Analysis – Page 14

The number of deaths averted

What are epidemiological models for? You can use models to inform policy and other decision-making. But you can’t use them to manufacture a number that you can advertise in order to draw praise. That’s what the government’s excuse appears to be vis-à-vis the number of deaths averted by India’s nationwide lockdown.

When the government says 37,000 deaths were averted, how can we know if this figure was right or wrong? A bunch of scientists complained that the model wasn’t transparent, so its output had to be taken with a cupful of salt. But as an article published in The Wire yesterday noted, these scientists were asking the wrong questions – that the number of deaths averted is only a decoy.

So say the model had been completely transparent. I don’t see why we should still care about the number of deaths averted. First, such a model is trying to determine the consequences of an action that was not performed, i.e. the number of people who might have died had the lockdown not been imposed.

This scenario is reminiscent of a trope in many time-travel stories. If you went back in time and caused someone to do Y instead of X, would your reality change or stay the same considering it’s in the consequent future of Y instead of X? Or as Ronald Bailey wrote in Reason, “If people change their behaviour in response to new information unrelated to … anti-contagion policies, this could reduce infection growth rates as well, thus causing the researchers to overstate the effectiveness of anti-contagion policies.”

Second, a model to estimate the number of deaths averted by the lockdown will in effect attempt to isolate a vanishingly narrow strip of the lockdown’s consequences to cheer about. This would be nothing but extreme cherry-picking.

A lockdown has many effects, including movement restrictions, stay-at-home orders, disrupted supply of essential goods, closing of businesses, etc. Most, if not all, of them are bound to exact a toll on one’s health. So the number of deaths the lockdown averted should be ‘adjusted’ against, say, the number of people who couldn’t get life-saving surgeries, the number of migrant labourers who died of heat exhaustion, the number of TB patients who developed MDR-TB because they couldn’t get their medicines on time, even the number of daily-wage earners’ children who died of hunger because their parents had no income.

So the only models that can hope to estimate a meaningful number of deaths averted by the lockdown will also have simplified the context so much that the mathematical form of the lockdown will be shorn of all practical applicability or relevance – a quantitative catch-22.

Third, the virtue of the number of deaths averted is a foregone conclusion. That is, whatever its value is, it can only be a good thing. So as an indisputable – and therefore unfalsifiable – entity, there is nothing to be gained or lost by interrogating it, except perhaps to elicit a clearer view of the model’s innards (if possible, and only relative to the outputs of other models).

Finally, the lockdown will by design avert some deaths – i.e. D > 0 – but D being greater than zero wouldn’t mean the lockdown was a success as much D‘s value, whatever it is, being a self-fulfilling prophecy. And since no one knows what the value of D is or what it ought to be, even less what it could have been, a model can at best come up with a way to estimate D – but not claim a victory of any kind.

So it would seem the ‘number of deaths averted’ metric is a ploy disguised as a legitimate mathematical problem whose real purpose is to lure the ‘quants’ towards something they think challenges their abilities without realising they’re also being lured away from the more important question they should be asking: why solve this problem at all?

Ocean-safe consumption

Just spotted this ad on the website of The Better India, a journalism website that focuses on “positive stories”:

India’s nationwide lockdown has many important lessons – including the fact that it wasn’t useful in slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus through the Indian population; and though there’s no way yet to tell if it was useless instead, state opacity, data manipulation, false advertisement, medical research devoid of science, struggling hospitals and apathy of the poor all make it so. This said, two lessons in particular have been decidedly positive: the air becoming cleaner, at least to see through, and the Ganga river becoming cleaner, reportedly even to drink from.

K.A.S. Mani, a hydrologist, observed shortly after the latter was reported that rivers could clean themselves in a matter of weeks only if we took a break from stuffing them with pollutants – and axiomatically that when governments spend crores of rupees on fancy technological solutions and set themselves deadlines that are years away to achieve the same goals, they’re probably not doing it right. The final message for the people is simple, and what it’s always been: if you want to protect the rivers – or for that matter the oceans – consume less.

This is also what makes any attempt to combine consumerism with eco-friendliness absurd, including The Better India‘s advertisement for a combination of different surface cleaners.

I admit their business model is worth considering: if you subscribe to their ‘service’, they’ll ship refill pouches to your place every month and whose contents you can store in the bottle you purchased the first time round.

(However, I’m skeptical of the claims about the cleaning substances, per the FAQ: “Our cleaners for laundry and dishwashing contain enzymes in addition to plant-based surfactants. These enzymes are lab-processed. Floor and toilet cleaners contain active microbes that create enzymes while performing the cleaning action.” Quite vague. I’m also very skeptical of the “non-toxic” bit: toxicity is highly context-specific, and the claim can’t possibly mean the cleaners are safe to drink!)

Most of all, none of this is “ocean-safe” – or even ocean-friendly – by any stretch of imagination. Bottles, refill pouches and cleaning agents still need to be made and shipped to households – all processes that will generate trash. It doesn’t make sense to claim simply that the contents of the bottles are unlikely to harm the ocean when spilled into the water (and even then I’d like to see some test results). What it is is very marginally less offensive to the world’s water bodies, where our waste eventually ends up.

And if anyone asks if I have a better idea: I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I get to pretend that what I’m doing is “safe” or “friendly” when it’s not.

Note: This post was updated on June 2, 2020, at 3.30 pm to clarify the lockdown’s usefulness in more detail.

The journalist as expert

I recently turned down some requests for interviews because the topics of discussion in each case indicated that I would be treated as a scientist, not a science journalist (something that happened shortly after the Balakot airstrikes and the ASAT test as well). I suspect science and more so health journalists are being seen as important sources of information at this crucial time for four reasons (in increasing order of importance, at least as I see it):

1. We often have the latest information – This is largely self-explanatory except for the fact that since we discover a lot of information first-hand, often from researchers to whom the context in which the information is valid may be obvious but who may not communicate that, we also have a great responsibility to properly contextualise what we know before dissemination. Many of us do, many of us don’t, but either way both groups come across as being informed to their respective audiences.

2. We’re “temporary experts”.

3. We’re open to conversations when others aren’t – I can think of a dozen experts who could replace me in the interviews I described and do a better job of communicating the science and more importantly the uncertainty. However, a dozen isn’t a lot, and journalists and any other organisations committed to spreading awareness are going to be hard-pressed to find new voices. At this time, science/health journalists could be seen as stand-in experts: we’re up-to-date, we’re (largely) well-versed with the most common issues, and unlike so many experts we’re often willing to talk.

4. It would seem journalists are the only members of society who are synthesising different schools of thought, types of knowledge and stories of ground realities into an emergent whole. This is a crucial role and, to be honest, I was quite surprised no one else is doing this – until I realised the problem. Our scholastic and academic systems may have disincentivised such holism, choosing instead to pursue more and more specialised and siloised paths. But even then the government should be bringing together different pieces of the big picture, and putting them together to design multifaceted policies and inventions, but isn’t doing so. So journalists could be seen as the only people who are.

Now, given these reasons, is treating journalists as experts so bad?

It’s really not, actually. Journalism deserves more than to be perceived as an adjacent enterprise – something that attaches itself on to a mature substrate of knowledge instead of being part of the substrate itself. There are some journalists who have insightfully combined, say, what they know about scientific publishing with what they know about research funding to glimpse a bigger picture still out of reach of many scientists. There is certainly a body of knowledge that cannot be derived from the first principles of each of its components alone, and which journalists are uniquely privileged to discover. I also know of a few journalists who are better committed to evidence and civic duty than many scientists, in turn producing knowledge of greater value. Finally, insofar as knowledge is also produced through the deliberate opposition of diverse perspectives, journalists contribute every time they report on a preprint paper, bringing together multiple independent experts – sometimes from different fields – to comment on the paper’s merits and demerits.

But there are some issues on the flip side. For example, not all knowledge is emergent in this way, and more importantly journalists make for poor experts on average when what we don’t know is as important as what we know. And when lives are at stake, anyone who is being invited to participate in an interview, panel discussion or whatever should consider – even if the interviewer hasn’t – whether what they say could cause harm, and if they can withstand any social pressure to not be seen to be ignorant and say “I don’t know” when warranted. And even then, there can be very different implications depending on whether it’s a journalist or an expert saying “I don’t know”.

Even more importantly, journalists need to be recognised in their own right, instead of being hauled into the limelight as quasi-experts instead of as people who practice a craft of their own. This may seem like a minor issue of perception but it’s important to maintain the distinction between the fourth estate and other enterprises lest journalism’s own responsibilities become subsumed by those of the people and organisations journalists write about or – worse yet – lest they are offset by demands that society has been unable to meet in other ways. If a virologist can’t be found for an interview, a journalist is a barely suitable replacement, except if the conversation is going to be sharply focused on specific issues the journalist is very familiar with, but even then it’s not the perfect solution.

If a virologist or a holist (as in the specific way mentioned above) can’t be found, the ideal way forward would be to look harder for another virologist or holist, and in doing so come up against the unique challenges to accessing expertise in India. In this regard, if journalists volunteer themselves as substitutes, they risk making excuses for a problem they actually needed to be highlighting.

In defence of ignorance

Wish I may, wish I might
Have this wish, I wish tonight
I want that star, I want it now
I want it all and I don’t care how
Metallica, King Nothing

I’m a news editor who frequently uses Twitter to find new stories to work on or follow up. Since the lockdown began, however, I’ve been harbouring a fair amount of FOMO born, ironically, from the fact that the small pool of in-house reporters and the larger pool of freelancers I have access to are all confined to their homes, and there’s much less opportunity than usual to step out, track down leads and assimilate ground reports. And Twitter – the steady stream of new information from different sources – has simply accentuated this feeling, instead of ameliorating it by indicating that other publications are covering what I’m not. No, Twitter makes me feel like I want it all.

I’m sure this sensation is the non-straightforward product of human psychology and how social media companies have developed algorithms to take advantage of it, but I’m fairly certain (despite the absence of a personal memory to corroborate this opinion) that individual minds of the pre-social-media era weren’t marked by FOMO, and more certain that they were marked less so. I also believe one of the foremost offshoots of the prevalence of such FOMO is the idea that one can be expected to have an opinion on everything.

FOMO – the ‘fear of missing out’ – is essentially defined by a desire to participate in activities that, sometimes, we really needn’t participate in, but we think we need to simply by dint of knowing about those activities. Almost as if the brains of humans had become habituated to making decisions about social participation based solely on whether or not we knew of them, which if you ask me wouldn’t be such a bad hypothesis to apply to the pre-information era, when you found out about a party only if you were the intended recipient of the message that ‘there is a party’.

However, most of us today are not the intended recipients of lots of information. This seems especially great for news but it also continuously undermines our ability to stay in control of what we know or, more importantly, don’t know. And when you know, you need to participate. As a result, I sometimes devolve into a semi-nervous wreck reading about the many great things other people are doing, and sharing their experiences on Twitter, and almost involuntarily develop a desire to do the same things. Now and then, I even sense the seedling of regret when I look at a story that another news outlet has published, but which I thought I knew about before but simply couldn’t pursue, aided ably by the negative reinforcement of the demands on me as a news editor.

Recently, as an antidote to this tendency – and drawing upon my very successful, and quite popular, resistance to speaking Hindi simply because a misguided interlocutor presumes I know the language – I decided I would actively ignore something I’m expected to have an opinion on but there being otherwise no reason that I should. Such a public attitude exists, though it’s often unspoken, because FOMO has successfully replaced curiosity or even civic duty as the prime impetus to seek new information on the web. (Obviously, this has complicated implications, such as we see in the dichotomy of empowering more people to speak truth to power versus further tightening the definitions of ‘expert’ and ‘expertise’; I’m choosing to focus on the downsides here.)

As a result, the world seems to be filled with gas-bags, some so bloated I wonder why they don’t just float up and fuck off. And I’ve learnt that the hardest part of the antidote is to utter the words that FOMO has rendered most difficult to say: “I don’t know”.

A few days ago, I was chatting with The Soufflé when he invited me to participate in a discussion about The German Ideology that he was preparing for. You need to know that The Soufflé is a versatile being, a physicist as well as a pluripotent scholar, but more importantly The Soufflé knows what most pluripotent scholars don’t: that no matter how much one is naturally gifted to learn this or that, knowing something needs not just work but also proof of work. I refused The Soufflé’s invitation, of course; my words were almost reflexive, eager to set some distance between myself and the temptation to dabble in something just because it was there to dabble. The Soufflé replied,

I think it was in a story by Borges, one of the characters says “Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be.” 🙂

To which I said,

That was when the world was simpler. Now there’s a perverse expectation that everyone should have opinions on everything. I don’t like it, and sometimes I actively stay away from some things just to be able to say I don’t want to have an opinion on it. Historical materialism may or may not be one of those things, just saying.

Please bear with me, this is leading up to something I’d like to include here. The Soufflé then said,

I’m just in it for the sick burns. 😛 But OK, I get it. Why do you think that expectation exists, though? I mean, I see it too. Just curious.

Here I set out my FOMO hypothesis. Then he said,

I guess this is really a topic for a cultural critic, I’m just thinking out loud… but perhaps it is because ignorance no longer finds its antipode in understanding, but awareness? To be aware is to be engaged, to be ‘caught up’ is to be active. This kind of activity is low-investment, and its performance aided by social media?
If you walked up to people today and asked “What do you think about factory-farmed poultry?” I’m pretty sure they’d find it hard to not mention that it’s cruel and wrong, even if they know squat about it. So they’re aware, they have possibly a progressive view on the issue as well, but there’s no substance underneath it.

Bingo.

We’ve become surrounded by socio-cultural forces that require us to know, know, know, often sans purpose or context. But ignorance today is not such a terrible thing. There are so many people who set out to know, know, know so many of the wrong ideas and lessons that conspiracy theories that once languished on the fringes of society have moved to the centre, and for hundreds of millions of people around the world stupid ideas have become part of political ideology.

Then there are others who know but don’t understand – which is a vital difference, of the sort that The Soufflé pointed out, that noted scientist-philosophers have sensibly caricatured as the difference between the thing and the name of the thing. Knowing what the four laws of thermodynamics or the 100+ cognitive biases are called doesn’t mean you understand them – but it’s an extrapolation that social-media messaging’s mandated brevity often pushes us to make. Heck, I know of quite a few people who are entirely blind to this act of extrapolation, conflating the label with the thing itself and confidently penning articles for public consumption that betrays a deep ignorance (perhaps as a consequence of the Dunning-Kruger effect) of the subject matter – strong signals that they don’t know it in their bones but are simply bouncing off of it like light off the innards of a fractured crystal.

I even suspect the importance and value of good reporting is lost on too many people because those people don’t understand what it takes to really know something (pardon the polemic). These are the corners the push to know more, all the time, often even coupled to capitalist drives to produce and consume, has backed us to. And to break free, we really need to embrace that old virtue that has been painted a vice: ignorance. Not the ignorance of conflation nor the ignorance of the lazy but the cultivated ignorance of those who recognise where knowledge ends and faff begins. Ignorance that’s the anti-thing of faff.

‘Science alone triumphs’: A skeptic annotates

An article entitled ‘Science alone triumphs: Providing a true picture of the world, only science can help India against coronavirus’, penned by a Jayant Sinha, appeared on the Times of India‘s editorials page on April 8, 2020. My annotated reading of the article follows…

As the coronavirus continues its deadly spread around the world, it is only science that protects us. Many different scientists and experts are responding to the global challenge…

A sweeping statement that suggests whatever science can protect for us are the only things worth protecting. Obvious exceptions include social security, access to food and other essential supplies, protection against discrimination and stigma, and of course individual rights. The author quite likely does not intend to imply that one’s biological safety is more important than any of these other attributes, but that’s what the words imply.

… Their deep technical expertise, honed through years of education and practice, keeps us from falling into the abyss.

A bit too florid but okay.

Ultimately, it is the practice of science – developing new ideas, testing them against hard evidence, replicating them successfully, scaling them up, and then further improving them through honest feedback – that drives all of them.

It’s quite heartening to have a lawmaker acknowledge these aspects of the scientific method, esp. a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party, but these exact are also curious at this time. The Indian Council of Medical Research has allowed frontline health workers to consume hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic against COVID-19 with flimsy (if that) evidence to support the drug’s efficacy and safety. Where are the tests, leave alone the replication studies?

This is the quintessential scientific method, the unrelenting search for truth.

More than 99% of the article’s readers are unlikely to notice a difference between the scientific method and the search for truths (I prefer using the plural), but it exists: the scientific method is a way to acquire new knowledge about the natural universe. The nature of the quest depends on the practitioner – the scientist.

What science tells us about coronavirus infections has reached everyone. People are wearing masks, washing their hands, and avoiding crowds. Yet most people I meet are stumped by questions such as: What is a virus? How does it actually spread? How does your body fight the coronavirus? Why do some people die from the virus? This indeed is the great paradox of our times.

Truly!

Even as science becomes more vital, fewer and fewer people understand and appreciate it. As a child who loved science, as a young man trained in engineering, and as a technocrat who believes in analytical reasoning and hard evidence, I find this hard to accept.

I’m not sure if the author means he does not understand why this paradoxical engagement with science persists but I have some ideas:

Science is becoming increasingly more specialised, and a lot of what we learn from the cutting edge these days cannot be communicated to anyone without at least 18 years of education.
Most people think they understand science when they really mean they’re familiar with its commonest precepts and scientists’ pronouncements. Their knowledge is still only based on faith: that, for example, the new coronavirus spreads rapidly but not why so, freeing them to use scientific knowledge in unscientific narratives.

(Reason: because the virus’s spike proteins have evolved to establish stronger bonds with the ACE2 receptor protein produced by cells in the respiratory tract, compared to the spike proteins of the closely related SARS virus, as well as the ability to attach, albeit less strongly, to another protein – furin – produced by all cells in the body.)

To change this state of affairs, we must focus on four key areas. … We are afflicted by too much quackery and superstition.

Is this article really a dog-whistle? The author is the BJP MP from Hazaribagh (Jharkhand) so there is some comfort – no matter how fleeting – that the BJP is not completely devoid of appreciation for science. However, I’m curious how often the author has brought these issues up with other BJP lawmakers, including the prime minister himself, who have frequently issued a stream of nonsense that undermines a scientific understanding of the world. The answer wouldn’t affect what we should or shouldn’t take away from this piece, but this not uncommon practice of speaking sense in some fora but shutting up in others is annoying, especially when the speaker wields some power.

… Of course, mythology has immense power to shape people’s beliefs, but it must be acknowledged that it is only science that can solve our material problems.

Well said… I think. Can’t be a 100% sure.

While there is certainly much wisdom in age-old practices, it is primarily because there is a genuine scientifically proven cause-and-effect relationship that underlies these practices.

No. Specifically, causality – nor any of the properties we associate with modern science – is not a precondition for traditional wisdom, beliefs and rituals, nor is it meaningful to attempt to validate such wisdom, beliefs and rituals using filters developed to qualify scientific theories of the natural universe. Science and tradition (in many contexts) are born of and seek to fulfil different purposes. Additionally, science alone does not empower – traditional practices do as well (look no further than tribal groups that have been stewarding many of India’s forests for centuries) – and science abandoned by the guiding hand of social forces has often become an instrument of disempowerment.

… In short, we would all be much better off if we shifted some of our time and resources away from blind faith and towards a better scientific understanding of the world.

This is very true. Faith has its place in the world (more so than some might like to acknowledge); outside this finite domain, however, it’s a threat.

Second, our children must learn honestly about science. There is no ‘Western’ concept of science taught in schools which should then be negated at home. Science is universal – just look up the path-breaking research conducted by SN Bose, or CV Raman, or S Chandrasekhar. The pure scientific truth that they discovered holds true everywhere, even in the deep cosmos.

💯 A diversity in the choice of names (by gender or by caste, for example) would have been better.

Teachers and parents must tell children that science is the pursuit of truth and provides a true picture of the world.

As the children grow up, can we encourage our teachers and parents to communicate more nuanced ideas of what science is and why it was invented?

… We should not demand obedience from our children, rather we should encourage them to probe all that we do. …

Again, is this article really a dog-whistle?

Third, we must revere our scientists and technologists.

Never revere another human. Never assume anyone is closed off to (constructive) criticism, particularly when they deserve it. Obviously there’s a time and place (including absurd advice like “don’t berate a surgeon in the middle of a surgery”), but when such opportunities arise don’t let reverence stop you.

It is through their efforts that we flourish today.

Brian Josephson won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1973 for predicting the Josephson effect but he also supported the “water memory” hypothesis that claimed to make sense of homeopathic remedies. Giving scientists the keys to running the world is not guaranteed to produce the desired results.

… Even our start-up culture tends to value the business celebrity, not so much the tech nerd. …

The author is probably thinking of celebrity tech nerds, the Bezoses and the Jobses. “Nerds” and “geeks” in general have become more popular and their culture more socially and commercially profitable.

Billions of dollars of wealth has been created by writing great code, developing insanely good products, creating clever new financial solutions, and establishing entirely new scientific approaches. …

Many of these “insanely good products” have also progressively eroded democracy. To quote Jacob Silverman in The Baffler (at length, hoping Silverman doesn’t mind):

The fundamental underlying problem is the system of economic exchange we’re dealing with, which is sometimes called surveillance capitalism. It’s surveillance capitalism that, by tracking and monetizing the basic informational content of our lives, has fueled the spectacular growth of social media and other networked services in the last fifteen years. Personal privacy has been annihilated, and power and money have concentrated in the hands of whoever owns the most sophisticated machine to collect and parse consumer data. Because of the logic of network effects—according to which services increase in value and utility as more people use them—a few strong players have consolidated their control over the digital economy and show little sign of surrendering it.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. For years, tech executives and data scientists maintained the pose that a digital economy run almost exclusively on the parsing of personal data and sensitive information would not only be competitive and fair but would somehow lead to a more democratic society. Just let Facebook and Google, along with untold other players large and small, tap into the drip-drip of personal data following you around the internet, and in return you’ll get free personalized services and—through an alchemy that has never been adequately explained—a more democratized public sphere.
While these promises provided the ideological ballast for the tech revolution of the last decade or two, they turned out to be horribly wrong. There is nothing neutral, much less emancipatory, about our technological systems or the data sloshing through them. They record and shape the world in powerful, troubling ways. The recent clutch of stories, including in the New York Times and the Guardian, about Cambridge Analytica, the favored data firm of the Trump campaign, provides a humbling example of how personal data can be used to manipulate voter populations. This essential truth has been known at least since 2012, when a University of California-San Diego study found that a few nudges on Facebook appreciably increased voter turnout. From there, it’s only a small jump to isolating and bombarding millions of potential Trump voters with customized appeals, as Cambridge Analytica did.

In the final analysis, the author’s association of “scientific approaches” with technological triumphalism is just a very good reminder that “scientific approaches” don’t have morals built-in.

Finally, we must massively strengthen our scientific institutions. … The hard work of science gets done in these places and they must be among the best in the world. …

Without specifying how ‘best’ or even ‘better’ needs to be measured, the task of strengthening institutes is at risk of being hijacked by the single-minded pursuit of better scores on ranking tables.

… Our best diaspora scientists should be provided generous support to come back to India and set up their research labs. Top scientific institutions must be granted the autonomy to govern themselves, hire the best faculty, attract great students from around the world, and pursue the best research. …

I once picked a fight with a scientist after he submitted a piece arguing that the Government of India should improve the supply of masks and other PPE to tame India’s tuberculosis burden. He couldn’t understand why I was opposed to publishing the piece, insisting he was “saying the rights things – the things that need to be said.” Here’s the thing: no one disagrees, and the dialogue has in fact moved leaps and bounds ahead. So while it may be the right thing to say, I’m not sure it needs to be said – much less deserves a thousand words. Put differently: You’re a minister, try moving the needle!

To that end, I have introduced a private members bill to grant IIM-level autonomy to the IITs that have been selected as institutions of eminence.

Okay… Is this what the article was about: to build support for your Bill? According to PRS, fewer than 4% of private members’ Bills were even discussed during the 14th Lok Sabha (i.e. Modi’s first term as prime minister). Why not build support within the party and introduce it as a government Bill?

Our civilisation is marked by its unending quest for knowledge, … The Mundaka Upanishad enlightens us: Satyameva Jayate – Truth alone triumphs. Our republic is based on this eternal principle. …

Seriously, STAHP. 😂

For coronavirus claims, there is a world between true and false

In high school, you must have learnt about Boolean algebra, possibly the most fascinating kind of algebra for its deceptive ease and simplicity. But thanks to its foundations in computer science, Boolean algebra – at least as we it learnt in school – is fixated with ‘true’ and ‘false’ states but not with the state of ‘don’t know’ that falls in between. This state may not have many applications as regards the functioning of logic gates but in the real world, it is quite important, especially when the truth threatens to be spun out of control.

Amitabh Bachchan recently published a video in which he delivered a monologue claiming that when a fly alights on human faeces containing traces of the new coronavirus, flies off and then alights on some food, the food could also be contaminated by the same virus. The Wire Science commissioned a fact-check from Dr Deepak Natarajan, a reputed (and thankfully opinionated) cardiologist in New Delhi. In his straightforward article, Dr Natarajan presents evidence from peer-reviewed papers to argue that while we know the new coronavirus does enter the faeces of an infected person, we don’t know anything about whether the virus remains viable, or capable of precipitating an infection. Second, we know nothing of the participation of flies either.

The thing to remember here is that, during a panic – or in a pre-panic situation that constantly threatens to devolve into a panic – society as such has an unusually higher uptake capacity for information that confirms their biases irrespective of whether it is true. This property, so to speak, amplifies the importance of ‘not knowing’.

Thanks to scientism, there is a common impression among many experts and most non-experts that science has, or could have, the answers to all questions that could ever be asked. So when a scientist says she does not know something, there is a pronounced tendency among some groups of people – particularly, if not entirely, those who may not be scientistic themselves but believe science itself is scientistic – to assume the lack of an answer means the absence of an answer. That is, to think “If the scientist does not have an answer, then the science does not have an answer”, rather than “If the scientist does not have an answer, then the science does not have an answer yet” or even “If the scientist does not have an answer yet, she could have an answer later“.

This response at a time of panic or pre-panic forces almost all information to be classified as either ‘true’ or ‘false’, precluding the agency science still retains to move towards a ‘true’ or ‘false’ conclusion and rendering their truth-value to be a foregone conclusion. That is, we need evidence to say if something is true – but we also need to understand that saying something is ‘not true’ without outright saying it is ‘false’ is an important state of the truth itself.

It also forces the claimant to be more accountable. Here is one oversimplified but nonetheless illustrative example: When only ‘true’ and ‘false’ exist, any new bit of information has a 50% chance of being in one bin or the other. But when ‘not true/false’ or ‘don’t know’ is in the picture, new information has only a 33% chance of assuming one of the truth values. Further, the only truth value based on which people should be allowed to claim something is true is ‘true’. ‘False’ has never been good enough but ‘don’t know’ is not good enough either, which means that before we subject a claim to a test, it has a 66% chance of being ‘not true’.

Amitabh Bachchan’s mistake was to conflate ‘don’t know’ and ‘true’ without considering the possibility of ‘not true’, and has thus ended up exposing his millions of followers on Twitter to claims that are decidedly not true. As Dr Natarajan said, silence has never been more golden.

On India’s path to community transmission

There’s a virus out there among many, many viruses that’s caught the world’s attention. This virus came into existence somewhere else, it doesn’t matter where, and developed a mutation at some point that allowed it to do what it needs to do inside the body of one specific kind of animal: Homo sapiens. And once it enters one Homo sapiens, it takes advantage of its new surroundings to produce more copies of itself. Then, its offspring wait for the animal to cough or sneeze – acts originally designed to expel irritating substances – to exit their current home and hopefully enter a new one. There, these viruses go through the same cycle of reproduction and expulsion, and so forth.

This way, the virus has infected over 210,000 people in the last hundred days or so. Some people’s bodies have been so invaded by the virus that their immune systems weren’t able to fight it off, and they – nearly 9,000 of them – succumbed to it.

Thus far, the virus has reportedly invaded the bodies of at least 282 people in India. There’s no telling how the virus will dissipate through the rest of the population – if it needs to – except by catching people who have the virus early, separating them from the rest of the population for long enough to ensure they don’t have and/or transmit the virus or, if they do, providing additional treatment, and finally reintegrating them with the general population.

But as the virus spreads among more and more people, it’s going to become harder and harder to tell how every single new patient got their particular infection. Ultimately, a situation is going to arise wherein too many people have the virus for public-health officials to be able to say how exactly the virus got to them. The WHO calls this phase ‘community transmission’.

India is a country of over 1.3 billion people, and is currently on the cusp of what the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has called ‘stage 3’ – the advent of community transmission. It’s impossible to expect a developing country as big and as densely populated as India to begin testing all 1.3 billion Indians for the virus as soon as there is news of the virus having entered the national border because the resource cost required to undertake such an exercise is extremely high, well beyond what India can generally afford. However, this doesn’t mean Indians are screwed.

Instead of testing every Indian, ICMR took a different route. Consider the following example: there’s a population of red flecks randomly interspersed with yellow flecks. You need to choose a small subset of flecks from this grid (shown below) such that checking for the number of yellow flecks in the subset gives you a reliable idea of the number of yellow flecks overall.

The ideal subset would be the whole set, of course, so there is one more catch: you have a fixed amount of money to figure out the correct answer (as well as for a bunch of other activities), so it’s in your best interests to keep the subset as small as possible. In effect, you need to balance the tension between two important demands: getting to a more accurate answer while spending less.

Similarly, ICMR assumed that the virus is randomly distributed in the Indian population, and decided to divide the population into different groups, for example by their relative proximity to a testing centre. That is, each testing centre would correspond to the group of all people who live closer to that testing centre than any other. Then, ICMR would pick a certain number of people from each group, collect their nasal and throat samples and send it to the corresponding labs for tests.

Say group size equals 100. For a Bernoulli random variable with unknown probability p, if no events occur in n independent trials, the maximum value of p (at 95% confidence) is approximately 3/n. In our case, n = 100 and p at 95% confidence is 3/100, which is 3%. Since this is the upper bound, it means less than 3% of the population has the ‘event’ which didn’t occur in n trials – which in our case is the event of ‘testing positive’. Do note, this is what is safe to say; it’s not what may actually be happening on the ground. So by increasing the sample size n as much as possible, ICMR can ascertain with higher and higher confidence as to whether the corresponding group has community transmission or not.

Thus far, ICMR has said there is no community transmission in India based on these calculations. Independent experts have been reluctant to take its word, however, because while ICMR has publicised what the sample size and the number of positives are, there is very little information about two other things.

First: we don’t know how ICMR selected the samples that it did for testing. While the virus’s distribution in the population can be considered to be random, especially if community transmission is said to have commenced, the selection of samples needs to have an underlying logic. What is that logic?

Second: we don’t know the group sizes. It’s important for the sample size to be proportionate to the group size. So without knowing what the group size underlying each sample is, it becomes impossible to tell if ICMR is doing its job right.

On March 17, one ICMR scientist said that some testing centres had admitted fewer people with COVID-19-like symptoms and the source of whose infections was unknown (i.e. community transmission) than the size of the sample chosen from their corresponding group. She was suggesting that ICMR’s choice of samples from each group was large enough to not overlook community transmission. To translate in terms of the example above: she was saying ICMR’s subset size was big enough to catch at least one yellow fleck – and didn’t.

As it happens, on March 20, ICMR announced that it would begin testing for a potential type of community-transmission cases even though its sampling exercise had produced 1,020 negative results in 1,020 samples (distributed across 51 testing centres).

The reasons for this are yet unclear but suggests that ICMR suspects there is community transmission of the virus in the country even though its methods – which ICMR has always stood by – haven’t found evidence of such transmission. This in turn prompts the following question: why not test for all types of community transmission? The answer is the same as before: ICMR has limited resources but at the same time has been tasked with discovering how many yellow flecks are there in the total population.

The virus is not an intelligent creature. In fact, it’s extremely primitive. Each virus is in its essence a packet of chemical reactions, and when each reaction happens depends on a combination of internal and external conditions. Other than this, the virus does not harbour any intentions or aspirations. It simply responds to stimuli that it cannot manipulate or affect in any way.

The overarching implication is that beyond how good the virus is at spreading from person to person, a pandemic is what it is because of human interactions, and because of human adaptation and mitigation systems. And as more and more people get infected, and their groups verge towards the WHO’s definition of ‘community transmission’, the virus’s path through the population becomes less and less obvious, but at the same time a greater depth of transmission opens the path to better epidemiological modelling.

When such transmission happens in a country like India, the body responsible for keeping the people safe – whether the Union health ministry, ICMR or any other entity – faces the same challenge that ICMR did. This is also why direct comparisons of India’s and South Korea’s testing strategies are difficult to justify, especially of the number of people tested per million: India has nearly 26-times as many people but spends 11.5-times less on healthcare per capita.

At the same time, ICMR isn’t making it easy for anyone – least of all itself – when it doesn’t communicate properly, and leaves itself open to criticism, which in turn chips away at its authority and trustworthiness in a time as testing as this. Demonetisation taught us very well that a strategy is only as good as its implementation.

But on the flip side, it wouldn’t be amiss to make a distinction here: between testing enough to get a sense of the virus’s prevalence in the population – in order to guide further action and policy – and the fact that the low expenditure on public healthcare is always going to incentivise India to skew towards a sampling strategy instead of an alternative that requires mass-testing. ICMR and the Union health ministry haven’t inspired confidence on the first count but it’s important to ensure criticism of the former doesn’t spillover into criticism of the latter as well.

Anyway, the corresponding sampling strategy is going to have to be based on a logic. Why? Because while the resources for the virus to spread exist abundantly in nature (in the form of humans), the human response to containing the spread requires resources that humans find hard to get. Against the background of this disparity, sampling, testing and treatment logics – such as Italy’s brutal triaging policy – help us choose better sampling strategies; predict approximately how many people will need to be quarantined in the near future; prepare our medical supplies; recruit the requisite number of health workers; stockpile important drugs; prepare for economic losses; issue rules of social conduct for the people; and so forth.

A logic could even help anticipate (or perpetuate, depending on your appetite for cynicism) ‘leakages’ arising due to, say, caste or class issues. Think of it like trying to draw a circle with only straight lines of a fixed length: with 200 strokes, you could technically draw a polygon with 200 sides that looks approximately like a circle – but it will still have some discernible edges and vertices that won’t exactly map on a circle, leaving a small part of the latter out. Similarly, using a properly designed technique that can predict which person might get infected and who might not can still catch a large number of people – but the technique won’t catch all of them.

One obvious way to significantly improve the technique’s efficacy as it stands is to account for the fact that more than half of all Indians are treated at private hospitals whereas you can be tested for COVID-19 only at a government facility, and not all VRDLs receive samples from all private hospitals in their respective areas.

Ultimately, the officials who devise the logics must be expected to justify how the combination of all logics can – even if only on paper – uncover most, if not all, cases of the virus’s infection in India.

A great discussion on the history of India’s tech.

On February 27, the Bangalore International Centre and Carnegie India hosted a panel discussion around Midnight Machines, the new book by Arun Mohan Sukumar that traces the interplay of technology and politics in independent India (read The Wire Science‘s review here). The panelists were Arun (my friend and former colleague at The Hindu), space entrepreneur Susmita Mohanty, Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Gowda, historian of science Jahnavi Phalkey, and Anu Singh of Carnegie India.

The whole discussion was about 90 minutes long, and picked up steam after the first 15 minutes or so. If you’re at all interested in the history of science and technology in India, I recommend you watch the whole thing on YouTube. If not, I’d like to draw your attention to two a few interesting (to me) passages of discussion and which I’ve also transcribed below. The parts where Arun and Phalkey directly debated each other, Arun emerged with only minor bruises, which I shouldn’t have to tell you is a considerable feat and may not have been the case in a full-on, two-person debate!

Jahnavi Phalkey, 32:00 – The political ambition of a state is now technological ambition. That’s why the technological story of the latter half of the 20th century is a political one, and is therefore also political in India. The other aspect of this is centralisation. While we in India have argued that the Indian state centralised research funding through the CSIR, DAE, the space programme, etc. with all money going into a few facilities, look at Europe. The European answer was CERN, with countries coming together to build facilities. Apart from the UN, there was no economy then that could conduct scientific research at the scale the tone for which was set during the Second World War.

Therefore, the centralisation solution adopted (also) in India was no different from what was happening globally. So what was happening in India was not anomalous. It’s a part of the larger story. To add a footnote to the Nehru story: Nehru spoke science, he said “scientific temper”, but look at the institutions he established: the IITs (when it was 60 years before India setup the IISERs) and the CSIR (he didn’t go for the Max Planck Institutes model, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes model or the Harnack principle but focused on industrial research); the IISc came 50 years before independence. So the accusation that Nehru spoke science, did science but didn’t do technology is not held out.

[At one point, Arun also talks about how India needed a Nehru to navigate the Non-Aligned Movement to still secure favours form different governments without upsetting the precarious balance of powers (so to speak) to help set up some of India’s preeminent IITs. I skimmed through the video twice but couldn’t find the exact timestamp.]

Arun Mohan Sukumar, 43:50 – A CSIR scientist said the failure of the solar cooker project basically ensured that all the scientists [who worked on it] retreated into the comfort of their labs and put them off “applied science”.

Here’s a project commenced almost immediately after independence meant to create technology by Indians for Indians, and after it failed for various reasons, the political spotlight that had been put on the project was counterproductive. Nehru himself investing this kind of capital exposed him and the scientific establishment to criticism that they were perhaps not used to. These were venerated men in their respective fields and they were perhaps unused to being accountable in this visceral way. India offered a prototype of the solar cooker to Egypt and, I believe, Rhodesia or South Africa, and the joke goes that the order was never repeated. D.D. Kosambi says in an opinion piece at the time that the only person who made any profit out of the solar cooker affair is the contractor who sold it for scraps.

This is the kind of criticism confronted by the scientific establishment and it is a consequence of politics. I agree with Prof Phalkey when she says it was a consequence of the political establishment not insulating the scientific establishment from the sort of criticism which may or may not informed but you know how the press is. That led to a gradual breaking of ranks between the CSIR and the political vision for India where you’d have these mass technologies that [Phalkey] mentioned, and you can see the best evidence for that is Nehru’s pursuit of massive industrialisation in the second Five Year Plan, from 1956 to 1961.

This isn’t to say that Nehru was surrounded by advisers who all believed in the same thing; there was of course [P.C.] Mahalanobis who believed in a more aggressive form of industrialisation. But at various points of time one constituency was trumping another, within even the establishment. But it needs to be said that the PM was not in favour of introducing tractors in agriculture… Again, this is all criticism with the wisdom of hindsight.

Jahnavi Phalkey, 53:16 – In the 1970s, look at the number of democratic regimes that fell due to hot wars fought during the Cold War in the rest of the world. You’ll start to see why the need for control was felt.

Arun Mohan Sukumar [following after Rajeev Gowda’s comments], 55:05 – Another dimension is the presence of universities in the US, which incubated the military-industrial complex. Harvard and MIT in Boston and Stanford in the Silicon Valley were the nuclei for research. In India, some of these are truly unfortunate circumstances that the government has no control over. When the first batch of graduates passed out of IIT Kanpur in 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Immigration and Naturalisation Act giving Indians, and people of other nationalities, an automatic path to citizenship. So the best minds of our country were prompted by the fact that there aren’t enough jobs or enough well-paying jobs in India [to enter] a feeder line created between India and the US, from which it is very difficult to come back. Those circumstances too must be acknowledged.

Susmita Mohanty, 56:20 – Even brain drain is hugely exaggerated. I’ve lived in four different countries. The talent pool we have in India today is as big or bigger. There are people leaving the country but not everyone is the best coder in town.

Arun Mohan Sukumar, 57:24 – The appropriate technology movement that started in the late 1960s and early 1970s was this philosophy that grew out of Western Europe and the US which called for lesser consumption of natural resources and labour-intensive jobs with a view to conserving resources for the planet, a lot of which was precipitated by a report called ‘Limits to Growth’, which essentially predicted this catastrophe that would befall humanity by 2000.

And then economist [E.F.] Schumacher writes this book called ‘Small is Beautiful’ [in 1973] and creates a revolution incidentally not just in advanced societies but also in developing countries, where leaders like Indira Gandhi coopted the movement to say to the people that you should consume less, conserve your natural resources and deploy labour-intensive technologies that will essentially be beneficial to you and your way of life. Seminar after seminar was organised by top institutes of the time to talk about how you can create fuel out of biogas, how you can mechanise bullock carts – technologies that are not scalable but nevertheless are quick-fixes, and this is where ‘jugaad’ has its historical origin: in the valorisation of frugal innovation.

[Phalkey shakes her head in disagreement.]

This would’ve been acceptable had it not been for the fact that investments in the space and nuclear programmes continued unabated. … So on the one hand the state was promoting big science and it wasn’t as if they had an ideological or political compulsion against Big Machine and big technologies. There was just factors such as financial considerations and the government’s own inability to develop technology at home which, I argue, led Indira Gandhi to co-opt the appropriate technology movement. … In India, perhaps it’s harsh to say that we moved backwards, but the objective was not to redefine technology but to shun it altogether. [Phalkey is quite in disagreement at this point.] That unfortunately is I feel a byproduct of the legacy of the 1970s.

Jahnavi Phalkey, 1:01:14 – I have to disagree because there’s been only one science plan in the country in its history, and that was done in the 1970s under Mrs Gandhi’s regime. Eighteen-hundred people from user ministries, the Planning Commission, scientific institutions and industry sat together over 18-24 months and came up with a comprehensive plan as to how to take research happening in the institutions and in the CSIR through Planning Commission allocation of money to the user ministries. We haven’t seen anything on this scale before or since.

Problem was as soon as Mrs Gandhi implemented the plan, she also implemented the Emergency. When the Emergency was pulled back, the Morarji Desai regime decided that India did not need [the science plan]. So the argument you’re making [addressing Arun] of scaling back on technology or technology as a solution to the social, political and other problems that India had was more due to the Janata regime and not Mrs Gandhi’s. One needs to make this small distinction because this was simply not true at the time.

Arun Mohan Sukumar, 1:06:09 – What was remarkable to me while writing this book was this factoid that comes from this book on the history of computing in India by C.R. Subramanian: he says the import of computers to India tripled during the years of the Emergency. For my life, I can’t imagine why! But it goes to show that despite the anti-automation protests of the 1970s and 1970s, and remember that 1978 is the year when IBM quit India for whatever reasons, there was beginning to be this gradual embrace of technology and which really takes off from the 1980s. And from the moment of liberalisation in 1991, it’s a different story altogether.

Some of these legacies continue to haunt us, whether it is popular protests against nuclear plants, which really came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, not just in India but also in other parts of the world. Some of that really bore on India as well, and I believe continued into the debate on genetically modified crops. If you ask a person who really has a strong opinion on these subjects, I wonder whether he or she would have a clear idea of what the technology is. But they evoke such strong views, and perhaps some of it is due to the constant politicisation of the virtues and vices of the technology.

Arun Mohan Sukumar, 1:09:04 – One of the reasons why the Indian opposition to the Human Genome Project was so pronounced in the early 1990s, when the hand of invitation was extended to the Indian government, was because the Vaccine Action programme signed by Rajiv Gandhi and Ronald Reagan just a few years ago ran into a great deal of controversy within and without government; defence ministry officials said here is an effort to take DNA materials from Indians to be turned against India as an agent of biological warfare, and all sorts of rubbish.

[How history repeats itself!]

Adding to this, some private institutes in the US were involved in smuggling anti-rabies vaccines into developing countries. All of this spooked the scientific establishment and which, the book argues, led to us staying away from the Human Genome Project.

… And we missed the bus. Today we say we are able to map the genome of some man from Jharkhand at a fraction of the cost – it is at a fraction of the cost because most of the work has already been done. There is some historical legacy there that unfortunately continues to haunt us.

[Susmita Mohanty mentions ISRO’s famous reluctance to share information about components of its civilian space programme.]

Jahnavi Phalkey, 1:12:26 – There’s also a little bit of politics to it. The information that NASA and ESA share is backed by a very, very, very strong politics of sharing. What can and cannot be shared are clearly divided.

Jahnavi Phalkey, 1:13:57 – If you begin with Robert Clive, we have a history of about 300 years of building suspicion. And to dismantle that kind of suspicion is going to take lots of work. I’m not saying to not have participated in the Human Genome Project but that it’s not a good thing to share or that we embark on certain projects. I think we might be erring on the side of caution.

Arun Mohan Sukumar, 1:17:58 – There are different kinds of technocracies, and the three people surveyed in the book [who represented those kinds] are M. Visvesvaraya, Vikram Sarabhai and Nandan Nilekani. They forged three different organisational structures within government (of course Visvesvaraya did so before independence), and they had different views of technology. I wouldn’t say there were all political animals but they certainly had a good appreciation of politics which was crucial to their success.

For example, Visvesvaraya was a very astute navigator of colonial-era politics but then resigned as the diwan of Mysore over what he perceived as anti-Brahmin protests in the Madras presidency and the threat of that spilling over into Mysore. Finally, after independence, his views were totally marginalised by the establishment of the time.

Sarabhai was in currency throughout but also in many respects was able to tell the leadership what it wanted to hear and at the same time insulate his own team from politics to the extent that ISRO today has a separate recruitment process. Some degree of autonomy was built-in.

Nilekani’s work on Aadhaar goes the exact opposite way: he is very clear that he does not want scientists or technologists running the programme beyond the infancy… He was very sure at the beginning that an IAS officer should be running UIDAI. We can debate the merits of the decision but the fact is, in his view and the view of the team, the technocracy could only survive if it was built from within government. Whereas when Sarabhai died, Satish Dhawan was brought from Caltech to run ISRO. It was very clear for the folks behind Aadhaar that that model would not have survived.

fin.

Featured image: The panelists (L-R): Arun Mohan Sukumar, Susmita Mohanty, Rajeev Gowda, Jahnavi Phalkey and Anu Singh.

The difficulty of option ‘c’

Can any journalist become a science journalist? More specifically, can any journalist become a science journalist without understanding the methods of scientific practice and administration? This is not a trivial question because not all the methods of science can be discovered or discerned from the corresponding ‘first principles’. That is, common sense and intelligence alone cannot consummate your transformation; you must access new information that you cannot derive through inductive reasoning.

For example, how would you treat the following statement: “Scientists prove that X causes Y”?

a. You could take the statement at face-value

b. You could probe how and why scientists proved that X causes Y

c. You could interrogate the claim that X causes Y, or

d. You could, of course, ignore it.

(Option (d) is the way to go for claims in the popular as well as scientific literature of the type “Scientists prove that coffee/wine/chocolate cause your heart to strengthen/weaken/etc.” unless the story you’re working on concerns the meta-narrative of these studies.)

Any way, choosing between (a), (b) and (c) is not easy, often because which option you pick depends on how much you know about how the modern scientific industry works. For example, a non-science journalist is likely to go with (a) and/or (b) because, first, they typically believe that the act of proving something is a singular event, localised in time and space, with no room for disagreement.

This is after all the picture of proof-making that ill-informed supporters of science (arguably more than even supporters of the ideal of scientism) harbour: “Scientists have proved that X causes Y, so that’s that,” in the service of silencing inconvenient claims like “human activities aren’t causing Earth’s surface to heat up” or like “climate geoengineering is bad”. I believe that anthropogenic global warming is real and that we need to consider stratospheric aerosol injections but flattening the proof-making exercise threatens to marginalise disagreements among scientists themselves, such as about the extent of warming or about the long-term effects on biodiversity.

The second reason (a) and (b) type stories are more common, but especially (a), follows from this perspective of proofs: the view that scientists are authorities, and we are not qualified to question them. As it happens, most of us will never be qualified enough, but question them we can thanks to four axioms.

First, science being deployed for the public good must be well understood in much the same way a drug that has been tested for efficacy must also be exculpated of deleterious side-effects.

Second, journalists don’t need to critique the choice of reagents, animal models, numerical methods or apparatus design to be able to uncover loopholes, inconsistencies and/or shortcomings. Instead, that oppositional role is easily performed by independent scientists whose comments a journalist can invite on the study.

Third, science is nothing without the humans that practice it, and most of the more accessible stories of science (not news reports) are really stories of the humans practising the science.

Fourth, organised science – hot take: like organised religion – is a human endeavour tied up with human structures, human politics and human foibles, which means as much of what we identify as science lies in the discovery of scientific knowledge as in the way we fund, organise, disseminate and preserve that knowledge.

These four allowances together imply that a science journalist is not a journalist familiar with advanced mathematics or who can perform a tricky experiment but is a journalist trained to write about science without requiring such knowledge.

Anyone familiar with India will recognise that these two principal barriers – a limited understanding of proof-making and the view of scientists as authority figures – to becoming a good science journalist are practically seeded by the inadequate school-level education system. But they are also furthered by India’s prevailing political climate, especially in the way a highly polarised society undermines the role of expertise.

Some people will tell you that you can’t question highly trained scientists because you are not a highly trained scientist but others will say you’re entitled to question everything as a thinking, reasoning, socially engaged global citizen.

As it happens, these aren’t opposing points of view. It’s just that the left and the right have broken the idea of expertise into two pieces, taking one each for themselves, such that the political left is often comfortable with questioning facts like grinding bricks to unusable dust while the political right will treat all bricks the same irrespective of the quality of clay; the leftist will subsequently insist that quality control is all-important whereas the rightist will champion the virtues of pragmatism.

In this fracas to deprive expertise either of authority or of critique, or sometimes both, the expert becomes deconstructed to the point of nonexistence. As a result, the effective performance of science journalism, instead of trying to pander equally to the left’s and the right’s respective conceptions of the expert, converges on the attempt to reconstruct expertise as it should be: interrogated without undermining it, considered without elevating it.

Obviously, this is easier said, and more enjoyably said, than done.

The scientist as inadvertent loser

Twice this week, I’d had occasion to write about how science is an immutably human enterprise and therefore some of its loftier ideals are aspirational at best, and about how transparency is one of the chief USPs of preprint repositories and post-publication peer-review. As if on cue, I stumbled upon a strange case of extreme scientific malpractice that offered to hold up both points of view.

In an article published January 30, three editors of the Journal of Theoretical Biology (JTB) reported that one of their handling editors had engaged in the following acts:

“At the first stage of the submission process, the Handling Editor on multiple occasions handled papers for which there was a potential conflict of interest. This conflict consisted of the Handling Editor handling papers of close colleagues at the Handling Editor’s own institute, which is contrary to journal policies.”
“At the second stage of the submission process when reviewers are chosen, the Handling Editor on multiple occasions selected reviewers who, through our investigation, we discovered was the Handling Editor working under a pseudonym…”
Many forms of reviewer coercion
“In many cases, the Handling Editor was added as a co-author at the final stage of the review process, which again is contrary to journal policies.”

On the back of these acts of manipulation, this individual – whom the editors chose not to name for unknown reasons but one of whom all but identified on Twitter as a Kuo-Chen Chou (and backed up by an independent user) – proudly trumpets the following ‘achievement’ on his website:

The same webpage also declares that Chou “has published over 730 peer-reviewed scientific papers” and that “his papers have been cited more than 71,041 times”.

Without transparency^a and without the right incentives, the scientific process – which I use loosely to denote all activities and decisions associated with synthesising, assimilating and organising scientific knowledge – becomes just as conducive to misconduct and unscrupulousness as any other enterprise if only because it allows people with even a little more power to exploit others’ relative powerlessness.

a. Ironically, the JTB article lies behind a paywall.

In fact, Chen had also been found guilty of similar practices when working with a different journal, called Bioinformatics, and an article its editors published last year has been cited prominently in the article by JTB’s editors.

Even if the JTB and Bioinformatics cases are exceptional for their editors having failed to weed out gross misconduct shortly after its first occurrence – it’s not; but although there many such exceptional cases, they are still likely to be in the minority (an assumption on my part) – a completely transparent review process eliminates such possibilities as well as, and more importantly, naturally renders the process trustless^b. That is, you shouldn’t have to trust a reviewer to do right by your paper; the system itself should be designed such that there is no opportunity for a reviewer to do wrong.

b. As in trustlessness, not untrustworthiness.

Second, it seems Chou accrued over 71,000 citations because the number of citations has become a proxy for research excellence irrespective of whether the underlying research is actually excellent – a product of the unavoidable growth of a system in which evaluators replaced a complex combination of factors with a single number. As a result, Chou and others like him have been able to ‘hack’ the system, so to speak, and distort the scientific literature (which you might’ve seen as the stack of journals in a library representing troves of scientific knowledge).

But as long as the science is fine, no harm done, right? Wrong.

If you visualised the various authors of research papers as points and the lines connecting them to each other as citations, an inordinate number would converge on the point of Chou – and they would be wrong, led there not by Chou’s prowess as a scientist but misled there by his abilities as a credit-thief and extortionist.

This graphing exercise isn’t simply a form of visual communication. Imagine your life as a scientist as a series of opportunities, where each opportunity is contested by multiple people and the people in charge of deciding who ‘wins’ at each stage aren’t some or all of well-trained, well-compensated or well-supported. If X ‘loses’ at one of the early stages and Y ‘wins’, Y has a commensurately greater chance of winning a subsequent contest and X, lower. Such contests often determine the level of funding, access to suitable guidance and even networking possibilities, so over multiple rounds, by virtue of the evaluators at each step having more reasons to be impressed by Y‘s CV because, say, they had more citations, and fewer reasons to be impressed with X‘s, X ends up with more reasons to exit science and switch careers.

Additionally, because of the resources that Y has received opportunities to amass, they’re in a better position to conduct even more research, ascend to even more influential positions and – if they’re so inclined – accrue even more citations through means both straightforward and dubious. To me, such prejudicial biasing resembles the evolution of a Lorenz attractor: the initial conditions might appear to be the same to some approximation, but for a single trivial choice, one scientist ends up being disproportionately more successful than another.

The answer of course is many things, including better ways to evaluate and reward research, and two of them in turn have to be to eliminate the use of numbers to denote human abilities and to make the journey of a manuscript from the lab to the wild as free of opaque, and therefore potentially arbitrary, decision-making as possible.

Featured image: A still from an animation showing the divergence of nearby trajectories on a Lorenz system. Caption and credit: MicoFilós/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.