Analysis – Page 12

Slate Star Codex: No time for malice

This post benefited from valuable input and feedback from Thomas Manuel.

To the uninitiated: Scott Alexander Siskind is a noted member of the international community of rationalists and wrote the once-celebrated blog Slate Star Codex. I use the past tense because Siskind used to write this blog from the relative obscurity afforded by using only his first and middle names – ‘Scott Alexander’ – and which was threatened after a New York Times reporter got in touch to profile him, and then decided to ‘out’ his identity thanks to some editorial rule the reporter said he was was bound by.

Siskind, fearing for his privacy as well as the wellbeing of his clients (he’s a psychiatrist by profession) threatened to delete his entire blog if the reporter didn’t back off – and then proceeded to do so. At the time of the incident, Siskind also called for support from his readers, who flooded the New York Times with telephone calls, emails and online comments, cancelled their subscriptions in droves, and also doxxed (revealed online without permission and with an intent to harass) the reporter’s personal information. Siskind subsequently restored his blog posts and also moved to Substack, where he currently writes under the title ‘Astral Codex Ten’ using his full name.

The New York Times profile in question was published on February 14 under the authorship of reporter Cade Metz. Many members of the rationalists’ community centred on Slate Star Codex have described the article as a “hit job” and it has since become something of a referendum, at least on one other intellectual’s blog (Shtetl Optimized by Scott Aaronson), on the appropriate way to sanction journalists and/or news publishers that fail to properly represent the views of their subjects to their audience.

(I’m an occasional reader of Slate Star Codex, now Astral Codex Ten, but have never been a full participant of the rationalist movement. I occasionally pop in and out and absorb interesting ideas. I also don’t defend the rationalists, being aware of the tendency of most members of this community to over-rationalise, to debate ideas without paying attention to their social consequences, which often lie outside the realm of reason, and to be cynical of politics.)

Here are a few contiguous paragraphs from the article that I think capture its spirit and purpose:

Part of the appeal of Slate Star Codex, faithful readers said, was Mr. Siskind’s willingness to step outside acceptable topics. But he wrote in a wordy, often roundabout way that left many wondering what he really believed.
Mr. Aaronson, the University of Texas professor, was turned off by the more rigid and contrarian beliefs of the Rationalists, but he is one of the blog’s biggest champions and deeply admired that it didn’t avoid live-wire topics.
“It must have taken incredible guts for Scott to express his thoughts, misgivings and questions about some major ideological pillars of the modern world so openly, even if protected by a quasi-pseudonym,” he said.
It was the protection of that “quasi-pseudonym” that rankled Mr. Siskind when I first got in touch with him. He declined to comment for this article.
As he explored science, philosophy and A.I., he also argued that the media ignored that men were often harassed by women. He described some feminists as something close to Voldemort, the embodiment of evil in the Harry Potter books. He said that affirmative action was difficult to distinguish from “discriminating against white men.”
In one post, he aligned himself with Charles Murray, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in “The Bell Curve.” In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people “are genetically less intelligent than white people.”
He denounced the neoreactionaries, the anti-democratic, often racist movement popularized by Curtis Yarvin. But he also gave them a platform. His “blog roll” – the blogs he endorsed – included the work of Nick Land, a British philosopher whose writings on race, genetics and intelligence have been embraced by white nationalists.
In 2017, Mr. Siskind published an essay titled “Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due to Offensive Attitudes.” The main reason computer scientists, mathematicians and other groups were predominantly male was not that the industries were sexist, he argued, but that women were simply less interested in joining.
That week, a Google employee named James Damore wrote a memo arguing that the low number of women in technical positions at the company was a result of biological differences, not anything else – a memo he was later fired over. One Slate Star Codex reader on Reddit noted the similarities to the writing on the blog.
Mr. Siskind, posting as Scott Alexander, urged this reader to tone it down. “Huge respect for what you’re trying, but it’s pretty doomed,” he wrote. “If you actually go riding in on a white horse waving a paper marked ‘ANTI-DIVERSITY MANIFESTO,’ you’re just providing justification for the next round of purges.”

There are some obvious problems with the article. The foremost is that Metz makes some questionable assumptions about the foundations of Siskind’s arguments to the effect that Siskind sounds like a conservative, dogmatic person who draws on questionable scholarship to frame his thoughts. This is quite off-target. The article also oversimplifies some of the rationalist community’s positions, although this may be unavoidable in anything less than a book-length treatment of such an involved subject.

On the other hand, a not inconsiderable amount of the Slate Star Codex community’s derision towards the New York Times seems to be rooted in the idea that the newspaper is pursuing a smear campaign – ostensibly in retaliation for Siskind asking his (sizeable) audience to call on New York Times editors to not have his name outed, but who also went on to doxx Metz. Siskind wrote on his Substack after the article was published:

The New York Times backed off briefly as I stopped publishing, but I was also warned by people “in the know” that as soon as they got an excuse they would publish something as negative as possible about me, in order to punish me for embarrassing them.

The “in the know” bit sounds funny to me because, based on my experience at The Hindu at least, it’s extremely unlikely for a legacy newspaper to identify one person that’s giving one reporter a tough time as a threat to the extent that the institution, as such, considers intentionally doxxing him – not to mention an accusation like this also insults the intelligence of the people it. I agree with journalist and Gawker cofounder Elizabeth Spiers’s take on this view:

SSC is influential in a small but powerful corner of the tech industry. It is not, however, a site that most people, even at The New York Times, are aware exists—and certainly, the Times and its journalists are not threatened by its existence. They are not out to destroy the site, or “get” Scott, or punish him. At the risk of puncturing egos: they are not thinking about Scott or the site at all. Even the reporter working on the story has no especial investment in its subject.

I also agree with Will Wilkinson, a politics writer and author, on the limited point of the Slate Star Codex community’s conviction that Metz’s actions were malicious, that Metz or the New York Times were “out to get them”. Instead, Wilkinson argues, the community need only examine the sequence of events from Metz’s point of view to find that common sense offers a simpler and more rational explanation.

Somebody tells Metz about SSC, he finds it really interesting, wants to write some kind of article about Siskind, his popular and influential blog, and the fascinating community around it. He starts to do some preliminary research. … Metz contacts Siskind and at some point he tells Scott that he already knows his real name and at some point Scott tells Metz it’s very important that he doesn’t use his real name. Metz says, sorry, house rules say I have to use your real name. To Metz, things are already getting pretty interesting. He’s a reporter. He’s not going to take what people tell him at face value. He’s probably wondering why Scott’s really sweating so hard about his real name. Then, at some point Siskind flips the fuck out and tells the Times that he’s going to burn SSC to the ground if they don’t promise not to use his real name. At this juncture basically any competent reporter is going to think, “Whoa! Yeah, there’s something deeper here for sure.”
Well, the Times won’t promise, so Siskind actually does it. This seems super-crazy and the natural journalistic response to it is “What the hell is this man hiding? What’s he so afraid I’ll find on his blog?”
Let’s pause to acknowledge that Siskind eventually acknowledged that he had been behaving in a way that seemed incredibly suspicious to outside observers and that it does make a great deal of completely non-malicious sense for a journalist to tune into this. It’s interesting, though, that this apparently hadn’t occurred to him. “Contacts in the news industry” had to tell him.

But as it happens, Siskind had assumed similarly well before the New York Times article was published: that Metz or the newspaper may not be thinking as much about Slate Star Codex’s true identity as much as Siskind and the community was:

I think they just didn’t expect me to care about anonymity as much as I did. In fact, most of my supporters, and most of the savvy people giving me advice, didn’t expect me to care as much as I did. … Realistically, my anonymity let me feel safe and comfortable. But it probably wasn’t literally necessary to keep me alive. I feel bad admitting this, like I conscripted you all into a crusade on false pretenses. Am I an entitled jerk for causing such a stir just so I can feel safe and comfortable? I’m sure the New York Times customer service representatives who had to deal with all your phone calls thought so. …
In the New York Times‘ worldview, they start with the right to dox me, and I had to earn the right to remain anonymous by proving I’m the perfect sympathetic victim who satisfies all their criteria of victimhood. But in my worldview, I start with the right to anonymity, and they need to make an affirmative case for doxxing me. I admit I am not the perfect victim. The death threats against me are all by losers who probably don’t know which side of a gun you shoot someone with. If anything happened at work, it would probably inconvenience me and my patients, but probably wouldn’t literally kill either of us. …
I don’t think anyone at the Times bore me ill will, at least not originally. But somehow that just made it even more infuriating. In Street Fighter, the hero confronts the Big Bad about the time he destroyed her village. The Big Bad has destroyed so much stuff he doesn’t even remember: “For you, the day [I burned] your village was the most important day of your life. For me, it was Tuesday.” That was the impression I got from the Times. They weren’t hostile. I wasn’t a target they were desperate to take out. The main emotion I was able to pick up from them was annoyance that I was making their lives harder by making a big deal out of this. For them, it was Tuesday.

I sort of also see Siskind’s point here: it’s unreasonable to destabilise a community because it failed to explain the terms of its existence to an interloper. Instead, his anonymity and the reasons for it could have been part of the story, irrespective of Metz’s and others’ assertion that Scott Alexander’s last name wasn’t hard to find.

Some others, but also Wilkinson, have read this ‘privacy v. public interest’ contention a bit differently, by invoking Siskind’s presumed absolute right to free speech. I’m personally uncomfortable with the Slate Star Codex community’s view that the interference of Siskind’s right to free speech with his profession as a psychiatrist (and the wellbeing of his patients) shouldn’t be seen as a confounding factor in his decision to react with arguably disproportionate alarm when Metz expressed his intent to use Siskind’s full name – and that the newspaper isn’t very much to blame here. But I can’t be sure if this matters to how Metz constructed the Slate Star Codex profile.

Very broadly, Wilkinson questions the cons of free-speech absolutism not just vis-à-vis the topics that benefit from such a license (like white supremacy or “women have smaller brains”) but vis-à-vis the concept itself. He argues that the absolute right to free speech and a right to anonymity can’t go together, and it’s possible from a journalistic standpoint that Metz may have been encouraged by this incompatibility and by the fact of Siskind’s name showing up after a few searches on Google to ‘reveal’ his last name.

But I think this argument is neither here nor there – plus the profile doesn’t contain any evidence that this is how Metz approached the decision (some anecdotal reports I came across suggested Metz was simply following some newsroom rule). This alternative also doesn’t sit well with Spiers’s and Siskind’s shared belief that the New York Times may never care about the consequences of its gaze on a particular subject more than the subject will.

But the profile being what it is, Scott Aaronson – and I’m sure many others – have decided to boycott Cade Metz, meaning they won’t speak to him on future stories, in an effort to register their disapproval.

Is this fair? I think it’s hard to be sure, although I also suspect this question may be moot. Right now, I’ve yet to find a self-consistent explanation for either party to stand its ground. The verbosity of all the arguments in this debate, save for the New York Times profile itself, is also quite suspicious. I’m implicitly wary of arguments that overuse words because it’s a sign, to me, that the author is either attempting to massage the reader’s intelligence into accepting an otherwise unintelligent, and often deleterious, proposition or that the author is trying to make a point that they themselves don’t fully understand yet. (I may be guilty of either given the length of this post.)

For now, I can see why, without agreeing with it, Aaronson et al have decided to boycott Metz. The relationship between a reporter and their source has only one degree of freedom – trust – and that’s what Aaronson et al have resolved to strike at. But based on what I have read, I don’t see water in the community’s argument that Metz’s efforts have resulted in a “hit job” that violated their trust, of being represented ‘fairly’, by focusing on the rationalist community’s negative attributes. This seems like the rationalists are conflating journalism and reputation management – even considering the New York Times has one of the world’s largest newspaper audiences and a single misinformed article can deal significant reputational damage.

In Aaronson’s and Siskind’s telling, Metz did the rationalists a disservice by focusing on the “wrong” parts of what made Slate Star Codex awesome. But as Wilkinson, Spiers and others have argued, their very ability and freedom to collect as rationalists and openly discuss potentially dangerous or even antisocial ideas is hard to separate from the fact that the rationalists are also “overwhelmingly white and male and clustered in a very narrow of range of heavily white, male analytical symbol manipulation occupations” – a fact that the rationalists tend to dismiss as a distraction.

On the other hand, Metz’s article – while definitely not a “hit job” – is flawed where it seems to imply Siskind’s guilt by association with writers he’s quoted, topped off by the decision to reveal Siskind’s identity. At the same time, Metz is also justified in framing the article the way he did, or worked with his editor to do so.

This isn’t just in terms of, as Spiers put it, going where the story took him but also of revealing a relatively small and cloistered community to the larger world that mostly didn’t know the community existed. And I sense that the two parties couldn’t agree on the terms of this act of revelation.

This speaks to the larger question of yearning for objectivity where there is none. To one group, Slate Star Codex appeared to be yet another portal to fascism-curious thinking that is sustained not-inexplicably by yet another group of white men, and had some notable connections to Silicon Valley. To the other, Slate Star Codex was a salon at which certain people could gather to discuss topics that other members of society had decided they couldn’t debate without also contravening the limitations imposed on free speech.

The values underlying these positions are largely incommensurable, and I suspect the rationalists came away smarting not because they didn’t see the incommensurability but because they expected Metz or anyone else to be objective to the extent that the topics of conversation in the Slate Star Codex community and the demographic characteristics of the people who tended to have them wouldn’t matter.

I realise that this is an older, more-well-hashed debate, and I’m questioning myself whether this whole ‘scandal’ – on which many smarter people have expended tens of thousands of words – can be distilled to such a simple premise. But I’m more certain that disillusionment with the ‘view from somewhere’ is part of the story, even if ironically so considering the New York Times was synonymous with the futile pursuit of objectivity during the Trump presidency.

UAE’s spaceflight shortcut to making history

This post benefited from valuable input and feedback from Thomas Manuel.

In an hour or so, the UAE’s Hope probe, currently en route to Mars, will beam a signal to Earth about whether it managed to get into orbit around the red planet. Thanks to the Indian experience of the same feat, achieved in 2014, we all know what this moment must be like to the people of the UAE… I think.

I’m also seeing a lot of quotes doing the rounds on Twitter and also in the news including messages of Arab pride, that this moment is a success for the Arab world irrespective of whether the Hope probe successfully completes orbital capture. While I’m sure a lot of writers will unpack the meaning of this moment in the days to come – including the fact that the UAE’s riches in particular are erected on a desperate workforce that migrated to the Gulf in search of better fortunes, and still labours in the shadows with none of the labour rights that the country’s full-time citizens enjoy – I hope some of them will be able to focus on two things: the connection between making history and spaceflight itself, and between UAE’s age and ambitions.

On the first count, the complexity of spaceflight seems to offer a shortcut, of sorts, to history-making today: perfecting a rocket launch, building a functional satellite capable of lasting many months in space, deploying a suite of instruments that can semi-autonomously investigate the properties of another world seems to be able to guarantee a significant amount of notability.

This is not tautological: there are many enterprises today that demand a considerable amount of resources, focus and skill to execute – a vaccination drive that doesn’t abuse its healthcare workers, for example, or even building a big bridge over the sea without injuring any of the workers involved in its construction, but neither compares to spaceflight in the latter’s ability to capture the public imagination. I suspect strongly that the crises currently facing humankind are becoming an increasingly larger part of this perception – both in terms of spaceflight being a sort of epitome of the human ability to innovate humankind’s way out of sophisticated problems as well as by stoking fantasies of escape – as might be the fact that spacefaring is a preoccupation of the billionaire class, and the capitalism world-system seems to be predicating the solutions to many of the world’s more wicked problems on the collective benevolence of these people.

In this sense, small but rich countries might as well be primed to buy their way into history – in this moment, today – using the spaceflight route, after doing the same thing in years past by benefitting from the exploitation of their natural resources, of outsourced labour and by offering anti-accountable financial services that help keep the global capitalist machine running.

Second, many Emiratis seem intent to make known the UAE’s relative youth – “some of our parents were born before the UAE became a country,” one social media post said – vis-à-vis the Hope probe’s impending orbital capture. It’s worth noting here that three prominent American universities were involved in putting the probe together. The Emirati monarchy may see reason to be proud here, considering the sort of internationalism they’ve been fond of promoting in Dubai, but the celebrations rooted in the UAE’s age (50 years) would be misplaced in turn. If anything, the UAE may demonstrate that in some particular enterprises of the 21st century, achieving great things needn’t have anything to do with national longevity – and in fact may benefit more from a political leadership able to do what it pleases.

Featured image credit: NASA.

Pandemic: Science > politics?

By Mukunth and Madhusudhan Raman

Former Union health secretary K. Sujatha Rao had a great piece in The Indian Express on January 14, whose takeaway she summarised in the following line:

Science, evidence and data analytics need to be the bedrock of the roll-out policy, not politics and scoring brownie points for electoral advantages.

However, we can’t help but be reminded of the difference between what should be and what will be. We all (at least those of us who have been on the same side since 2014) know what should be. But as we’ve seen with the National Registry of Citizens (NRC), the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) 2019 and most recently the farm laws, our present government doesn’t change its mind.

In the last example, the Supreme Court intervened to stay the laws’ implementation but the mediation committee it put together somehow wound up with most members being known to be sympathetic to the government’s position. So what will be, will be – and this is likely to be true vis-à-vis Covaxin as well.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already guaranteed as much by determining to foot the cost of 5.5 million doses of Covaxin using the PM CARES fund, which lies beyond public oversight. The Central Drug Standards Control Organisation also played its part by pushing through Covaxin’s approval on terms no one has heard of – and which no one can therefore falsify.

However, this isn’t a pitch for a nihilist position. When Sujatha Rao writes that the government should prize science, evidence and data more than politics and elections, she is right – but we must also ask why. The government has clear incentives to prioritise politics. By thrusting Bharat Biotech – Covaxin’s maker – to the forefront, Modi can claim his ‘Atma Nirbhar’ and ‘Make in India’ schemes have been successful. Also, two important state elections are around the corner: West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.

These are issues that people, but especially ‘Middle Indians’, have an eye on and according to which they vote. The government has also said it is approving Covaxin because it is concerned with the ‘UK variant’. While no reason can be good enough to justify the use of a vaccine candidate in the population sans data from phase 3 clinical trials, the government has effectively set up Covaxin to be failure-proof: if it works, it works; if it doesn’t, it becomes the fault of the variant.

Taken together, Modi’s biggest mistake here is criminal negligence – for pushing Covaxin in the absence of efficacy data (which leads to a cascade of ethical dilemmas) – especially since there are fewer questions over Covaxin’s safety. And negligence is a difficult case to stick to this party or in fact to many people.

Granted, public-spirited science teachers, communicators and journalists can take it upon themselves (ourselves) to persuade readers as to why Covaxin’s approval is really bad – that though everything may turn out okay, it sets a terrible precedent for what this government is allowed to do, how such unchecked power may wreak deadly havoc in future crises, and ultimately that we become a people okay with settling for less, increasingly blind to the banal incrementalism of evil.

In fact, if the mainstream press manages to forget concerns about vaccine apartheid within the country, the dominant narrative as the vaccine roll-out is a few months in is going to be: “India is doing just fine, thank you very much.”

But while the Modi government’s actions may only be negligent – albeit criminally so – in the domains of public healthcare and ‘scientific temper’, they amount to something more egregious if we include the political dimensions of our present moment as well.

None of this means words like those of Sujatha Rao are unnecessary. We need to never forget what should be, and we need to keep protesting for our own sakes. (“Protests sometimes look like failures in the short term, but much of the power of protests is in their long-term effects, on both the protesters themselves and the rest of society.” – Zeynep Tufekci) If we don’t, this government might pretend even less than it currently does that it is following some rules or guidelines from time to time.

However, limiting our exhortations to insist at every turn that “science is more important than politics during a pandemic” risks playing down the importance and influence of political motivations altogether – as well as assuming that the state machinery will automatically give way to scientific ones when lives are at stake.

A politician’s principal responsibility is not to govern but to win elections; good governance is a means to this electoral end. And the way people have voted for many decades attests to the reality of this incentive. While this claim may not be palatable from a theoretical point of view, consider it empirically: the Indian government has seldom responded to national crises to the detriment of potential electoral gains. Examples of such crises include the 1962, 1971 and 1999 conflicts, the nuclear tests and economic liberalisation. During the Emergency, the government itself embodied this crisis.

More recently, numerous ministers and diplomats urged the India and Pakistan governments to find diplomatic solutions after the Pulwama attack and also after the questionable Balakot airstrike, in early 2019. In previous years, they had been preceded by the disagreeable events of Aadhaar implementation, demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax. But Modi and his fellows won by a bigger margin in 2019 than they had five years earlier.

This happened partly because his success in elections rests on his impression as the Strongman of India, so his resolutions of choice involve flashy displays of strength and machismo.

Against this background: we need to admit political factors into the conversations we – rather, experts like health policymakers, heads of institutions, epidemiologists, healthcare workers, etc. – have from the beginning, instead of ruing the inevitable influence of politics later, so that we may anticipate it and take advantage of it.

For example, consider the conversation surrounding academic publishing. Academics perform most of the work that goes into publishing an academic paper (research, writing and reviewing). Publishing houses add only marginal value to journals – yet publishers charge exorbitant fees to access the results of publicly funded research once it is published. This is unfair, and many academics have said so.

However, the fact that publishing conglomerates are publicly traded companies whose primary responsibility is to generate profits for their shareholders finds little mention in conversations. In this case, the publishers’ profit-seeking motives are fundamental to the problem at hand – but are often disregarded in the first analysis (what should be) and subsequently bemoaned (what will be). For this to happen once is tragic; for it to repeat itself every few months is wasteful.

Similarly, the nationwide lockdown from March to July 2020 served a political purpose: it was a grand gesture, decisive, appealing to ‘Middle Indians’, in addition to supplying the government a pretext to disband protests against the CAA and the NRC. Just before the lockdown, the public conversation had been centred on what the government should be doing. However, most scientists and economists didn’t engage with the political dimension of this decision.

If we had, we may not have been side-tracked into conversations about weekend curfew versus night curfew, or cash transfers versus vouchers, etc. We would perhaps have recognised that our responsibility is not to operate within the parameters set by the government (“How effective was the lockdown?”) but instead recognise that the government’s decisions are politically motivated – so we can ask “Why lock down in the first place?”

Poverty, psychology and pseudoscience

From the abstract of ‘Why Do People Stay Poor? Evidence on Poverty Traps from Rural Bangladesh’, November 24, 2020:

There are two broad views as to why people stay poor. One emphasizes differences in fundamentals, such as ability, talent or motivation. The other, poverty traps view, differences in opportunities stemming from differences in wealth. We exploit a large-scale, randomized asset transfer and panel data on 6000 households over an 11 year period to test between these two views. The data supports the poverty traps view — we identify a threshold level of initial assets above which households accumulate assets, take on better occupations and grow out of poverty. The reverse happens for those below the threshold.

In the resulting worldview this ‘condition’ imposes on people, it’s tempting to see justification for the existence of pseudoscientific enterprises like astrology. Actually, a faith-based binary like ‘requiring faith’ v. ‘not requiring faith’ may be more appropriate here than a science-based binary (‘scientific’ v. ‘unscientific’), if only to emphasise the presence of faith here over the absence of scientific reasoning. So that is, while I can’t ascertain a causal relationship between conditions like the poverty trap and opaque practices like astrology, there’s enough of a correlation here to understand astrology et al as the means by which people rationalise their shared predicament – a predicament that refuses to be allayed by their own efforts.

For example, astrology could provide social, mental and moral incentives for individuals to believe – without having to know – that they were denied any opportunities because ‘their time isn’t right’ and/or that they will continue to luck out, while social realities instead of the alignment of their stars will ensure this is true in some measure. Such faith could also subdue or redirect individuals’ anger or sense of wrongdoing at forces beyond their control, creating ground for social conditions that tolerate oppression more than it ought to be.

Another observation this paper brings to mind is from the work of Sendhil Mullainathan, among others. Researchers from various fields have reported differences in the way poor people make decisions, compared to those who aren’t poor – as if they were less intelligent. However, this perception arises from a sort of cognitive John-Henryism: that is, just as disadvantaged members of society – like Black people in the US – can incur a physical toll imposed by the need to fight for their rights, poor people incur a cognitive toll brought on by the limited availability of resources and the short-lived nature of good fortune.

This doesn’t mean poor people become or are less intelligent, or anything nonsensical like that. Instead, it means poor people’s priorities are different – for example the need for discounts on products, and to maximise absolute savings over percentage savings – in a way that those who aren’t poor may not find optimal for their needs, and that more tasks compete for their attention when they are short on the resources required to execute all of them. As Alice Walton wrote for the Chicago Booth Review in 2018,

In the Wheel of Fortune–style game, the researchers [including Mullainathan] measured how cognitively fatigued the players became. Logic would predict that rich players would be more fatigued, since they were allowed more turns to make more guesses. Instead, the researchers observed that poor players, having received fewer tries to guess at the answers, were more fatigued, having put more effort into each guess.
In an Angry Birds–style game in which people tried to shoot targets, rich players were given more chances to train a virtual slingshot on a target. Poor players, given fewer attempts, spent longer lining up their shots, and many scored more points per shot than rich players. For all the extra shots rich players had, they didn’t do as well, proportionally. “It seems that to understand the psychology of scarcity, we must also appreciate the psychology of abundance. If scarcity can engage us too much, abundance might engage us too little,” the researchers write.

This toll subsequently compromises future choices, and effectively installs another barrier, or trap, in front of people trying to go from being poor in one resource – money, in poverty’s case – to being rich. Walton offers a few examples of policymakers building on these findings to devise better schemes and improve uptake.

In India, where sugarcane farmers are paid annually after the harvest, farmers’ attention scores were the equivalent of 10 IQ points higher than just before the harvest, when farmers were relatively poor, according to data from the 2013 Science study…
Offering subsidies or other incentives when people are more receptive to and have the spare capacity to consider them, such as after a harvest or a payday, may make a difference over the long run. One effort, in Tanzania, asked people to sign up for health insurance at cashpoint locations right after payday, and the timing led to a 20 percentage point increase in health-insurance use.
Introducing cognitive aids can help address the limited capacity for attention that may constrain people in poverty. In one study, it helped to show farmers research regarding the most productive ways to plant their crops. When poor, stressed, and in a scarcity mind-set, farmers had a harder time taking in the information. “This result has nothing to do with the intelligence of the farmers,” writes Bryan’s team. “A fact is only obvious if the observer has the spare attentional capacity to notice it.”

I wonder if the converse could also be true: that when homeopaths, phytotherapists, many Ayurveda practitioners and other quack healers offer dubious ways out of difficult healthcare situations, people who are short on attentional space could be likelier to buy into them in order to free up space for other tasks. If so, governments and activists may also need to consider fighting superstition and pseudoscience in healthcare by ensuring more legitimate outcomes – like visiting the local clinic or being able to procure a given drug – require as little cognitive bandwidth as possible.

The overlay bias

I’m not very fond of some highly popular pieces of writing (I won’t name them because I’m nervous about backlash from authors and/or their supporters) because a part of their popularity is undeniably rooted in technological ‘solutions’ that asymmetrically promote work published in the solution’s country of origin.

My favourite example is Pocket, the app that allows users to save copies of articles to read later, offline if required. Not long ago, Pocket introduced an extension for the Google Chrome browser (which counts hundreds of millions of users) such that every time you opened a new tab, it would show you three articles lots of other Pocket users have read and liked. It’s fairly brainless, ergo presumably non-malicious, and you’d expect the results to be distributed equally from among magazines, journals, etc. published around the world.

However, nine times out of ten – but often more – I’d find articles by NYT, The Atlantic, The Baffler, etc. there. I was reluctant to blame Pocket at first, considering their algorithm seemed too simple, but then I realised Pocket was just the last in a long line of other apps and algorithms that simply amplified existing biases.

Before Pocket, for example, there might have been Twitter, Facebook or some other platform that allowed stories from some domains (nytimes.com, thebaffler.com, etc.) to persist for longer on users’ feeds because they were more easily perceived to be legitimate than articles from other sources, say, a Venezuelan newspaper, a Kenyan blog, a Pakistani magazine or a Vietnamese journal. Or there might have been Nuzzle, which auto-compiles a digest of articles that others your friends on the social media have shared most – likely unmindful of the fact that people quite often share headlines, or domains they’d like to be known to be reading, instead of the articles themselves.

This is a social magnification like the biological magnification in nature, whereby toxic substances pile up in greater quantities in the gizzards of animals higher up in the food chain. Here, perceptions of legitimacy and quality accumulate in greater quantities in the feeds and timelines of people who consume, or even glance through, the most information. And this way, a general consciousness of what’s considered desirable erects itself without anything drastic, with just the more fleeting and mindless actions of millions of people, into a giant wheel of information distribution that constantly feeds itself its own momentum.

As the wheel turns, and The Atlantic publishes an article, it doesn’t just publish a good article that draws hundreds of thousands of readers. It also rides a wheel set in motion by American readers, American companies, American developers, American interests and American dollars, with a dollop of historical imperialism, that quietly but surely brings the world a good article plus a good-natured reminder that The Atlantic is good and that readers needn’t go looking for anything else because The Atlantic has them covered.

As I wondered in 2017, and still do: “Will my peers in India have been farther along in their careers had there been an equally influential Indian for-publishers tech stack?” Then again, how much is one more amplifier, Pocket or anything else, going to change?

I went into this tirade because of this Twitter thread, which describes a similar issue with arXiv – the popular preprint repo for physical sciences, computer science and applied mathematics papers (don’t @ me to quibble over arXiv’s actual remit). As the tweeter Jia-Bin Huang writes, the manuscripts that were uploaded last – i.e. most recently – to arXiv are displayed on top of the output stack, and what’s displayed on top of the stack gets more citations and readership.

This is a very simple algorithm, quite like Pocket’s algorithm, but in both cases they’re algorithms overlaid on existing bias-amplifying architectures. In a sense, they’re akin to the people who might stand by and watch a lynching, neither egging the perpetrators on nor stopping them. If the metaphor is brutal, remember that the effects on any publication or scientist that can’t infiltrate or ‘hack’ social biases are brutal as well. While their contents and their ideas might deserve international readership, these publications and scientists will need to spend more – energy, resources, effort – to grab international attention again and again.

The example Jia-Bin Huang cites is of scientists in Asia, who – unlike their American counterparts – can’t upload a paper on arXiv just before the deadline so that their papers sit on top of the stack because 2 pm in New York is 3 am in Taipei.

As some replies to the thread indicated, the people maintaining arXiv can easily solve the problem by waiting for the deadline to pass, then randomising the order of papers displayed in its email blast – but as Jia-Bin Huang notes, doing that would mean negating the just-in-time advantage that arXiv’s American users enjoy. So here we are.

It isn’t hard to see how we can extend the same suggestion to the world’s Pockets and Nuzzles. Pick your millions of users’ thousand most-read articles, mix up their order – even weigh down popular American publishers if necessary – and finally advertise the first ten items from this list. But ultimately, until technological solutions actively negate the biases they overlie, Pocket will lie on the same spectrum as the tools that produce the biases. I admit fact-checking in this paradigm could be labour-intensive, as could relevance-checking vis-à-vis arXiv, but I also think the latter would be better problems to solve.

Science prizes, wealth location and social signals

One count on which I almost always find myself to be an outlier in India is my opinion that the Nobel Prizes and their derivatives belong in the gutter. But while many people in other countries share this opinion of the Nobel Prizes, and often put their weight behind advancing this view, there are very few people who focus on similar issues with Indian prizes.

For example, I just sent my colleagues at The Wire a note suggesting that we desist where and when possible to play up notions like eminence, vis-à-vis scientists, and not associate anything but the quality of one’s work with their success. My concern had been prompted by a PTI copy advertising the fact that scientists, “including from MIT, Stanford University and Harvard University in the US”, had been awarded the 2020 Infosys Prizes.

My congratulations to the laureates for doing good work, irrespective of what they’ve won for it – but let’s consider what we’re celebrating here, really. We’re talking about a jury of well-known scholars coming together to consider a list of 200+ nominations and somehow picking only a half-dozen ‘winners’, and to those winners awarding a pure gold medal, a certificate and $100,000, or around Rs 74 lakh.

Most mediapersons pay attention to the Infosys Prizes because of the substantial purse, and when we do pay attention, what are we looking at? We’re looking at a lot of money going to a group of people who already have a good job and access to funds, especially in the name of a job well done that quite likely happened in the first place by virtue of having a good job and access to funds. The Infosys Prizes are in effect heaping more privilege on already privileged scientists.

Consider this year’s laureates, for example. Three of them – Hari Balakrishnan, Sourav Chatterjee and Raj Chetty – have full-time jobs at three of the world’s most well-endowed universities. Rajan Sankaranarayanan is a chief scientist at CCMB Hyderabad and runs his own lab. The sole female laureate this year, historian Prachi Deshpande, is at CSSS Kolkata and used to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. Arindam Ghosh is an associate professor at IISc Bangalore, again with his own lab. I can’t comment on the relative fortunes of Sankaranarayanan, Deshpande and Ghosh (although at least one other person from CCMB and six others from IISc have won Infosys Prizes, speaking to the localisation of resources and opportunities). But these are all scholars who have, as some might say, settled – scholars who have been able to sidestep or surmount, as the case may be, the numerous barriers to finding success and renown as an Indian scientist.

The case of Balakrishnan seems particularly curious (vis-à-vis the prize-giving entity, not Balakrishnan or any of the other laureates): he is a chair professor at MIT and the CTO at a six-person startup with $500 million in funding.

As an offshoot of what I said earlier, it is not unjust to reward people who have done good work – but too often we do so to the exclusion of those who lack the opportunities to begin doing good work in the first place. For example, instead of Balakrishnan, Chatterjee and Chetty, the prizes could have been awarded to three accomplished scientists working in India. And I argue that we need to reapply this criterion and select even other laureates who are yet to settle, so that we may ultimately expand the possibility of there being more successful scientists in future. Ultimately, we do need more successful scientists, not more laureates.

Of course, it isn’t implicitly wrong for any individual or entity to gift a large sum of money to anyone or any other entity (but perhaps it is bad in some cases). The wrongness arises when the money becomes part of a deleterious idea – such as that excellent scientists are men and/or that they succeeded by working alone. Thanks to their reputation, the Nobel Prizes are the foremost examples of this problem. As I wrote in The Wire recently:

That the prizes’ prestige is a construct, and not an innate attribute, matters because constructs represent intent. The construct of prestige or reputation surrounding the Nobel Prizes exists by reinforcing the beliefs and myths that some experts (in the relevant topics) held in order to maintain their privileges, to secrete away their power and perpetuate the status quo. That is, their intention here was to preserve the idea, and even glamourise it by attaching a purse of SEK 10 million (Rs 8.24 crore) with each Nobel Prize (no strings attached), that individuals make inventions and discoveries, and that men were always better at science than women, and more so than people of other genders.

The Infosys Prizes, as also the S.S. Bhatnagar Prize and the Swarnajayanti Fellowships in India, are different only in scale, not in spirit. They seem disinterested in addressing any of the issues, and seem keener on getting media attention. (By making this point, I hope I’m being clear that the media’s attitude towards the constitution of ‘news’ is also part of the problem.)

This year’s Infosys Prize laureates include only one woman; in all, 22% of laureates are women, fewer still if the social sciences are left out. And the prizes have only ever been awarded to individuals. This is disappointing because the prizes can do so much more by virtue, again, of the amount of money in play.

For example, the prize-giving foundation could give ‘senior’ laureates a citation, a certificate, etc., and split the purse into smaller chunks and award each one to promising young scientists, or those who are likely to have a hard time breaching science’s ‘in’ groups without good fortune. This could help separate the prizes’ extant wealth- and virtue-signalling from the distinction-signalling – as well as greatly expand some of the foundation’s other initiatives that directly help students.

I recently wrote with regard to the announcement of this year’s Swarnajayanti Fellowships, in mid-November, that resource constraints encourage us to think that only a few people can be selected for an award every time that award is given out. This in turn leads to the question about which candidates should be left out from the final pool of winners. And this question is to begin with singly misguided, becoming doubly misguided when it is used as a defence against questions about why so few women are awarded important recognitions, and triply misguided when the resource constraints are made-up, a fiction of funders and administrators to retain power.

Instead, we must demand more material wealth and supply it at the springboards of where young and/or struggling scientists take off. These scientists plus some other groups (incl. those from marginalised sections of society, those who need to learn the English language, even those who promise to stay in India for a decade, etc.) are in my view the only ‘segments’ that have justifiable need for not-insubstantial sums of money. Beyond this point, we can be generous with immaterial rewards for those who do good work and may no longer need the money.

Super-spreading, mobility and crowding

I still see quite a few journalists in India refer to “super-spreaders” vis-à-vis the novel coronavirus – implying that some individuals might be to blame for ‘seeding’ lots of new infections in the community – instead of accommodating the fact that simply breathing out a lot of viruses doesn’t suffice to infect tens or hundreds of others: you also need the social conditions that will enable all these viral particles to easily find human hosts.

In fact, going a step ahead, a super-spreading event can happen if there are no super-spreading individuals but there are enabling environmental conditions that do nothing to slow the virus’s transmission across different communities. These conditions include lack of basic amenities (or access to them) such as clean water, nutritious meals and physical space.

A new study published by a group of researchers from the US adds to this view. According to their paper’s abstract, “Our model predicts higher infection rates among disadvantaged racial and socioeconomic groups solely from differences in mobility: we find that disadvantaged groups have not been able to reduce mobility as sharply, and that the POIs [points of interest] they visit are more crowded and therefore higher-risk.”

And what they suggest by way of amelioration – to reduce the maximum occupancy at each POI, like a restaurant – applies to a mobility-centric strategy the same way reducing inequality applies to a strategy centred on social justice. In effect, disadvantaged groups of people – which currently include people forced to live in slums, share toilets, ration water, etc. in India’s cities – should have access to the same quality of life that everyone else does at that point of time, including in the limited case of housing.

This study is also interesting because the authors’ model was composed with mobility data from 98 million cellphones – providing an empirical foundation that obviates the need for assumptions about how people move and where. In the early days of India’s COVID-19 epidemic, faulty assumptions on just this count gave rise to predictions about how the situation would evolve in different areas that in hindsight were found to be outlandish – and in some cases in ways that could have been anticipated.

Some modellers denoted people as dots on a screen and assumed that each dot would be able to move a certain distance before it ‘met’ another dot, as well as that all the dots would have a certain total area in which to move around. But as two mathematicians wrote for Politically Math in April this year, our cities look nothing like this:

According to this report, “India’s top 1% bag 73% of the country’s wealth”. Let us say, the physical space in our simulation represents not the ‘physical space’ in real terms, but the ‘space of opportunities’ that exist. In this specific situation of a country under complete lockdown because of the pandemic, this might mean who gets to order ‘contactless’ food online while being ‘quarantined’ at home, and who doesn’t. In our segregated simulation space therefore, the top chamber must occupy 73% of the total space, and the bottom chamber 27%. Also, 1% of the total number of dots occupy the airy top chamber, while the remaining 99% of the dots occupy the bottom chamber.

As a result, and notwithstanding any caveats about the data-taking exercises, researchers reported that Dharavi in Mumbai had a seroprevalence of more than 50% by late July while three wards in non-slum areas had a seroprevalence of only 16%.

The flawed models still can’t claim they could have been right if Mumbai’s slum and non-slum areas were treated as distinct entities. As T. Jacob John wrote for The Wire Science in October, one of the reasons (non-vaccine) herd immunity as a concept breaks when applied to humans is that humans are social animals, and their populations regularly mix such that ‘closed societies’ are rendered practically impossible.

So instead of mucking about with nationwide lockdowns and other restrictions that apply to entire populations at once, the state could simply do two things. First, in the short-term, prevent crowding in places where it’s likely to happen – including public toilets that residents of slums are forced to share, ration shops where beneficiaries of the PDS system are required to queue up, workplaces where workers are crammed too many to a room, etc.

Obviously, I don’t suggest that the government should have been aware of all these features of the epidemic’s progression in different areas from the beginning. But from the moment these issues became clear, and from the moment a government became able to reorient its COVID-19 response strategy but didn’t, it has effectively been in the dock.

This brings us to the second and longer term thing we should do: with the novel coronavirus’s transmission characteristics as a guide, we must refashion policies and strategies to reduce inequality and improve access to those resources required to suppress ‘super-spreading’ conditions at the same time.

The simultaneity is important. For example, simply increasing the average house size from 4 sq. m, say, to 8 sq. m won’t cut it. Instead, buildings have to be designed to allow ample ventilation (with fresh air) and access to sunlight (depending on its natural availability). As researchers from IDFC Institute, a think-tank in Mumbai, noted in another article:

Dharavi’s buildings and paths are irregularly laid out, with few straight routes. Based on calculations with OpenStreetMap routes and Google Earth imagery, it appears 68% of pathways and roads are less than 2 m wide. Such a dimension offers little space for air circulation, and reduces airflow relative to other, properly planned areas, and admits fewer air currents that could help break up the concentration of viral particles.

Mitigating such conditions could also impinge on India’s climate commitments. For example, with reference to our present time in history as the hottest on record, and many countries including India experiencing periods in which the ambient temperature in some regions exceeds thresholds deemed safe for human metabolism, science writer Leigh Phillips wrote for Jacobin that air-conditions must be a human right:

What would it mean to have a right to air-conditioning? Precisely, the right should be to have free or cheap, reliable access to the thermal conditions optimal for human metabolism (air temperatures of between 18 degrees C and 24 degrees C, according to the WHO). Neither too hot nor too cold. The right to Goldilocks’s porridge, if you will. New buildings must come with A/C as part of any “Green New Deal”. The aim of any programme of publicly subsidised mass retrofitting of old buildings shouldn’t be just to fuel-switch away from gas heating and improve insulation, but also to install quiet, efficient air-conditioning systems. At the scale of the electricity grid, this demand must also include the requirement that A/C run on cheap, clean electricity.

So really, none of what’s going on is simple – and when governments respond by offering solutions that assume the problem is simple are avoiding dealing with the real causes. For example, ‘super-spreading’ is neither a choice nor an event – it’s a condition – so solutions that address it as a choice or event are bound to fail. Seen the other way, a community with a high prevalence of a viral infection may be much less responsible for its predicament than the simple interaction of their social conditions with a highly contagious virus.

But this doesn’t mean no solution except a grand, city-scale one can be feasible either – only that all solutions must converge, by being targeted to that effect, on eliminating inequalities.

On resource constraints and merit

In the face of complaints about how so few women have been awarded this year’s Swarnajayanti Fellowships in India, some scientists pushed back asking which of the male laureates who had been selected should have been left out instead.

This is a version of the merit argument commonly applied to demands for reservation and quota in higher education – and it’s also a form of an argument that often raises its head in seemingly resource-constrained environments.

India is often referred to as a country with ‘finite’ resources, often when people are discussing how best to put these resources to use. There are even romantic ideals associated with working in such environments, such as doing more with less – as ISRO has been for many decades – and the popular concept of jugaad.

But while fixing one variable while altering the other would make any problem more solvable, it’s almost always the resource variable that is presumed to be fixed in India. For example, a common refrain is that ISRO’s allocation is nowhere near that of NASA, so ISRO must figure how best to use its limited funds – and can’t afford luxuries like a full-fledged outreach team.

There are two problems in the context of resource availability here: 1. an outreach team proper is implied to be the product of a much higher allocation than has been made, i.e. comparable to that of NASA, and 2. incremental increases in allocation are precluded. Neither of these is right, of course: ISRO doesn’t have to wait for NASA’s volume of resources in order to set up an outreach team.

The deeper issue here is not that ISRO doesn’t have the requisite funds but that it doesn’t feel a better outreach unit is necessary. Here, it pays to acknowledge that ISRO has received not inconsiderable allocations over the years, as well as has enjoyed bipartisan support and (relative) freedom from bureaucratic interference, so it cops much of the blame as well. But in the rest of India, the situation is flipped: many institutions, and their members, have fewer resources than they have ideas and that affects research in a way of its own.

For example, in the context of grants and fellowships, there’s the obvious illusory ‘prestige constraint’ at the international level – whereby award-winners and self-proclaimed hotshots wield power by presuming prestige to be tied to a few accomplishments, such as winning a Nobel Prize, publishing papers in The Lancet and Nature or maintaining an h-index of 150. These journals and award-giving committees in turn boast of their selectiveness and elitism. (Note: don’t underestimate the influence of these journals.)

Then there’s the financial constraint for Big Science projects. Some of them may be necessary to keep, say, enthusiastic particle physicists from being carried away. But more broadly, a gross mismatch between the availability of resources and the scale of expectations may ultimately be detrimental to science itself.

These markers of prestige and power are all essentially instruments of control – and there is no reason this equation should be different in India. Funding for science in India is only resource-constrained to the extent to which the government, which is the principal funder, deems it to be.

The Indian government’s revised expenditure on ‘scientific departments’ in 2019-2020 was Rs 27,694 crore. The corresponding figure for defence was Rs 3,16,296 crore. If Rs 1,000 crore were moved from the latter to the former, the defence spend would have dropped only by 0.3% but the science spend would have increased by 3.6%. Why, if the money spent on the Statue of Unity had instead been diverted to R&D, the hike would have nearly tripled.

Effectively, the argument that ‘India’s resources are limited’ is tenable only when resources are constrained on all fronts, or specific fronts as determined by circumstances – and not when it seems to be gaslighting an entire sector. The determination of these circumstances in turn should be completely transparent; keeping them opaque will simply create more ground for arbitrary decisions.

Of course, in a pragmatic sense, it’s best to use one’s resources wisely – but this position can’t be generalised to the point where optimising for what’s available becomes morally superior to demanding more (even as we must maintain the moral justification of being allowed to ask how much money is being given to whom). That is, constantly making the system work more efficiently is a sensible aspiration, but it shouldn’t come – as it often does at the moment, perhaps most prominently in the case of CSIR – at the cost of more resources. If people are discontented because they don’t have enough, their ire should be directed at the total allocation itself more than how a part of it is being apportioned.

In a different context, a physicist had pointed out a few years ago that when the US government finally scrapped the proposed Superconducting Supercollider in the early 1990s, the freed-up funds weren’t directed back into other areas of science, as scientists thought they would be. (I couldn’t find the link to this comment nor recall the originator – but I think it was either Sabine Hossenfelder or Sean Carroll; I’ll update this post when I do.) I suspect that if the group of people that had argued thus had known this would happen, it might have argued differently.

I don’t know if a similar story has played out in India; I certainly don’t know if any Big Science projects have been commissioned and then scrapped. In fact, the opposite has happened more often: whereby projects have done more with less by repurposing an existing resource (examples here, here and here). (Having to fight so hard to realise such mega-projects in India could be motivating those who undertake one to not give up!)

In the non-Big-Science and more general sense, an efficiency problem raises its head. One variant of this is about research v. teaching: what does India need more of, or what’s a more efficient expense, to achieve scientific progress – institutions where researchers are free to conduct experiments without being saddled with teaching responsibilities or institutions where teaching is just as important as research? This question has often been in the news in India in the last few years, given the erstwhile HRD Ministry’s flip-flops on whether teachers should conduct research. I personally agree that we need to ‘let teachers teach’.

The other variant is concerned with blue-sky research: when are scientists more productive – when the government allows a “free play of free intellects” or if it railroads them on which problems to tackle? Given the fabled shortage of teachers at many teaching institutions, it’s easy to conclude that a combination of economic and policy decisions have funnelled India’s scholars into neglecting their teaching responsibilities. In turn, rejigging the fraction of teaching or teaching-cum-research versus research-only institutions in India in favour of the former, which are less resource-intensive, could free up some funds.

But this is also more about pragmatism than anything else – somewhat like untangling a bundle of wires before straightening them out instead of vice versa, or trying to do both at once. As things stand, India’s teaching institutions also need more money. Some reasons there is a shortage of teachers include the fact that they are often not paid well or on time, especially if they are employed at state-funded colleges; the institutions’ teaching facilities are subpar (or non-existent); if jobs are located in remote places and the institutions haven’t had the leeway to consider upgrading recreational facilities; etc.

Teaching at the higher-education level in India is also harder because of the poor state of government schools, especially outside tier I cities. This brings with it a separate raft of problems, including money.

Finally, a more ‘local’ example of prestige as well as financial constraints that also illustrates the importance of this PoV is the question of why the Swarnajayanti Fellowships have been awarded to so few women, and how this problem can be ‘fixed’.

If the query about which men should be excluded to accommodate women sounds like a reasonable question – you’re probably assuming that the number of fellows has to be limited to a certain number, dictated in turn by the amount of money the government has said can be awarded through these fellowships. But if the government allocated more money, we could appreciate all the current laureates as well as many others, and arguably without diluting the ‘quality’ of the competition (given just how many scholars there are).

Resource constraints obviously can’t explain or resolve everything that stands in the way of more women, trans-people, gender-non-binary and gender-non-conforming scholars receiving scholarships, fellowships, awards and prominent positions within academia. But axiomatically, it’s important to see that ‘fixing’ this problem requires action on two fronts, instead of just one – make academia less sexist and misogynistic and secure more funds. The constraints are certainly part of the problem, particularly when they are wielded as an excuse to concentrate more resources, and more power, in the hands of the already privileged, even as the constraints may not be real themselves.

In the final analysis, science doesn’t have to be a powerplay, and we don’t have to honour anyone at the expense of another. But deferring to such wisdom could let the fundamental causes of this issue off the hook.

The climate change of bad news

This post flows a bit like the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket. As one friend put it, “It starts somewhere and then goes in a different direction.”

This year hasn’t been beset by the same old steady drizzle of bad news we have every year – but has borne the brunt of cyclonic storms, each one distinctively episodic and devastating. The latest of these storms is l’affair Rukmini Callimachi. To the uninitiated: Callimachi is a reporter with the NYT who shot to fame from 2015 or so onwards for her inside reports of the Islamic Caliphate; she later dramatised her efforts to produce these stories in a podcast called Caliphate. And in this time, she raked up four Pulitzer Prize nominations (although I don’t set much store by prizes in general).

I haven’t read or listened to her work, so when a friend shared a link to the NYT’s own report, by its media columnist Ben Smith, discussing the charges against Callimachi and their newfound, but evidently delayed, efforts to reevaluate her work, I wasn’t guilty of not having criticised her myself. (If you think this is a tall order: the headline of Jacob Silverman’s review of this storm for The New Republic describes, in a few words, how quickly her house of cards seems to fall down.)

However, these days, a successful journalist is two things: she is the producer of stories that have changed the world, and which continue to live lives of their own, and she is a role-model of sorts. Her output and her resolve represent what is possible if only one tried. An even greater example of such work is that of the journalists at the Miami Herald – especially Julie Brown – who exposed Jeffrey Epstein and brought on, among other changes, a reckoning at various universities around the US that had knowingly accepted his money and overtures.

But now, with Callimachi’s articles seemingly teetering on the brink of legitimacy, both the things she stood for are on the edge as well. First, the good thing: her stories, which – if Smith’s account is to be believed – Callimachi seems to have composed in her head before moving in to report them, often, if not always, with the spiritual and material support of many of NYT’s senior editors. Second, the bad: her legacy, such as it is – erected as a façade at which we could all marvel, at least those of us who unquestioningly placed our faith and hope in the greatness of another. This is the guilt I feel, a fractured reflection of what Callimachi’s coverage of the Islamic Caliphate at the NYT is itself going through right now.

However, I will also be quick to shed this guilt because I insist that as much as I’m tasked – by my employer, but the zeitgeist, so to speak – to be wary, cautious, skeptical, to fact-check, fact-check, fact-check, to maintain cupfuls of salt at hand so I’m never taken for a ride, just as much as I’m behooved to stand on guard, I’m also fortifying an increasingly small, and increasingly precious, garden in a corner of my mind, a place away from the bad news that I can visit in my daydreams, where I can recoup some hope and optimism. Today, the winds of l’affair Callimachi blew away her articles and podcasts from this place.

Make no mistake, I will still call out everything that deserves to be called out: from the multiple red-flags Silverman spotlighted to the anti-oriental undertones of Callimachi’s methods, of her claims and even of the self-recrimination bubbling up around her, to a lot of which Rafia Zakaria has (repeatedly) called attention. I’m only saddened, for now, by the unstoppable eradication of all that is good, such as it is, and by the guilt for my part in it. As a political being, in this moment I deem this march upon ignorance to be necessary, but as a human one, it is deeply, and to my mind unforeseeably, exacting. A cognitive dissonance for the times, I suppose, although I’m sure I will cope soon enough.

Fortunately, perhaps in a counterintuitive sense, the Callimachi episode is personally not very hard to recover from. While it is true that what Callimachi and her collaborators have (still largely allegedly) done is quite different from, say, what Jonah Lehrer did, they were both motivated by a common sin: to print what could be instead of what is (and even these words might be too strong). More specifically, reporting on war brings with it its own seductions, many of them quite powerful, to the extent that some – as Zakaria implied in her piece for The Baffler – may choose to believe Callimachi et al’s failings are still the failings of an institution vis-à-vis conflict journalism. But no, the problem is pervasive.

However, looking on this shitshow from not-so-distant India, two bells have been quick to go off. First, this is very old wine in a new bottle, in which, to borrow Zakaria’s words, “the greed for catching terrorists” is pressed into the service of making “white journalists’ careers”; you could replace ‘terrorists’ with anything else that has been touched, at any point in its history, by a colonist or invader. Also read Priyanka Borpujari’s 2019 essay in the Columbia Journalism Review, in which she writes:

The title ‘foreign correspondent’ has long been synonymous with whiteness, maleness, and imperialism—journalists fly in from North America, Europe, and Australia to cover the poverty and wars of the non-Western world. In recent years, a push for diversity has meant that more women are pursuing stories in what was once the domain of men—conflict zones and fractured democracies—or in traditionally private female spaces. But the opportunities for journalists in non-Western nations to tell their own stories in international outlets have not been as great. Overwhelmingly, foreign reportage still relies on a model of Western, and largely white, reporters hiring local journalists in subservient roles.”

And thanks to biases in the way technology is constructed, used as well as located around the world, the problem extends to the consumption of journalism as well. To quote from an older post:

Where an app [that amplifies content] was made matters because nobody is going to build an app in location A and hope that it becomes popular in faraway location B. Pocket itself is San Franciscan and the bias shows: most recommendations I’ve received, or even the non-personalised trending topics I’ve spotted, are American. In fact, among all the tools I use and curation services I follow, I’ve come across only two exceptions: the heartwarming human-curated 3QuarksDaily and Quora. I’m not familiar with Quora’s story but I’m sure it’s interesting – about how a Q&A platform out of Mountain View came to be dominated by Indian users.

I notice a not insignificant number of articles and essays, in English, to this day emerging from blogs and publications in Central, South and Southeast Asia, South America and of course Africa that will never go viral on Twitter, make it to the list of ‘most read’ articles on Pocket or be cited by even the most quirky columnist – even as the same ideas and arguments will virtually ‘break the internet’ the moment they emerge from The Atlantic or New Yorker a few months later.

None of the writers of The Atlantic or New Yorker can be blamed, at least not most of the time, for something quite hard to discover in the first place, but that doesn’t mean Big Tech isn’t distorting our view of who is doing good work and who isn’t. And many Indian journalists and writers are often at the wrong end of this discovery problem.

In this light, what Callimachi and the NYT did is not new at all but in fact further widens, or accentuates, the divide between being non-white, non-Western and being white and Western. This is a divide that I and many others, perhaps especially the others, have been habituated to ignore – especially when the crime at hand appears to be victimless but in fact quietly sidelines those who have already been historically, and today structurally, displaced from the ‘mainstream’.

On the other hand, what the NYT has perpetrated here is akin to what many in India (myself included) have done and, to different degrees, continue to have a part in. Specifically, the second bell that goes off has to do with my privileges, one product of which is that I will always be a parachute-journalist in my own country – a member of the top 1% who claims to understand the problems of the 99%.

Journalism professor Justin Martin gently defended parachute journalism in a 2011 essay, deeming fluency in “one of the main local languages” to be a prerequisite of parachuting well. I am not likely to speak any other languages than the four I already know, and less literally, I can never know, in any meaningful sense, what it means to be poor, transgender, tribal, of a lower caste; that lived experience will stay out of reach, and my assessment of what is right will always be inferior to those of, say, a desperate job-seeker, a transgender activist, a member of a tribe, a Dalit scholar when, for example, the topic at hand is poverty, gender, Indigenous people’s rights and caste.

As Martin also admits, “Hiring correspondents who live in the countries and regions they cover … is ideal”, and my higher social status in India does place me in a country other than the one I’m writing about. Although I may not be guilty of allowing information sources I haven’t vetted enough to feed exaggerated stories that I can’t prove in any other way to be true – that is, although we may not all be Rukmini Callimachis ourselves – the composition of our newsrooms means we are only one illegitimate source away, only one moment of weakness for what could be in place of what is away, from creating the next storm.

Christopher Nolan’s explosion

In May, Total Film reported that the production team of Tenet, led by director Christopher Nolan, found that using a second-hand Boeing 747 was better than recreating a scene involving an exploding plane with miniatures and CGI. I’m not clear how exactly it was better; Total Film only wrote:

“I planned to do it using miniatures and set-piece builds and a combination of visual effects and all the rest,” Nolan tells TF. However, while scouting for locations in Victorville, California, the team discovered a massive array of old planes. “We started to run the numbers… It became apparent that it would actually be more efficient to buy a real plane of the real size, and perform this sequence for real in camera, rather than build miniatures or go the CG route.”

I’m assuming that by ‘numbers’ Nolan means the finances. That is, buying and crashing a life-size airplane was more financially efficient than recreating the scene with other means. This is quite the disappointing prospect, as must be obvious, because this calculation limits itself to a narrow set of concerns, or just one as in this case – more bang for the buck – and consigns everything else to being negative externalities. Foremost on my mind is carbon emissions from transporting the vehicle, the explosion and the debris. If these costs were factored in, for example in terms of however much the carbon credits would be worth in the region where Nolan et al filmed the explosion, would the numbers have still been just as efficient? (I’m assuming, reasonably I think, that Nolan et al aren’t using carbon-capture technologies.)

However, CGI itself may not be so calorifically virtuous. I’m too lazy in this moment to cast about on the internet for estimates of how much of the American film industry’s emissions CGI accounts for. But I did find this tidbit from 2018 on Columbia University’s Earth Institute blog:

For example, movies with a budget of $50 million dollars—including such flicks as Zoolander 2, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and Ted—typically produce the equivalent of around 4,000 metric tons of CO2. That’s roughly the weight of a giant sequoia tree.

A ‘green production guide’ linked there leads to a page offering an emissions calculator that doesn’t seem to account for CGI specifically; only broadly “electricity, natural gas & fuel oil, vehicle & equipment fuel use, commercial flights, charter flights, hotels & housing”. In any case, I had a close call with bitcoin-mining many years ago that alerted me to how energy-intensive seemingly straightforward computational processes could get, followed by a reminder when I worked at The Hindu – where the two computers used to render videos were located in a small room fit with its own AC, fixed at 18º C, and when they were rendering videos without any special effects, the CPUs’ fans would scream.

Today, digital artists create most CGI and special effects using graphics processing units (GPUs) – a notable exception was the black hole in Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar, created using CPUs – and Nvidia and AMD are two of the more ‘leading’ brands from what I know (I don’t know much). One set of tests whose results a site called ‘Tom’s Hardware’ reported in May this year found an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE GPU is among the bottom 10% of performers in terms of wattage for a given task – in this case 268.7 W to render fur – among the 42 options the author tested. An AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU consumed nearly 80% as much for the same task, falling in the seventh decile. A bunch of users on this forum say a film like Transformers will need Nvidia Quadro and AMD Firepro GPUs; the former consumed 143 W in one fur-rendering test. (Comparability may be affected by differences in the hardware setup.) Then there’s the cooling cost.

Again, I don’t know if Nolan considered any of these issues – but I doubt that he did – when he ‘ran the numbers’ to determine what would be better: blowing up a real plane or a make-believe one. Intuition does suggest the former would be a lot more exergonic (although here, again, we’re forced to reckon with the environmental and social cost of obtaining specific metals, typically from middle-income nations, required to manufacture advanced electronics).

Cinema is a very important part of 21st century popular culture and popular culture is a very important part of how we as social, political people (as opposed to biological humans) locate ourselves in the world we’ve constructed – including being good citizens, conscientious protestors, sensitive neighbours. So constraining cinema’s remit or even imposing limits on filmmakers for the climate’s sake are ridiculous courses of action. This said, when there are options (and so many films have taught us there are always options), we have a responsibility to pick the more beneficial one while assuming the fewest externalities.

The last bit is important: the planet is a single unit and all of its objects occupants are wildly interconnected. So ‘negative externalities’ as such are more often than not trade practices crafted to simplify administrative and/or bureaucratic demands. In the broader ‘One Health’ sense, they vanish.