funny that Ito couldn’t have known when he was surely part of the MIT Media Lab’s efforts to identify and evaluate new funders.

    The charade doesn’t end here. Ito’s apology is also rendered ineffectual in part by the fact that he didn’t choose to speak up until eight months after the Miami Herald‘s investigation resuscitated the case against Epstein, and only shortly after Marvin Minsky’s involvement came to light. (Ethan Zuckerman, a philosopher at the Media Lab, calls Minsky the lab’s “co-founder”.) Earlier this month, The Verge reported that Minsky was one of the men that Epstein had forced young women to sleep with.

    On August 21, Zuckerman posted on his blog that he was going to leave the Media Lab at the end of the academic year because of Ito’s involvement with Epstein. “I feel good about my decision, and I’m hoping my decision can open a conversation about what it’s appropriate for people to do when they discover the institution they’ve been part of has made terrible errors,” he wrote.

    It sounds a bit ominous; is this going to be the end of the Media Lab itself? Ito hasn’t said anything about resigning as director. Instead, he wrote in his post: “I vow to raise an amount equivalent to the donations the Media Lab received from Epstein and will direct those funds to non-profits that focus on supporting survivors of trafficking. I will also return the money that Epstein has invested in my investment funds.”

    The money Epstein poured into the lab itself will stay, of course, presumably because it can’t be removed without significantly affecting the lab’s academic and research commitments. Let’s see what the lab’s other members – about 80 in total – have to say.

  • Anything but our Vedic heritage

    The Union culture ministry had announced in November last year that it would develop a ‘Vedic Heritage’ portal to promote the Vedas, and hoped to inaugurate it by March 2019. It would seem the portal is finally online (with the last update posted on July 29, 2019). Though Arun Goel, the then (and present) secretary to the ministry, had hailed it as a “new paradigm” to disseminate “pure scientific information” last year, a sampling of its contents suggests it is only more of the same.

    Consider the following, drawn from one document that claims ancient Hindu texts far surpass the abilities of modern particle physics to describe the fundamental nature of reality.

    In word science, by dropping last letter ‘e’, pronounciation of the leftover word ‘scienc’ would be nothing else than Saankhya, but may be with slightly different dialect. It means that Sankhya Darshana was regarded as the book of science and word science was accepted as the synonym of Saankhya, centuries before Christ.

    In fact, there is little on the portal’s pages to suggest good scholarship – or any scholarship – and is the usual Hindutva revanchism in yet another bottle. Almost all the documents have been published under the banner of ‘Vijnana Bharati’, a nonprofit organisation with a focus on “swadeshi science”. Some excerpts + comments from the particle physics document follow (or you could skip to the next section):

    The beauty of Sanskrit language is in its evocative and meaningful vocabulary. As every word is created with some root, following some grammatical laws, one word may have many meanings. Therefore, while seeking the right meaning of a Vaidic Richa, it is required to select the right meaning of the word. Some times the same Richa or the Mantra may provide the explanations related to the God, the Jeevatmaa, or the Prakriti. It depends on the selection of right series of related meanings, and the procedure adopted in finding its explanations.

    Sounds like cherry-picking…

    The Vedas, as well as the Vaidic Particle Physics (VPP), starts knowing a thing, right from the sub-base of the foundation and then to the rest of the structure. The VPP starts its studies of the universe right from the study of the building blocks of this huge creation, while the modern science is awfully confused on the question of building blocks.

    It’s probably “awfully confused” because it has allowed itself to be guided by evidence instead of presupposing what the building blocks could be.

    They are producing confusing and illusive theories like the Quark Theory, which has consumed more than three decades of thousands of scientists. They still keep the destination far away. The other prevailing theory, the S-matrix Theory and its Bootstrap Approach is much in line with the VPP, except a slight but significant difference.

    This suggests an inability or reluctance (probably the former) to admit complexity, as well as an unwillingness to accept that a prevailing theory of particles can explain some things perfectly well but fail to make sense of something else, and still be considered a legitimate description of reality.

    (There’s an interesting bit of history here: Max Planck – whose research sparked the 20th century revolution of quantum mechanics – struggled to make sense of energy quantisation because it forced him to “sacrifice” his “previous convictions about physics” (source). Niels Bohr would help resolve this dilemma with his philosophy of correspondence: that a new theory that extends the application of an older theory in a new domain must replicate the predictions of the old theory in the older domain. In effect, different theories could apply to different domains of study and simply correspond with one another instead of having to be fundamentally unified and apply in all domains at once to be true.)

    Second, the author’s preference for “S-matrix Theory” is fascinating. S-matrix theory was developed in the 1960s as an alternative to quantum field theory but lost out. However, it was later refurbished and reinterpreted as string theory, which today has progressed so far from its seeds that the author’s sympathy for S-matrix theory seems to be just that. Then again, we could be splitting hair here.

    In the VPP, after studying the state of affairs and before beginning the creation of universe, as mentioned in the Vedas, we find certain amazing properties of the Prakriti. One of the properties is its dual behaviour. Individually it behaves like a particle, while collectively, its behaviour is like energy.

    Why? Who cares.

    This property is described in the Rigveda 10/129. … In the Mantra 2 and 3, three imperative words appear: Aaneed awaatam, Swadhyaa, and Salilam. The first word, aaneed awaatam means the energy, which was inert, which was not active, not flowing, which was in the stagnant form like water confined in a jar. … On arrival of creation period, everything became active and creative energy. This substance of the stagnant energy on being active becomes raw material for the creation of the universe. It means the material cause of the creation of everything is energy.

    Evidence? Who cares.

    Mr. Geoffrey Chew, one of the principal architects of S-matrix theory and its Bootstrap Approach and Fritjof Capra, considers energy to be the material cause of the creation. In S-matrix theory, there are no distinct entities and no basic building blocks; there is only a flow of energy showing certain well-defined patterns. The second part of the above statement shows that the above theory is in line with the VPP. It is the first part of the statement, which has ‘the slight but significant difference’ as we mentioned…

    Let’s ignore comma discipline for a moment. This is cherry-picking plain and simple: to associate with a theory of physics after the fact in an attempt to inherit its now-dead credibility. Second, such cameo invocation of Fritjof Capra is possible likely because former Union home minister Rajnath Singh did something similar in November 2014. Capra and his The Tao of Physics are beloved of the Hindutvawadis because of the book’s quest for parallels between quantum mechanics and eastern philosophy.

    The second very important word is Swadhayaa. It means self-consistent, self-supporting or self-generated. The mist-like substance filled in everywhere was not created by some body, nor was it supported by some thing.

    S-matrix theory proposed to describe the properties of particles without the notions of space-time and within an abstract mathematical object called the scattering matrix (hence the name). So when the “mist-like substance filled in everywhere”, where or what is ‘everywhere’?

    The third important word appeared in the third Mantra of the Sookta and that is Salilam. The word salila is usually taken as the synonym of water. No doubt, the water is an example of salila, but it does not mean salila. Unadisootra defines salila to be the fluid. The Oxford dictionary says ‘fluids consists of particles that move freely among themselves and yield to the slightest pressure’. It means that the Salilam is the group of particles with the least or no cohesion in between.

    Being a fluid does not mean having no cohesion between particles. Water is strongly cohesive. ‘Salilam’ – whatever it is – may be fluid but that identity doesn’t preclude adhesive or cohesive behaviour, and raises suspicions that the author could be interpreting the text wrong.

    This confirms that according to the Vedas the substance filled in before creation was in the form of energy as well as in the form of particles. … There is nothing to get upset on this statement; there is nothing new in it. … The filled in substance, which has dual characteristics, is termed as Prakriti by the Saankhya Darshan, the Vaidic book in particle physics. The Vedas call this as ‘Aditi’.

    This is upsetting.

    Now, when we accept the particle form of the Prakriti particle, we accept all the mathematics related to the particle. After all, it must have some geometry, some mass, and some volume. We know they would be very small. They could have been 10-50 gm (mass) or 10-50 cc (volume). This figure may have been smaller or greater. What so ever, it must bear some mass and some volume.

    The assumption of implicit and explicit properties is not mathematics. More importantly, this is an attempt at a qualitative description of physical reality, and, due to its presumed inviolability, a pretty bad one at that.

    The author goes on to define three gunas, or natures, that make up all Prakriti particles. Their organisation is such that no Prakriti particle can be composed of only one or two of the gunas but must by definition encompass all three. The author equates the feature to the persistence of magnetic dipoles but it seems to me to be more like asymptotic freedom. Then:

    When the time to commence the creation is arrived, the balanced state of the three gunas in the particle is smashed and the direction of the acting gunas is reversed from inwards to outwards. At the moment, the particle ceases to be recognised as Prakriti, and then it becomes Mahat. This sudden change in the direction of application comes with a great impact and results in the big bang as the mantra suggests.

    The passive voice is a menace. Apart from keeping sentences long and clunky, it also glosses over active agency. “She threw the ball” becomes “the ball was thrown”, and “X smashed the particle” becomes “the particle is smashed”. There is no discussion of where or what X is because X has been removed from the equation.

    The rest of the document descends into more nonsensical descriptions of the electromagnetic force and electric and magnetic fields, among other things. This is nonsensical not because its conclusions are at odds with what we have uncovered using the methods of science and mathematics but because it does not tolerate argument, leave alone doubt, and is nonplussed with contradictions. There is no room to disagree, so agreement itself is rendered meaningless.

    In the last half-decade or so, pseudoscience has become a grave threat to India’s democracy. This document – together with the 41 others like it listed on the ‘Vedic Heritage’ website – contribute to it, together with the silence of those who know the texts are spurious but won’t speak up, by spreading false knowledge from a position of authority.

    For example, one of the documents, entitled ‘A Glimpse of Science in Ancient India – Retrospection from IISc’, claims “astrology has a basis in science” and that “much of the criticism [of] astrology can be traced to a complete ignorance or misunderstanding of the … law of karma.” One of its authors, K.I. Vasu, founded Vijnana Bharati. Will IISc’s top scientists speak up?

    However, there is even more at stake here. The culture ministry’s effort to promote the study of the Vedas is pernicious to serious and legitimate Vedic scholarship above all else.

    The Government of India’s excuse to support and promote pseudo-scholarship has been that doing so will uplift the Hindu politico-religious identity. However, it has only come at the expense of efforts to properly preserve Vedic texts and their interpretations over the centuries, to institute centres of study free of bureaucratic interference, to support scholars with grants and scholarships and to ensure India – the home of the Vedas – is also the place where modern Vedic scholarship is at its best. But this is the exact opposite of what has been done.

    The same can be said of Sanskrit, the language of ancient India’s Brahmins and to which ministers of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are so quick to attribute linguistic supremacy. But apart from championing its virtues in public addresses, the ministry of culture has done nothing in the last half decade to preserve it as a language. Did you know, for example, that “the first people to leave behind evidence of having spoken Sanskrit aren’t Hindus or Indians [but] Syrians”? (Source)

    The BJP’s fascistic outlook and majoritarian politics doesn’t have room for such possibilities, and whose attitude is generally opposed to the conditions necessary for honest, rigorous study. Look no further than the treatment meted out to the likes of Audrey Truschke, Sheldon Pollock and Patricia Sauthoff. The ‘Vedic Heritage’ website is what the BJP would have in their stead, and in the process ruin the cultural heritage that belongs equally to all Indians.

  • Discovering Vikram Sarabhai

    I just read through a collection of Vikram Sarabhai’s important speeches and papers compiled by members of the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad, to pick a suitable portion to excerpt on the occasion of Sarabhai’s birth centenary tomorrow. There was one portion I would have loved to publish but it belonged to a larger text that had originally been printed by an American NGO, and another the rights for which now belonged – of all companies – Elsevier. So I went with an eminently safe option: an enlightening convocation address Sarabhai delivered on August 1, 1965, at IIT Madras.

    The purpose of this excerpt is twofold: to recall Sarabhai’s sharp mind and to remind India of Sarabhai’s views on certain matters the country is presently occupied with. The collection didn’t have only three instances of both these conditions being met; that was just the shortlist. The longlist contained multiple choices that intrigued me. In fact, taken all together, the collection painted an image of Sarabhai somewhat different from the one I had constructed based on what I had read in the news. For example, no doubt Sarabhai was smart but that smartness was devoted almost exclusively to industrial development. Most of his speeches, even including one on “the role science is currently playing in promoting national goals”, involve attempts to characterise a problem or ambition at hand in terms of utilitarian concepts and definitions, following which he analyses their pros and cons, or performs a comparative analysis, and sifts out a proper course of action.

    It could certainly be, among other possibilities, that the PRL collected only those papers and speeches discussing quantitative measures in its collection, but it is still remarkable that in these presentations from 1959 to 1971, Sarabhai was seldom a story-teller and almost always a problem-solver guided by (what he recognised to be) the needs of the country. Without saying anything about whether this may have been a virtue in the India of 1960s, there is little to no evidence (within the collection) that Sarabhai was motivated to pursue any of his grand ambitions – whether spaceflight or nuclear power generation – for anything other than to transform India from being ‘underdeveloped’ to ‘developed’, together with Homi J. Bhabha and Jawaharlal Nehru.

    In fact, the sole exception to Sarabhai’s tendency to appear to be in control in the collection is the IIT Madras convocation address, riddled with rhetorical questions and groping for answers for sociopolitical problems within the principles of nuclear physics. This I hope you will enjoy reading tomorrow.

  • Would you take Epstein’s money to fund your research?

    Note: Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell on August 10, 2019. The following post was written before news of his death emerged.

    In 2016, I attended a talk by a not-unknown environmental activist in Chennai (not Nityanand Jayaraman, before you ask) who had spent many years stitching together community efforts to restore water bodies around Tamil Nadu. His talk covered the various challenges of his work as well as the different ways in which he overcame them. The one that stood out was his being absolutely okay with receiving donations to support his work from any and all sources, irrespective of their rectitude. He encouraged others to not shirk from any opportunity to accrue wealth because, to rephrase him, you never know why you are going to need it or when it is going to dry up.

    This particular activist was a man of simple means but one thing he did have, and arguably needed to have, was the conviction that his work was useful and necessary. Notwithstanding his personal character (only because I didn’t know him that way), most people in the audience that day judged his work — or what they had been told of it — to be important and, of course, good. Most of us are not so lucky. We often have to be very careful about the way we view our work — as a public good or, more precariously, the ‘greater good’, for example — and the things we are prepared to do to justify working on.

    Recently, scientists have been in the news in connection to this question thanks to an unlikely cause: Jeffrey Epstein. On August 5, STAT News published an interview of George Church, the noted American geneticist, biologist and teacher, where he apologised for having “contacts” with Epstein “even after the financier pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution”. The interview has so many parts about the behaviour of scientists around billionaires worth chewing on; consider the following example:

    Universities are supposed to vet potential donors who ask to meet with a faculty member, especially if they want to fund research. Epstein made a donation to Church’s lab for “cutting edge science and education” from 2005 to 2007. “My understanding is this [vetting] is the responsibility of the development office, which is yet another reason why scientists are a little bit more relaxed,” Church said. “They feel they have administrators, who in theory do the difficult job of figuring out who’s legit.” Epstein’s donation went into what Church called “a general account used to get new projects going before we have enough preliminary data to warrant a formal grant application.”

    Later, the article continued:

    As for whether Epstein’s 2008 conviction gave Church (a father and grandfather) pause, he said, “I did read a couple of news articles” a decade ago, he said, “but they weren’t clear enough for me to know there was a serious problem.” (The full extent of Epstein’s crimes came out in an investigation by the Miami Herald in 2018; in the New York Times, a 2006 story [described] Epstein’s not-guilty plea … and one in 2008 characterized the allegations as “involving massages with teenage girls”). “But that is still no excuse for me not being abreast of the news.”

    How much can you blame scientists for receiving money from tainted sources? I am not sure of the answer. Receiving and using money from corrupt individuals, and certainly those as morally and ethically corrupt as Epstein, is a problem because doing so:

    a) Allows the corrupted to claim a form of redemption, especially when they can exploit a shortage of funds required for risky projects

    b) Encourages the scientist to harbour an exceptionalism: that she gets to define what ‘good’ is through her work, and

    c) Creates the demand, so to speak, that sustains the problematic supply, but this is an admittedly weak contention in this particular case.

    At the same time, funding for research has been hard to come by. How often would a scientist stop to check if money sourced through a different department in her university came from a convicted sex offender – money that would ensure she and her students would get paid for the next few months, and possibly provide a way for her to produce research to further ingratiate herself with the university? Not very, possibly because she hasn’t been habituated to check.

    This said, the scientist doesn’t get off the hook because the larger argument to be made, or problem to be solved, here is that scientists shouldn’t assume their responsibilities are restricted to their labs. They ought to be as aware of whoever is funding them as, say, journalists are expected to be if only because the same standards should apply to everyone, or at least to every community that prizes independence and self-regulation. This is necessary beyond considerations of one’s relationship with the rest of society, and towards eliminating the imbalance of power that is sure to erupt between a donor who knows how consequential their wealth can be and the researcher who stands to be manipulated by it. For example, she could be tempted to design future projects in ways that are likelier to attract funding and, of course, ruffle fewer feathers.

    (I am aware of the difficulties of working scientists, so I don’t say that the solution – such as it is – is to berate them until they make better choices as much as large-scale reform over many years.)

    Notwithstanding (important) questions of financial independence, the use of tainted money for a self-proclaimed ‘good’ would at the least form a moral shield for the corrupt funder to hide behind. However, the extent to which this should concern the scientist is doubtful, especially if she is able to insulate herself and the products of her intellect from the influence a sizeable donation is likely to carry. Another argument could be that we should frame these narratives around those who do ‘good’ instead of obsessing over how they render those who do ‘bad’.

    For a tangential example, India’s National Green Tribunal recently slapped Volkswagen with a hefty fine of Rs 500 crore ($71 million) for cheating on emission tests, up from the Rs 171 crore recommended by a special panel. This was because, to quote the tribunal’s principal bench:

    … the measure of damages has to be fixed taking into account not only the actual damage but also the magnitude and the capacity of the enterprise so that compensation has deterrent effect. … [The] worth of the company is stated to be $75 billion. Thus, apart from actual damage by a conservative estimate, deterrent element has to be considered, specially in view of international unethical practice.

    Let us ignore for a moment that the Supreme Court has stayed this order and assume that Volkswagen deposited Rs 500 crore with the Central Pollution Control Board. We would have considered this a great victory, since Rs 500 crore would have increased India’s environment budget for 2019 by 15%, and expected the board to put the money to good use. Similarly, if rich people commit crimes and are convicted, their punishment could carry a big fine in addition to a prison sentence and commensurate to their personal wealth, to be deposited with an independent body staffed by experts from different fields who decide how that money is spent.

    This said, it might also be worth asking if the research project is so important or so urgent that its stewards can’t look beyond the first available source of funds, towards less controversial options. Think of it as a contest between the kind of example we want to set as a society about the foundations of our knowledge systems and if it matters that the funds are directed towards studies that are unlikely to be undertaken through other means. For example, on July 11, Peter Aldhous reported for BuzzFeed that between 2012 and 2014, Epstein donated to projects on melanoma, Crohn’s disease, consciousness research and one to develop open source software for AI. Is it possible to appreciate these contributions while condemning the enormity of Epstein’s crimes at the same time?

    It might be useful to draw a line here between the likes of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the one hand and, say, community colleges on the other. The former already boast of multiple donors and don’t stand to lose much by forgoing $250,000. However, the latter don’t have nearly enough and even $50,000 to a single institution could make a big difference. It would be a tragedy if there are no alternatives to Epstein’s money, but when there are, it becomes harder to justify the need for it. It is also not lost on any of us that ties between professors at these privileged universities and Epstein run even deeper, to the extent that they fly on his private jet to attend TED talks and then defend him in public using “empirical evidence” shorn of all social context.

    All of these questions disappear if government sources pay more for R&D; put another way, such are the questions that raise their heads when private sources of funding overshadow public ones. However, the early 21st century has been characterised by, among other things, an increasingly pervasive mistrust of experts, if not expertise. Leaders of large nations like India, Brazil, the US, the UK, the Philippines and Australia have consistently placed business interests above safeguarding their natural resources, flying in the face of scientific consensus and protest. Public investment in higher education, healthcare and R&D has stagnated or has fallen in the last few years, increasing researchers’ reliance on the private sector. (In India, the government has on occasion expressed interest to the point of dictating which questions researchers should and shouldn’t pursue.) At this time, what is the right thing for a scientist to do?

    The answer isn’t necessarily a blanket policy that says ‘accept the money’ or ‘don’t accept the money’. Instead, what is okay and what is not has to be negotiated by those who receive it, with knowledge of their specific circumstances, the relative importance of their work, what they think the consequences could be, and inevitably informed by their personal moral compasses. So the first thing scientists ought to do is step out of the neatly organised lab and into the messy real world, and not leave their public image to be mediated by a university press office with potentially divergent priorities. To paraphrase Church, there is no excuse for not being abreast of the news.

  • When deGrasse Tyson pulled a Pinker

    Since this post was published, an upward-edited version has been republished on The Wire.

    Twitter is, among other things, that place on the internet where people fight over the tips of icebergs. There is often the presumption that what ends up on Twitter has been thought through and carefully condensed to fit into the arbitrary 280-character limit, but then again, there is also ample evidence to the contrary: many of its users get caught up in the tips that they think that’s all there is. These possibilities cast a dark shadow on Twitter’s claim to represent reality. More often than not, it is its own world, and has nothing to do with the world around it except that it collects the worst opinions from there unto itself. Last night Neil deGrasse Tyson joined in:

    deGrasse Tyson has been one of those people calling attention to how what we’re reading about science on the web is often just a pinhole-sized snapshot of a more glorious thing lying hidden from view – just like an iceberg. Reading him, you’d think that when he says stuff about astronomy and cosmology, he’s not losing any context and that he’s simply presenting what he can in 280 characters on the microblogging platform. Then again, the tweet above appears to be evidence to the contrary: a tweet that seems to presume to contain all the arguments and histories of the five issues it mentions in (exactly) 280 characters and which, in one fell swoop, dismisses all the outrage of the political left.

    It certainly gets my goat that the left has been painted as anti-fact and that the right is guided by righteous logic when in fact this is the result of the deeper dismissal of the validity of the social sciences and humanities, which have served throughout history to make facts right and workable in their various contexts. The right has appropriated the importance of quantitative measures – and that alone – and brandishes it like a torch even as the world burns below.

    For example, As Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation and VP of strategy of the Oslo Freedom Forum, recently wrote in the New Republic, “dictators love development statistics” because “they’re an easily faked way to score international points”. Excerpt:

    From the development initiatives of Jeffrey Sachs and Bill Gates, to Tony Blair’s despotic partnerships or Tom Friedman championing Chinese autocracy in The New York Times, the last two decades have seen political concerns repeatedly sidelined by development statistics. The classic defence of dictatorship is that without the messy constraints of free elections, free press, and free protests, autocrats can quickly tear down old cities to build efficient new ones, dam rivers to provide electricity, and lift millions out of poverty. The problem with using statistics to sing the praises of autocracy is that collecting verifiable data inside closed societies is nearly impossible. From Ethiopia to Kazakhstan, the data that “proves” that an authoritarian regime is doing good is often produced by that very same regime.

    And by attacking the validity of the social sciences and humanities, the left has effectively had the rug pulled out from under its feet, and the intellectual purpose of its existence delegitimised. We’re still talking about deGrasse Tyson’s tweet because, in his view, it seems facts are all there is, that data alone should settle the debate but that emotions are unnecessarily stretching it out. Thousands of other tweets swirl around it in response, telling him that he’s right even though the left will eat him alive for it.

    You see, the right is the data and the left is the “soft science”, which – Quillette would have you believe – might as well be a synonym for ‘non-data’ and nonsense. And the only challenge the right is prepared to brook, or pretends to be prepared to brook, is numbers: those symbols that work one digit at a time, one character at a time, but which putatively contain everything you need to know about something, no further explanation required. This exaltation of mathematical logic, and Boolean algebra and lambda calculus, we’ve already seen before in the revanchist politics of the ‘New Atheist’ movement, and perhaps more recently when a Silicon Valley dude announced he had rediscovered history.

    Anyway, right now, I, nor anyone else, don’t have – shouldn’t have – just numbers to rebut deGrasse Tyson’s argument because that’s not all there is. But I personally feel compelled to try to come up with something concise if only to see what I come up with, and it’s this: deGrasse Tyson is pulling a Steven Pinker*. The first three numbers on the list in his tweet have been on a downward trend for quite some time thanks to a) pharmaceutical innovation, b) increasing awareness of and sensitivity about what those issues actually stand for, and c) policies that open new avenues of treatment and legislation that deters casualties. (However, trends in disease mortality are currently being ‘disrupted’ by the rise of antimicrobial resistance, climate change and – lest we forget – the lopsided effects of these stressors on already-stressed economies.) The fourth number, despite being about accidents and not wilful acts of malice actuated by the availability of guns, has also been on the decline (except for a relatively small spike in absolute numbers in 2016):

    Credit: Dennis Bratland/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

    Pinker is relevant here because of his disingenuous conclusion that the world is becoming a better place, and that cognitive biases are to blame for the left’s unwillingness to acknowledge that. His analyses are problematic because, especially in the domain of environmental action, they provide snapshots of the full picture – as if he’s content to work with the tips of icebergs. For example, consider the following excerpt from a rebuttal by George Monbiot to Pinker’s claim that countries become cleaner as they get richer, in the latter’s 2018 book Enlightenment Now:

    Pinker suggests that the environmental impact of nations follows the same trajectory, claiming that the “environmental Kuznets Curve” shows they become cleaner as they get richer. To support this point, he compares Nordic countries with Afghanistan and Bangladesh. It is true that they do better on indicators such as air and water quality, as long as you disregard their impacts overseas. But when you look at the whole picture, including carbon emissions, you discover the opposite. The ecological footprints of Afghanistan and Bangladesh (namely the area required to provide the resources they use) are, respectively, 0.9 and 0.7 hectares per person. Norway’s is 5.8, Sweden’s is 6.5 and Finland, that paragon of environmental virtue, comes in at 6.7.

    David Bell, a historian of science, took aim at a different portion of the book, in which Pinker appeared to be blind to the efforts of people who had fought, struggled and bent the arc of justice to serve them, instead labouring with the presumption that people should stop complaining because life has just automatically become better:

    Did Enlightenment forms of reasoning and scientific inquiry lie behind modern biological racism and eugenics? … Not at all, Pinker assures us. That was just a matter of bad science. … But Pinker largely fails to deal with the inconvenient fact that, at the time, it was not so obviously bad science. The defenders of these repellent theories, used to justify manifold forms of oppression, were published in scientific journals and appealed to the same standards of reason and utility upheld by Pinker. “Science” did not by itself inevitably beget these theories … The later disproving of these theories did not just come about because better science prevailed over worse science. It came about as well because of the moral and political activism that forced scientists to question data and conclusions they had largely taken for granted.

    deGrasse Tyson, it would seem, has fallen prey to a similar bout of snapshotism: he has cherry-picked one moment in history where the number of gun-deaths (per 48 hours) is lower than the number of deaths due to medical errors, flu, suicide and car accidents, all shorn of the now-denounced context that humankind and all its broken systems are trying to improve them.

    What his tweet, which presumes to be the entire iceberg in some people’s worldview when in fact it is only the tip, fails to say is that America is doing little to nothing to prevent more gun deaths from happening, and in fact whose political establishment has often condoned the deleterious cultures of white nationalism and “involuntary celibacy” that powers it. If deGrasse Tyson had compared the effects of gun deaths on the conscience of a nation with the global failure to make polluters pay, with rising income inequality, with the decreasing resilience to pandemics in the developing world or with nationalism+xenophobia, he’d have been closer to the truth of it: We don’t have to be ashamed of deaths due to medical errors, fly, suicide and car accidents, but we do have to be ashamed of mass murders.

    https://twitter.com/voxdotcom/status/1158064114482253824

    *deGrasseTyson also falls prey to a bit of the “poverty first, Moon/Mars next” fallacy in assuming that if there are multiple problems, they must be solved one after another even if the resources exist for us to tackle some or all of them in parallel.

  • Epstein’s friends from the ‘Reality Club’

    New York magazine has published an alphabetised list of the names of people that find mention in Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘black book’, a log book of sorts in which he kept track of the people he entertained, including at his residence and onboard his private jet, both venues of Epstein’s horrible exploitation of young women. The first name on the list is “Allen, Woody” and the last, “Zuckerman, Mort”; somewhere in between, there’s this about the ‘Reality Club’:

    What seems new, in flipping through the reams of society photos of perhaps the world’s most prolific sexual predator that have been circulating over the past few weeks, is not the powerful and the beautiful who surrounded Epstein, but the intellectuals — the Richard Dawkinses, the Daniel Dennetts, the Steven Pinkers. All men, of course. But the group selfies probably shouldn’t have been a surprise — documents of an age in which every millionaire doesn’t just fancy himself a philosopher-king but expects to be treated as such, and every public intellectual wants to be seen as a kind of celebrity.

    On point. The rituals of scholarship haven’t spared any man from the temptations of misplaced self-importance, if not outright power; in fact, on many occasions they have been the means to accrue it. Just ask Jorge Domínguez, Jeff Galindo, William V. Harris, Jason Lieb, Lawrence Krauss, Michael Katze, Geoff Marcy, Christian Ott, Thomas Pogge, John R. Searle or, perhaps most recently, Inder Verma – all of whom were passively protected by a network of academic institutions that financially benefited from the presence of these men on their campuses even as they continued to sexually harass, allegedly or decidedly, their coworkers and/or students. (Pinker and Dawkins have only helped this conclusion along with their displays of “poor scholarship” and “unthinking certitude”.)

  • Prestige journals and their prestigious mistakes

    On June 24, the journal Nature Scientific Reports published a paper claiming that Earth’s surface was warming by more than what non-anthropogenic sources could account for because it was simply moving closer to the Sun. I.e. global warming was the result of changes in the Earth-Sun distance. Excerpt:

    The oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field are likely to be caused by the solar inertial motion about the barycentre of the solar system caused by large planets. This, in turn, is closely linked to an increase of solar irradiance caused by the positions of the Sun either closer to aphelion and autumn equinox or perihelion and spring equinox. Therefore, the oscillations of the baseline define the global trend of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance over a period of about 2100 years. In the current millennium since Maunder minimum we have the increase of the baseline magnetic field and solar irradiance for another 580 years. This increase leads to the terrestrial temperature increase as noted by Akasofu [26] during the past two hundred years.

    The New Scientist reported on July 16 that Nature has since kickstarted an “established process” to investigate how a paper with “egregious errors” cleared peer-review and was published. One of the scientists it quotes says the journal should retract the paper if it wants to “retain any credibility”, but the fact that it cleared peer-review in the first place is to me the most notable part of this story. It is a reminder that peer-review has a failure rate as well as that ‘prestige’ titles like Nature can publish crap; for instance, look at the retraction index chart here).

    That said, I am a little concerned because Scientific Reports is an open-access title. I hope it didn’t simply publish the paper in exchange for a fee like its less credible counterparts.

    Almost as if it timed it to the day, the journal Science – Nature‘s big rival across the ocean – published a paper that did make legitimate claims but which brooks disagreement on a different tack. It describes a way to keep sea levels from rising due to the melting of Antarctic ice. Excerpt:

    … we show that the [West Antarctic Ice Sheet] may be stabilized through mass deposition in coastal regions around Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers. In our numerical simulations, a minimum of 7400 [billion tonnes] of additional snowfall stabilizes the flow if applied over a short period of 10 years onto the region (~2 mm/year sea level equivalent). Mass deposition at a lower rate increases the intervention time and the required total amount of snow.

    While I’m all for curiosity-driven research, climate change is rapidly becoming a climate emergency in many parts of the world, not least where the poorer live, without a corresponding set of protocols, resources and schemes to deal with it. In this situation, papers like this – and journals like Science that publish them – only make solutions like the one proposed above seem credible when in fact they should be trashed for implying that it’s okay to keep emitting more carbon into the atmosphere because we can apply a band-aid of snow over the ice sheet and postpone the consequences. Of course, the paper’s authors acknowledge the following:

    Operations such as the one discussed pose the risk of moral hazard. We therefore stress that these projects are not an alternative to strengthening the efforts of climate mitigation. The ambitious reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is and will be the main lever to mitigate the impacts of sea level rise. The simulations of the current study do not consider a warming ocean and atmosphere as can be expected from the increase in anthropogenic CO2. The computed mass deposition scenarios are therefore valid only under a simultaneous drastic reduction of global CO2 emissions.

    … but these words belong in the last few lines of the paper (before the ‘materials and methods’ section), as if they were a token addition to what reads, overall, like a dispassionate analysis. This is also borne out by the study not having modelled the deposition idea together with falling CO2 emissions.

    I’m a big fan of curiosity-driven science as a matter of principle. While it seemed hard at first to reconcile my emotions on the Science paper with that position, I realised that I believe both curiosity- and application-driven research should still be conscientious. Setting aside the endless questions about how we ought to spend the taxpayers’ dollars – if only because interfering with research on the basis of public interest is a terrible idea – it is my personal, non-prescriptive opinion that research should still endeavour to be non-destructive (at least to the best of the researchers’ knowledge) when advancing new solutions to known problems.

    If that is not possible, then researchers should acknowledge that their work could have real consequences and, setting aside all pretence of being quantitative, objective, etc., clarify the moral qualities of their work. This the authors of the Science paper have done but there are no brownie points for low-hanging fruits. Or maybe there should be considering there has been other work where the authors of a paper have written that they “make no judgment on the desirability” of their proposal (also about climate geo-engineering).

    Most of all, let us not forget that being Nature or Science doesn’t automatically make what they put out better for having been published by them.

  • To be a depressed person reading about research on depression

    It’s a strangely unsettling experience to read about research on an affliction that one has, to understand how scientists are obtaining insights into it using a variety of techniques that allow them to look past the walls of the human and into their mind, so to speak, with the intention of developing new therapeutic techniques or improving old ones. This is principally because it suggests, to me, that we – humankind – don’t scientifically know about X in toto whereas I – the individual sufferer – claims to understand what it is like to live with X.

    Of course, I concede that the experiment in question is an exercise in quantification and doesn’t seek (at least if its authors so intend) to displace my own experience of the condition. Nonetheless, the tension exists, especially when scientists claim to be able to model X with a set of equations.

    Do they suggest I’m a set of equations, that they claim to understand how I have been living my life for eight years using a bunch of symbols on paper through which they think they could divine my entire being?

    I have been learning, writing and reading about physics for the last decade and have been a science journalist and editor since 2012. Experiences in this time have allowed me a privileged view (mostly for the short span in which it could be assimilated) of what the scientific enterprise is, how it works, how scientific knowledge is organised, etc. As a result, I believe I am better placed to understand, for example, the particular mode of reductionism employed when scientists simulate a predetermined part of this or that condition in order to understand it better.

    This isn’t a blanket empathy, however; it’s more an admission of open-mindedness, such as it is. While not speaking about a specific experiment, I have come to understand that such de facto reductive experiments are necessary – especially when the evolution of certain significant parameters can be carefully controlled – because the corresponding results are otherwise impossible to deduce through other means, at least with the same quality. In fact, in my view, this is less reductionism and invisibilisation and more ansatz and heuristics.

    This is why I also see a flip side: the way scientists approach the problem, so to speak, has potential to redefine some aspects of my relationship with the affliction for the better. (It was a central part of my CBT programme.) To be clear, this isn’t about the prescriptive nature of what the scientists have been able to conclude through their studies and experiments but about the questions they chose to ask and the ways in which they decided to answer, and evaluate, them.

    For example, on June 17, the journal Nature Human Behaviour published a paper that concluded, based on reinforcement learning techniques, that “anxious or depressed humans change their behaviour much faster after something bad happens”, to quote from an explanatory post written by one of the authors. They were able to do so because, “for each real person – those with mood and anxiety symptoms and those without – we [could] generate an artificial computerised agent that mimics their behaviour.”

    Without commenting at all on the study’s robustness or the legitimacy of the paper, I’d say this sounds about right from personal experience: I display “mood and anxiety symptoms” and tend to play things very safe, which often means I’m very slow to have new experiences. Now, I have the opportunity to conduct a few experiments of my own to better ascertain that this is the case and then devise solutions, assisted by the study’s methods, that will help me eliminate this part of the problem. As the same note states, “Developing a deeper understanding of [how] symptoms emerge may eventually allow us to close [the] treatment gap” (with reference to the success rate of CBT ∪ medication, apparently about 66-75%).

    Which brings me to the other thing about research on an affliction that one has: it exposes you. This may not seem like a significant problem but from the individual’s perspective, it can be. When a discovery that is specific to my condition is broadcast, I often feel, if only at first, that I am no longer in control of what people do and don’t know about me. Maybe “it’s textbook”, as they say, but I will never acknowledge that about myself even if it is, at whichever level, true, nor would I like others to believe that I am as predictable as a set of equations would have it – but at the same time I don’t want anyone to believe the method of interrogation employed in the study is illegitimate.

    Thankfully, this feeling often dissipates quickly because the public narrative, at least among scientists, who are also likely to be discussing the findings for longer, is often depersonalised. However, there is that brief period of heightened apprehension – a sense of social nudity, as it were – and I have wondered if it tempts people into conforming with preset templates of public conduct vis-à-vis their affliction: either be completely open about it or completely closed off. I chose to be open about it; fortunately, I am also very comfortable with being this way.

  • The ‘could’ve, should’ve, would’ve’ of R&D

    ISRO’s Moon rover, which will move around the lunar surface come September (if all goes well), will live and and die in a span of 14 days because that’s how long the lithium-ion cells it’s equipped with can survive the -160º C-nights at the Moon’s south pole, among other reasons. This here illustrates an easily understood connection between fundamental research and its apparent uselessness on the one hand and applied science and its apparent superiority on the other.

    Neither position is entirely and absolutely correct, of course, but this hierarchy of priorities is very real, at least in India, because it closely parallels the practices of the populist politics that privileges short-term gains over benefits in the longer run.

    In this scenario, it may not seem worthwhile to fund a solid-state physicist who has, based on detailed physicochemical analyses, fashioned for example a new carbon-based material that can store lithium ions in its atomic lattice and has better thermal characteristics than graphite. It may seem even less worthwhile to fund researchers probing the seemingly obscure electronic properties of materials like graphene and silicene, writing papers steeped in abstract math and unable to propose a single viable application for the near-future.

    But give it twenty years and a measure of success in the otherwise-unpredictable translational research part of the R&D pipeline, and suddenly, you’re holding the batteries that’re supposed to be installed on a Moon rover and need to determine how many instruments you can pack on there to ensure the whole ensemble is powered for the whole time they’ll need to conduct each of their tests. Just as suddenly, you’re also thinking about what else you could’ve installed on the little machine so it could’ve lived longer, and what else it could’ve potentially discovered in this bonus time.

    Maybe you’re just happy, knowing how things have been for research in the country in the last two decades and based on the spaceflight organisation’s goals (a part of which the government has a say in), that the batteries can even last for two weeks. Maybe you’re just sad because you think it could’ve been better. But one way or another, it’s an inescapably tangible reminder that investments in research determine what you’re going to get to take out of the technology in the future. Put differently: it’s ridiculous to expect to know which water molecules are going to end up in which plant, but unless you water the soil, the plants are going to start wilting.

    Chandrayaan 2 itself may be lined up to be a great success but who knows, there could come along a future mission where a groundbreaking instrument developed by an inspired student at a state university has to be left out of an interplanetary satellite because we didn’t have access to the right low-density, high-strength materials. Or where a bunch of Indians are on a decade-long interstellar voyage and the captain realises crew morale is dangerously low because the government couldn’t give two whits about social psychology.

  • Making history at the speed of light

    Last week, Sophia Gad-Nasr, an astroparticle physicist and PhD student at University of California, Irvine, tweeted this question:

    To which I replied:

    Once you start thinking about it, this is a really mind-boggling thing. A part of history – as in the past – has physical character. This is because the fastest anything can travel in the universe is at the speed of light, including information.

    In this regard, history is like the blockchain: it’s regarded as history only if multiple people, and not just you, are able to agree on what exactly happened (just like a cryptocurrency transaction is acknowledged only if all members of the blockchain have registered it individually). So if you know something and you’d like to have your friend know it as well, you ping them on WhatsApp, make a call, shout it across the room, etc. None of these messages can travel faster than at the speed of light in vacuum.

    As a result, history itself – as information encoded in physical mediums – cannot propagate faster than at the speed of light. Of course, you can nitpick that history doesn’t travel and that it’s communication that’s limited to the speed of light, to which I’d retort with the claim that history is made at the speed of light. And this claim has many, many consequences for our knowledge of the universe.

    For example, we know that the universe is expanding because a mysterious form of energy, called dark energy, is pulling it apart, faster and faster. While the effects thus far can only be experienced at the intergalactic scale, it’s plausible that there is a point of time in the future when the universe will be expanding so fast that its pace will outstrip the speed at which we can communicate, leaving us stranded in a volume of spacetime that we can never, ever communicate beyond and past which information from the outside won’t reach us. (I discussed this in greater detail in June 2016.)

    For another, astronomers and cosmologists who want to know more about what the early universe could have looked like need simply to build more powerful telescopes that gaze deeper into the cosmos. This is evident by the formulation of the unit of distance called the light-year: it is the distance light travels in one year (in vacuum, about 9.46 trillion km). Therefore, light that is 100 years away from reaching us is likely to carry information from a century ago. Light that is billions of years away from reaching us is likely to carry information encoded billions of years ago.

    And to find this light – these photons – we need telescopes that can look billions of kilometres into the depths of space. (Note: By ‘look’, I don’t mean that these telescopes snatch distant photons and transport them to our location; instead, they’re simply instruments that are sensitive enough to register photons considerably weakened in the course of their long voyage.) As of today, the farthest object astronomers have observed, and verified, is a galaxy named GN-z11 at a distance of 32 billion light-years.

    If you’re wondering how this is possible when the universe formed only 13.8 billion years ago, it’s because the universe has been expanding since. In fact, the farthest astronomers can observe today (on paper, at least) is a distance of about 46.5 billion light-years in any direction, making up a sphere known as the observable universe. Its outermost edge corresponds to a time 378,000 years after the Big Bang. Thanks to dark energy, the fraction this sphere constitutes of the whole universe is shrinking. Anyway, this means GN-z11 formed less than half a billion years after the Big Bang.

    By pushing NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to its limits, an international team of astronomers has shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the farthest galaxy ever seen in the universe. Caption and credit: NASA

    In 1941, Isaac Asimov published his short story Nightfall, whose plot centred on just the moment when light from the last star visible in the sky twinkles out, never to be seen again because the universe is expanding faster than at the speed of light. Though the moment comes to be because of the increasing vastness of space, Asimov rightly identifies it as the onset of a perpetual claustrophobia, comparing it to the journey of a group of people through a dark tunnel for 15 minutes.

    What was the matter with these people?’ asked Theremon finally.

    ‘Essentially the same thing that was the matter with you when you thought the walls of the room were crushing in on you in the dark. There is a psychological term for mankind’s instinctive fear of the absence of light. We call it “claustrophobia”, because the lack of light is always tied up with enclosed places, so that fear of one is fear of the other. You see?’

    ‘And those people of the tunnel?’

    ‘Those people of the tunnel consisted of those unfortunates whose mentality did not quite possess the resiliency to overcome the claustrophobia that overtook them in the Darkness. Fifteen minutes without light is a long time; you only had two or three minutes, and I believe you were fairly upset.

    ‘The people of the tunnel had what is called a “claustrophobic fixation”. Their latent fear of darkness and enclosed places had crystalized and become active, and, as far as we can tell, permanent. That’s what fifteen minutes in the dark will do.’

    There was a long silence, and Theremon’s forehead wrinkled slowly into a frown. ‘I don’t believe it’s that bad.’

    ‘You mean you don’t want to believe,’ snapped Sheerin. ‘You’re afraid to believe. Look out the window!’

    Theremon did so, and the psychologist continued without pausing. ‘Imagine darkness – everywhere. No light, as far as you can see. The houses, the trees, the fields, the earth, the sky – black! And stars thrown in, for all I know – whatever they are. Can you conceive it?’

    ‘Yes, I can,’ declared Theremon truculently.

    And Sheerin slammed his fist down upon the table in sudden passion. ‘You lie! You can’t conceive that. Your brain wasn’t built for the conception any more than it was built for the conception of infinity or of eternity. You can only talk about it. A fraction of the reality upsets you, and when the real thing comes, your brain is going to be presented with the phenomenon outside its limits of comprehension. You will go mad, completely and permanently! There is no question of it!’

    He added sadly, ‘And another couple of millennia of painful struggle comes to nothing. Tomorrow there won’t be a city standing unharmed…’