Analysis – Page 3 – Close Read

Poonam Pandey and peer-review

One dubious but vigorous narrative that has emerged around Poonam Pandey’s “death” and subsequent return to life is that the mainstream media will publish “anything”.

To be sure, there were broadly two kinds of news reports after the post appeared on her Instagram handle claiming Pandey had died of cervical cancer: one said she’d died and quoted the Instagram post; the other said her management team had said she’d died. That is, the first kind stated her death as a truth and the other stated her team’s statement as a truth. News reports of the latter variety obviously ‘look’ better now that Pandey and her team said she lied (to raise awareness of cervical cancer). But judging the former news reports harshly isn’t fair.

This incident has been evocative of the role of peer-review in scientific publishing. After scientists write up a manuscript describing an experiment and submit it to a journal to consider for publishing, the journal editors farm it out to a group of independent experts on the same topic and ask them if they think the paper is worth publishing. (Pre-publishing) Peer-review has many flaws, including the fact that peer-reviewers are expected to volunteer their time and expertise and that the process is often slow, inconsistent, biased, and opaque.

But for all these concerns, peer-review isn’t designed to reveal deliberately – and increasingly cleverly – concealed fraud. Granted, the journal could be held responsible for missing plagiarism and the journal and peer-reviewers both for clearly duplicated images and entirely bullshit papers. However, pinning the blame for, say, failing to double-check findings because the infrastructure to do so is hard to come by on peer-review would be ridiculous.

Peer-review’s primary function, as far as I understand it, is to check whether the data presented in the study support the conclusions drawn from the study. It works best with some level of trust. Expecting it to respond perfectly to an activity that deliberately and precisely undermines that trust is ridiculous. A better response (to more advanced tools with which to attempt fraud but also to democratise access to scientific knowledge) would be to overhaul the ‘conventional’ publishing process, such as with transparent peer-review and/or paying for the requisite expertise and labour.

(I’m an admirer of the radical strategy eLife adopted in October 2022: to review preprint papers and publicise its reviewers’ findings along with the reviewers’ identities and the paper, share recommendations with the authors to improve it, but not accept or reject the paper per se.)

Equally importantly, we shouldn’t consider a published research paper to be the last word but in fact a work in progress with room for revision, correction or even retraction. Doing otherwise – as much as stigmatising retractions for reasons not related to misconduct or fraud, for that matter – on the other hand, may render peer-review suspect when people find mistakes in a published paper even when the fault lies elsewhere.

Analogously, journalism is required to be sceptical, adversarial even – but of what? Not every claim is worthy of investigative and/or adversarial journalism. In particular, when a claim is publicised that someone has died and a group of people that manages that individual’s public profile “confirms” the claim is true, that’s the end of that. This an important reason why these groups exist, so when they compromise that purpose, blaming journalists is misguided.

And unlike peer-review, the journalistic processes in place (in many but not all newsrooms) to check potentially problematic claims – for example, that “a high-powered committee” is required “for an extensive consideration of the challenges arising from fast population growth” – are perfectly functional, in part because their false-positive rate is lower without having to investigate “confirmed” claims of a person’s death than with.

Schrödinger’s temple

On January 22, in a ceremony led by Prime Minister and now high-priest Narendra Modi, priests and officials allegedly consecrated the idol of Lord Ram at the new temple in Ayodhya, with many celebrities in attendance. (‘Alleged’ because I don’t know if it’s a legitimate consecration, given the disagreement between some spiritual leaders over its rituals.) TV news channels on both sides of the spectrum were outwardly revelling in the temple’s festivities, bothering not at all with covering the ceremony in a dispassionate way. Their programming was unwatchable.

This Ram temple is a physical manifestation of the contemporary Indian nation – a superposition of state and sanctum sanctorum at once, collapsing like Schrödinger’s hypothetical cat to one or the other depending on political expedience. The temple, like many others around the country now, is both kovil and katchi office (Tamil for ‘temple’ and ‘party office’).

(I’m hardly unique in these views but I also suspect I’m in a minority, with few others to reinforce their legitimacy, so I’m writing them down so they’re easier for me to recall.)

After the consecration ceremony, Prime Minister Modi delivered a speech, as is his wont, further remixing the aspirations of the Indian state and its people with a majoritarian religious identity. (The mic then passed to the treasurer of the temple trust, who spoke in praise of Modi, and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, who spoke in praise of Modi’s ostensible ideals.) For now, the results of the Lok Sabha elections later this year seem like a foregone conclusion, with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party widely expected to begin a third term in May. The temple’s opening was effectively a show of strength by Modi, that he delivers on his promises no matter the obstacles in his way, even if any of them are legitimate.

Before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, in another show of strength, the Modi government signed off on the anti-satellite (ASAT) missile test in March, in which a missile launched from the ground flew 300 km up and destroyed a dummy satellite in earth orbit. The operation was called ‘Mission Shakti’ (Hindi for ‘strength’). A statement from the Ministry of External Affairs said, “The test was done to verify that India has the capability to safeguard our space assets”. Oddly, however, the Defence R&D Organisation, which conducted the test, had had ASAT capabilities for a decade by then under its Ballistic Missile Defence programme, rendering the timing suspect.

Considering Prime Minister Modi delivered another hour-long speech after the test, I’ve been inclined to side with the theory that it was conducted to give him airtime that was otherwise unavailable due to the Election Commission’s restrictions on election candidates coming on air in a short period before polling. In 2024, of course, it’s an open secret that the Election Commission determines polling schedules based on the BJP’s convenience.

ICC pitch-rating system is regulatory subversion

In today’s edition of The Hindu, Rebecca Rose Varghese and Vignesh Radhakrishnan have a particularly noteworthy edition of their ‘Data Point’ column – ‘noteworthy’ because they’ve used data to make concrete something we’ve all been feeling for a while, in the way we sometimes know something to be true even though we don’t have hard evidence, and which found prominent articulation in the words of Rohit Sharma in a recent interview.

Sharma was commenting on the ICC’s pitch-rating system, saying pitches everywhere should be rated consistently instead of those in the subcontinent earning poorer ratings more of the time.

Rebecca and Vignesh analysed matches and their pitch-ratings between May 14, 2019, and December 26, 2023, to find:

Pitches in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka receive ‘below average’ or ‘poor’ ratings for Test matches more often than Test pitches in Australia, West Indies, England, South Africa, and New Zealand;
In Test matches played in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, spin bowling claimed more wickets than pace bowling; and
When spin bowling claims more wickets than pace bowling in Test matches, the former pitches are rated worse than the latter pitches even if both sets of matches conclude after a relatively lower number of balls have been faced.

This is just fantastic. (1) and (2) together imply the ICC has penalised pitches in the subcontinent for being spin-friendly tracks. And this and (3) imply that this penalty doesn’t care for the fact that non-spin-friendly tracks produce similar results without incurring the same penalty.

The longer a Test match lasts, the better it is for stadiums and TV networks broadcasting the match: the stadium can sell tickets for all five days and networks can broadcast advertisements for Test matches on all five days. This thinking has come to dominate ODIs, T20s, and Test matches, but it’s a sad irony that the ICC created the ODI and the T20 formats to be more entertaining and more profitable without compromising the Test format. Now, with the ICC’s pitch-rating system, this entertainment + profitability thinking has percolated through Test matches as well.

Sharma alluded to this when he said:

I mean, we saw what happened in this match, how the pitch played and stuff like that. I honestly don’t mind playing on pitches like this. As long as everyone keeps their mouth shut in India and don’t talk too much about Indian pitches, honestly.

I’d take this further and say Test match pitches can’t be rated badly because the purpose of this format is to test players in the toughest conditions the sport can offer. In this milieu, to say a Test match pitch is ‘below average’ is to discourage teams from confronting their opponents’ batters with a track that favours bowlers’ strengths. And in the ICC’s limited view, this discouragement is biased markedly against spin-bowling.

Criticism of this paradigm isn’t without foundation. The A Cricketing View Substack wrote in a February 2021 post (hat-tip to Vignesh):

The Laws of Cricket only specify that the game not be played on a pitch which umpires might consider to be dangerous to the health of the players. The ICC has chosen to go beyond this elementary classification between dangerous and non-dangerous pitches by setting up a regulatory mechanism which is designed to minimize the probability that a bad pitch (and not just a dangerous pitch) will be prepared.

If anything, a bad pitch that results in uneven and potentially high bounce will be more dangerous to batters than a bad pitch that results in sharp turn. So the ICC’s pitch-rating system isn’t “regulatory expansion” – as A Cricketing View called it – but regulatory subversion. R. Ashwin has also questioned the view the ICC has taken, via its system, that pitches shouldn’t offer sharp turn on day 1 – another arbitrary choice, although one that makes sense from the entertainment and/or profitability PoV, that restricts ‘average’ or better spin-bowling in its view to a very specific kind of surface.

Point (3) in the ‘Data Point’ implies such pitches probably exist in places like Australia and South Africa, which are otherwise havens of pace-bowling. The advantage that pace enjoys in the ICC’s system creates another point of divergence when it meets players’ physiology. Pitches in Australia in particular are pace-friendly, but when they’re not, they’re not spin friendly either. On these tracks, Australian pacers still have an advantage because they’re taller on average and able to generate more bounce than shorter bowlers, such as those from India.

I believe Test matches should be played on tracks that teach all 22 players (of both teams) a valuable lesson – without of course endangering players’ bodies.

How will stadiums and TV networks make more money off Test matches? The bigger question, to me, is: should they? I’m aware of the role stadiums have played through history in making specific sports more sustainable by monetising spectatorship. But perhaps stadiums should be organised such that the bulk of their revenue is from ODI and T20 matches and Test matches are spared the trouble of being more entertaining/profitable.
Who decides what these lessons should be? I don’t trust the ICC, of course, but I don’t trust the BCCI either because I don’t trust the people who currently staff it to avoid making a habit of tit-for-tat measures – beyond one-off games – that massage Indian teams’ player-records. Other countries’ cricket boards may be different but given the effects of the ICC’s system on their specific fortunes, I’m not sure how they will react. In fact, it seems impossible that we will all agree on these lessons or how their suitability should be measured – a conclusion that, ironically, speaks to the singular pitfall of judging the value of a cricket match by its numbers.

An odd paper about India’s gold OA fees

A paper about open-access fees in India published recently in the journal Current Science has repeatedly surfaced in my networks over some problems with it. The paper is entitled ‘Publications in gold open access and article processing charge expenditure: evidence from Indian scholarly output’ and is authored by Raj Kishor Kampa, Manoj Kumar Sa, and Mallikarjun Dora of Berhampur University, the Indian Maritime University, and IIM Ahmedabad respectively. This is the paper’s abstract:

Article processing charges (APCs) ensure the financial viability of open access (OA) scholarly journals.The present study analyses the number of gold OA articles published in the Web of Science (WoS)-indexed journals by Indian researchers during 2020, including subject categories that account for the highest APC in India. Besides, it evaluates the amount of APC expenditure incurred in India. The findings of this study reveal that Indian researchers published 26,127 gold OA articles across all subjects in WoS-indexed journals in 2020. Researchers in the field of health and medical sciences paid the highest APC, amounting to $7 million, followed by life and earth sciences ($6.9 million), multidisciplinary ($4.9 million), and chemistry and materials science ($4.8 million). The study also reveals that Indian researchers paid an estimated $17 million as APC in 2020. Furthermore, 81% of APCs went to commercial publishers, viz. MDPI, Springer-Nature, Elsevier and Frontier Media. As there is a growing number of OA publications from India, we suggest having a central and state-level single-window option for funding in OA journals and backing the Plan S initiative for OA publishing in India.

It’s unclear what the point of the study is. First, it seems to have attempted a value-neutral assessment of how much scientists in India are paying as article processing charges (APCs) to have their papers published in gold OA journals. It concludes with some large, and frankly off-putting, numbers – a significant drain on the resources India has availed its scholars to conduct research – yet it proceeds to “suggest having a central and state-level single-window system” so scientists can continue to pay these fees with less hassle, and for the Indian government (presumably) to back the Plan S initiative.

As far as I know, India has declined to join the Plan S initiative; this is a good thing for the reasons enumerated here (written when India was considering joining the initiative), one of which is that it enabled the same thing the authors of the paper have asked for but on an international scale: allowing gold OA journals to hike their APCs knowing that (often tax-funded) research funders will pay the bills. This paper also marks the first time I’ve known anyone to try to estimate the APCs paid by Indian scientists and, once estimated, deem the figures not worthy of condemnation.

Funnily enough, while the paper doesn’t concern itself with taking a position on gold OA in its abstract or in the bulk of its arguments, it does contain the following statements:

“Although there is constant growth in OA publications, there is also a barrier to publishing in quality OA journals, especially the Gold and Hybrid OA, which levies APC for publications.”

“However, the high APC charges have been an issue for low-income and underdeveloped countries. In the global south, the APC is a real obstacle to publishing in high-quality OA journals”

“Extant literature reveals a constant increase in APC by most publishers like BioMed Central (BMC), Frontiers Media, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), and Hindawi”

“One of the ideas of open access was to make equitable access and check the rampant commercialization of scholarly publications. Still, surprisingly, many established publishers have positioned themselves in the OA landscape.”

“formulation of national-level OA policies in India is the need of the hours since OA is inevitable as everyone focuses on equity and access to scholarly communications.”

But these statements only render the paper’s conclusion all the more odd.

Of course, this is my view and the views of some scholars in India’s OA advocacy community and the authors of the Current Science paper are free to disagree. The second issue is objectively frustrating.

Unlike the products of science communication and science journalism, a scientific paper may simply present a survey of some numbers of interest to a part of the research community, but the Current Science paper falls short on this count as well. Specifically, not once does its body mention the words “discount” and “waiver” (or their variations), which is strange because OA journals regularly specify discounted APCs – or waive them altogether – if certain conditions are met (including, in the case of some journals, if a paper’s authors are from a low- and middle-income country). Accounting for discounts, researchers Moumita Koley (IISc Bengaluru) and Achal Agrawal (independent) estimated the authors could have overestimated Indian scientists’ APC expenses by 47.7% – ranging from 4.8% when submitting manuscripts to the PLoS journals to 428.3% when submitting to journals of the American Chemical Society.

Gold OA’s publishing fees are not in proportion to the amount of work and resources required to make a published paper open-access, and often extortionate, and that while discounts and waivers are available, they don’t spare research-funders in other parts of the world the expense, continue to maintain large profit margins at the expense of governments’ allocations for research, and – has scientist Karishma Kaushik wrote for The Hindu – the process of availing these concessions can be embarrassing to researchers.

Issue #1: the Current Science paper erects a flawed argument both in favour of and in opposition to APCs by potentially overestimating them! Issue #2: In their correspondence, Koley and Agrawal write:

“A possible reason for their error could be that DOAJ, which forms their primary source, does not mention discounts usually given to authors from lower-income countries. Another important error is that while the authors claim that they filtered the articles. Page 1058: ‘Extant literature suggests that the corresponding author most likely pays the APCs’. Following the corresponding author criterion, APC expenditure incurred by Indian researchers was estimated; they have not actually done so. Table 2 shows the discrepancy if one applies the filter. Also, Table 1 shows the estimated error in calculation if this criterion is included in calculation.”

To this, the authors of the Current Science paper responded thus:

“We wish to clarify any misunderstanding that may have arisen. We analysed the APC expenditure incurred in India without calculating the discounts or waivers received by authors as there is no specific single source to find all discounts, for example, an author-level or institute-level discount; hence, it would be difficult to provide an actual amount that Indian researchers spent on APC. Additionally, discounts or any publisher-provided waivers are recent developments, and discounts/waivers given to authors from LMIC countries were not mentioned in DOAJ, which is the primary source of the present study. Hence, it was not analysed in the current study. These factors may be considered as limitations of the study.”

This is such a blah exchange. To the accusation that the authors failed to account for discounts and waivers, the authors admit – not in their paper but in their response to a rebuttal – they didn’t, and that it’s a shortcoming. The authors also write that four publishers they identified as receiving 53% of APCs out of India – MDPI, Springer-Nature, Elsevier, and Frontiers Media – don’t offer “country-level discounts/waivers to authors” from LMICs and that this invalidates the concerns of Koley and Agrawal that APCs have been overestimated too much. However, they don’t address the following possibilities:

The identification of these four publishers itself was founded on APC estimates that have been called into question;
“Country-level” concessions aren’t the only kind of concessions; and
The decision to downplay the extent of overestimation doesn’t account for the publishers that received the other 47% of the APCs.

It’s not clear, in sum, what value the Current Science paper claims to have, and perhaps this is a question better directed at Current Science itself, which published the original paper, two rebuttals – the second by Jitendra Narayan Dash of NISER Bhubaneswar – the authors’ unsatisfactory replies to them, and, since we’re on the topic, doesn’t seem to have edited the first correspondence before publishing it.

What Gaganyaan tells us about chat AI, and vice versa

Talk of chat AI* is everywhere, as I’m sure you know. Everyone would like to know where these apps are headed and what their long-term effects are likely to be. But it seems that it’s still too soon to tell what they will be, at least in sectors that have banked on human creativity. That’s why the topic was a centrepiece of the first day of the inaugural conference of the Science Journalists’ Association of India (SJAI) last month, but little came of it beyond using chat AI apps to automate tedious tasks like transcribing. One view, in the limited context of education, is that chat AI apps will be like the electronic calculator. According to Andrew Cohen, a professor of physics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, as quoted (and rephrased) by Amrit BLS in an article for The Wire Science:

When calculators first became available, he said, many were concerned that it would discourage students from performing arithmetic and mathematical functions. In the long run, calculators would negatively impact cognitive and problem-solving skills, it was believed. While this prediction has partially come true, Cohen says the benefits of calculators far outweigh the drawbacks. With menial calculations out of the way, students had the opportunity to engage with more complex mathematical concepts.

Deutsche Welle had an article making a similar point in January 2023:

Daniel Lametti, a Canadian psycholinguist at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, said ChatGPT would do for academic texts what the calculator did for mathematics. Calculators changed how mathematics were taught. Before calculators, often all that mattered was the end result: the solution. But, when calculators came, it became important to show how you had solved the problem—your method. Some experts have suggested that a similar thing could happen with academic essays, where they are no longer only evaluated on what they say but also on how students edit and improve a text generated by an AI—their method.

This appeal to the supposedly higher virtue of the method, over arithmetic ability and the solutions to which it could or couldn’t lead, is reminiscent of a similar issue that played out earlier this year – and will likely raise its head again – vis-à-vis India’s human spaceflight programme. This programme, called ‘Gaganyaan’, is expected to have the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launch an astronaut onboard the first India-made rocket no earlier than 2025.

The rocket will be a modified version of the LVM-3 (previously called the GSLV Mk III); the modifications, including human-rating the vehicle, and their tests are currently underway. In October 2023, ISRO chairman S. Somanath said in an interview to The Hindu that the crew module on the vehicle, which will host the astronauts during their flight, “is under development. It is being tested. There is no capability in India to manufacture it. We have to get it from outside. That work is currently going on. We wanted a lot of technology to come from outside, from Russia, Europe, and America. But many did not come. We only got some items. That is going to take time. So we have to develop systems such as environmental control and life support systems.”

Somanath’s statement seemed to surprise many people who had believed that the human-rated LVM-3 would be indigenous in toto. This is like the Ship of Theseus problem: if you replace all the old planks of a wooden ship with new ones, is it still the same ship? Or: if you replace many or all the indigenous components of a rocket with ones of foreign provenance, is it still an India-made launch vehicle? The particular case of the UAE is also illustrative: the country neither has its own launch vehicle nor the means to build and launch one with components sourced from other countries. It lacks the same means for satellites as well. Can the UAE still be said to have its own space programme because of its ‘Hope’ probe to orbit and study Mars?

Cohen’s argument about chat AI apps being like the electronic calculator helps cut through the confusion here: the method, i.e. the way in which ISRO pieces the vehicle together to fit its needs, within its budget, engineering capabilities, and launch parameters, matters the more. To quote from an earlier post, “‘Gaganyaan’ is not a mission to improve India’s manufacturing capabilities. It is a mission to send Indians to space using an Indian launch vehicle. This refers to the recipe, rather than the ingredient.” For the same reason, the UAE can’t be said to have its own space programme either.

Focusing on the method, especially in a highly globalised world-economy, is a more sensible way to execute space programmes because the method – knowing how to execute it, i.e. – is the most valuable commodity. Its obtainment requires years of investment in education, skilling, and utilisation. I suspect this is also why there’s more value in selling launch-vehicle services rather than launch vehicles themselves. Similarly, the effects of the electronic calculator on science education speak to advantages that are virtually unknown-unknowns, and it seems reasonable to assume that chat AI will have similar consequences (with the caveat that the metaphor is imperfect: arithmetic isn’t comparable to language and large-language models can do what calculators can and more).

* I remain wary of the label ‘AI’ applied to “chat AI apps” because their intelligence – if there is one beyond sophisticated word-counting – is aesthetic, not epistemological, yet it’s also becoming harder to maintain the distinction in casual conversation. This is after setting aside the question of whether the term ‘AI’ itself makes sense.

A survey of El Salvador’s bitcoin adoption

On December 22, a group of researchers from the US had a paper published in Science in which they reported the results of a survey of 1,800 households in El Salvador over its members’ adoption, or not, of bitcoin as currency.

In September 2021, the government of El Salvador president Nayib Bukele passed a ‘Bitcoin Law’ through which it made the cryptocurrency legal tender. El Salvador is a country of 6.3 million people, many poor and without access to bank accounts, and Bukele pushed bitcoins as a way to circumvent these issues by allowing anyone with a phone with an internet connection to access a central-bank-backed cryptocurrency wallet and trading the virtual coins. Yet even at the time, adoption was muted by concerns over bitcoins’ extreme volatility.

In the new study, the researchers’ survey spotlighted the following issues, particularly that the only demographic that seemed eager to adopt the use of bitcoins as currency was “young, educated men with bank accounts”:

Privacy and transparency concerns appear to be key barriers to adoption; unexpectedly, these are the two concerns that decentralized currencies such as crypto aim to address. … we document that this payment technology involves a large initial adoption cost, has benefits that significantly increase as more people use it …, and faces resistance from firms in terms of its adoption. … Moreover, our survey work using a representative sample sheds light on how it is the already wealthy and banked who use crypto, which stands in stark contrast with recurrent hypotheses claiming that the use of crypto may help the poor and unbanked the most.

Bitcoin isn’t private. Its supporters claimed it was because the bitcoin system could evade surveillance by banks, but law enforcement authorities simply switched to other checks-and-balances governments have in place to track, monitor, and – if required – apprehend bitcoin users, with help from network scientists and forensic accountants.

The last line is also reminiscent of several claims advanced by bitcoin supporters – rather than well-thought-out “hypotheses” advanced by scholars – in the late 2010s about the benefits the use of cryptocurrencies could bring to the Global South. The favour the cryptocurrency enjoyed among these people was almost sans exception rooted in its technological ‘merits’ (such as they are). There wasn’t, and still isn’t in many cases, any acknowledgment of the social institutions and rituals that influence public trust in a currency – and the story of El Salvador’s policy is a good example of that. The paper’s authors continue:

There is substantial heterogeneity across demographic groups in the likelihood of adopting and using bitcoin as a means of payment. The reasons that young, educated men are more likely to use bitcoin for transactions remain an open question. One hypothesis is that this group has higher financial literacy. We found that, even conditional on access to financial services and education, young men were still more likely to use bitcoin. However, financial literacy encompasses several other areas of knowledge that are not captured by these controls. An alternative hypothesis is that young, educated men have a higher propensity to adopt new technologies in general. The literature on payment methods has documented that young individuals have a greater propensity to adopt means of payment beyond cash, such as cards (87). Nevertheless, further research is necessary to causally identify the factors contributing to the observed heterogeneity across demographic groups.

India and El Salvador are very different except, by virtue of being part of the Global South, they’re both good teachers. El Salvador is teaching us that something simply being easier to use won’t guarantee its adoption if people also don’t trust it. India has taught me that awareness of one’s own financial illiteracy is as important as financial literacy, among other things. I’ve met many people who won’t invest in something not because they understand it – they might – but because they don’t know enough about how they can be defrauded of their investment. And if they don’t, they simply assume they will lose their money at some point. It’s the way things have been, especially among the erstwhile middle class, for many decades.

This is probably one of several barriers. Another is complementarity (e.g. “benefits that significantly increase as more people use it”), which implies the financial instrument must be convenient in a variety of sectors and settings, which implies it needs to be better than cash, which is difficult.

Waters and bridges between science journalism and scicomm

On November 24-25, the Science Journalists’ Association of India (SJAI) conducted its inaugural conference at the National Institute of Immunology (NII), New Delhi. I attended it as a delegate.

A persistent internal monologue of mine at the event was the lack of an explicit distinction between science communicators and science journalists. One of my peers there said (among other things) that we need to start somewhere, and with that I readily agree. Subhra Priyadarshini, a core member of SJAI and the leader de facto of the team that put the conference together, also said in a different context that SJAI plans to “upskill and upscale science journalism in India”, alluding to the group’s plans to facilitate a gateway into science journalism. But a distinction may be worthwhile because the two groups seem to have different needs, especially in today’s charged political climate.

Think of political or business journalism, where journalists critique politics or business. They don’t generally consider part of their jobs to be improving political or business literacy or engagement with the processes of these enterprise. On the other hand, science journalists are regularly expected – including by many editors, scientists, and political leaders – to improve scientific literacy or to push back on pseudoscience. (For what it’s worth, pseudoscience isn’t a simple topic, especially against the backdrop of its social origins as well as questions about what counts as knowledge, how it’s created, who creates it, etc.).

When science institutions believe that X is science journalism when it’s in fact Y, then whenever they encounter Y, they’re taken aback, if not just offended. We have seen this with many research institutes whose leaders are friendly with the media when the latter is reporting on the former’s work, but become hostile when journalists start to ask questions about any wrongdoing or controversy. (One talking point supported by people insice NCBS, when the Arati Ramesh incident played out in 2021, was whether the publics are entitled to details of the inner workings of a publicly funded institute.) Scientists should know what science journalism really is, lest they believe it’s a new kind of PR, and change their expectations about the terms on which journalists engage with them.

This recalibration is important now when journalists are expected to bend over or not report on some topics, ideas or people. Are communicators expected to bend over also? I’m not so sure. Journalism is communication plus the added responsibility of abiding by the public interest (which transforms the way the communication happens as well), and the latter imposes demands that often give science journalism its thorn-in-the-side quality.

Understanding what journalism really is could improve relationships between scientists and science journalists, let scientists know why a (critical) journalism of science is as important as the communication of science, and the ways in which both institutions – of science and of journalism – are publicly answerable.

[After a few hours] So does that mean the difference between science journalism and science communication is what scientists understand them to be?

I think accounting for the peculiarities of both space (in India) and time (today) could produce a fairer picture of the places and roles of science journalism and communication. Specifically, that science journalism in India is coming of age at this particular time in history is important, especially because it will obviously evolve to respond to the forces that matter today. Most of all, unlike any other time before, today is distinguished by trivial access to the internet, which gives explainers and communicative writing more weight than before for their ability to be used against misinformation and to temper people’s readiness to consume information on the internet with the (editorial and scientific) expertise and wisdom of communicators and journalists.

The distinction of today also births the possibility of defining Indian science journalism separately from Indian science communication using the matter of their labels, expectations, purposes, and problems.

Labels – ‘Journalism’ and ‘communication’ are fundamentally labels used to describe specific kinds of activities. They probably originated in different contexts, to isolate and identify tasks that, in their respective settings, were unlike other tasks, but that wouldn’t have to mean that once they were transplanted to the science communication/journalism enterprise, they couldn’t have a significant – maybe even self-effacing – overlap. So it may be worthwhile to explore the history of these terms, in India, as it pertains to science journalists.

Expectations – The line between journalism and communication is slender. Many products of science-journalism work are texts that are concerned, to a not-insignificant extent, with communicating science first, with explaining a relevant concept, idea, etc. in its proper technical, historical, social, etc. context. Journalism peels away from communication with the added requirement of being in the public interest, but good communication can be in the public interest as well. (Economics seemed to pose a counter-argument but with a self-undermining component: did science communication in India have such a successful ‘scene’ before science journalism in India became a thing? I have my doubts although I’m not exactly well-informed – but a bigger issue is what editors in and product managers of newsrooms considered ‘science journalism’ to be in the first place. If they conflated it with communication, this counter-example is moot.)

Purposes – What is political journalism a journalism of? (To my mind, the answer to this question needs to be some activity that, when it is performed, would sufficiently qualify the performer as a practitioner of political journalism.) Is it a journalism of political processes, political thought, political outcomes or political leaders? Considering politics is a social enterprise, I think it’s a journalism of our political leaders: stories about these people are the stories about everything else that constitutes politics. Similarly, science journalism can be a journalism of the people of science – and it’s ease to see that, this way, it opens doors to everything from clever science to issues of science and society.

Problems – Journalism and communication may also be distinguished by their specific problems. For journalists, for example, quotes from scientists are more crucial than they are for communicators. Indian science journalism is thus complicated differently by the fact that many scientists don’t wish to speak to members of the press, for fear of being misquoted, of antagonising their bosses (who may have political preferences of their own), of lacking incentives to do so (e.g. “my chances of being promoted don’t increase if I speak to reporters”), and/or of falling afoul of the law (which prohibits scientists at government institutes from criticising government policies in the press). By extension, an association like SJAI that pools journalists (and communicators) together should also be expected to help alleviate journalists’ specific needs.

To its credit, SJAI 2023 did to the extent that it could, and I think will continue to do so; the point is that any other (science-)journalistic body in the country should do so as well and also ensure it doesn’t lose sight of the issues specific to each community.

Cognitive ability and voting ‘leave’ on Brexit

In a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE on November 22, a pair of researchers from the University of Bath in the UK have reported that “higher cognitive ability” is “linked to higher chance of having voted against Brexit” in the June 2016 referendum. The authors have reported this based on ‘Understanding Society’, a “nationally representative annual longitudinal survey of approximately 40,000 households, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council”, conducted in 12 waves between 2009 and 2020. The researchers assessed people’s cognitive ability as a combination of five tests:

Word recall: “… participants were read a series of 10 words and were then asked to recall (immediately afterwards and then again later in the interview) as many words as possible, in any order. The scores from the immediate and delayed word recall task are then summed together”

Verbal fluency: “… participants were given one minute to name as many animals as possible. The final score on this item is based upon the number of unique correct responses”

Subtraction test: “… participants were asked to give the correct answer to a series of subtraction questions. There is a sequence of five subtractions, which started with the interviewer asking the respondent to subtract 7 from 100. The respondent is then asked to subtract 7 again, and so on. The number of correct responses out of a maximum of five was recorded”

Fluid reasoning: “… participants were asked to write down a number sequence—as read by the interviewer—which consists of several numbers with a blank number in the series. The respondent is asked which number goes in the blank. Participants were given two sets of three number sequences, where performance in the first set dictated the difficulty of the second set. The final score is based on the correct responses from the two sets of questions—whilst accounting for the difficulty level of the second set of problems”

Numerical reasoning: “Participants were asked up to five questions that were graded in complexity.The type of questions asked included: “In a sale, a shop is selling all items at half price. Before the sale, a sofa costs £300. How much will it cost in the sale?” and “Let’s say you have £200 in asavings account. The account earns ten percent interest each year. How much would you havein the account at the end of two years?”. Based on performance on the first three items, partici-pants are then asked either two additional (more difficult) questions or one additional (simpler) question”

On the face of it, the study’s principle finding, rooting the way people decided on ‘Brexit’ in cognitive ability, seems objectionable because it’s a small step away from casting an otherwise legitimate political outcome – i.e. the UK leaving the European Union – as the product of some kind of mental deficiency. Then again, in their paper, the authors have reasoned that this correlation is mediated by individuals’ susceptibility to misinformation, that people with “higher” cognitive ability are better able to cut through mis- or dis-information. This seems plausible, and in fact the objectionability is also mitigated by awareness of the Indian experience, where lynch mobs and troll armies have been set in motion by fake news, with deadly results.

This said, we must still guard against two fallacies. First: correlation isn’t causation. That higher cognitive ability could be correlated with voting ‘remain’ doesn’t mean higher cognitive ability caused people to vote ‘remain’. Second, the fallacy of the inverse: while there is reportedly a correlation between the cognitive abilities of people and their decision in the ‘Brexit’ referendum, it doesn’t mean that pro-Brexit votes couldn’t have been cast for any reason other than cognitive deficiencies. One Q&A from an interview that PLoS conducted with one of the authors, Chris Dawson, and published together with the paper makes a similar note:

Some people might assume that if Remain voters had on average higher cognitive abilities, this implies that voting Remain was the more intelligent decision. Can you explain why your research does not show this, and what misinformation has to do with it?

It is important to understand that our findings are based on average differences: there exists a huge amount of overlap between the distributions of Remain and Leave cognitive abilities. We calculated that approximately 36% of Leave voters had higher cognitive ability than the average (mean) Remain voter. So, for any Remain voters who were planning on boasting and engaging in one-upmanship, our results say very little about what cognitive ability differences may or may not exist between two random Leave and Remain voters. But what our results do imply is that misinformation about the referendum could have complicated decision making, especially for people with low cognitive ability.

The five tests that the researchers used to estimate cognitive ability (at least in a relative sense) are also potentially problematic. I only have an anecdotal counter-example, but I suspect many readers will be able to relate to it: I have an uncle who is well-educated (up to the graduate level) and has had a well-paying job for many years now, and he is a staunch bhakt – i.e. an uncritical supporter of India’s BJP government and its various policies, including (but not limited to) the CAA, the farm laws, anti-minority discrimination, etc. He routinely buys into disinformation and sometimes spreads some of his own, but I don’t see him doing badly on any of the five tests. Instead, his actions and views are better explained by his political ideology, which is equal parts conservative and cynical. There are millions of such uncles in India, and the same thing could be true of the people who voted ‘leave’ in the 2016 referendum: that it wasn’t their cognitive abilities so much as their ideological positions, and those of the people to whom they paid attention, that influenced the vote.

(The reported correlation itself can be explained away by the fact that most of those who voted ‘leave’ were older people, but the study does correct for age-related cognitive decline.)

The two researchers also have a big paragraph at the end where they delineate what they perceive to be the major issues with their work:

Most noticeably, the positive correlation between cognitive ability and voting to Remain in the referendum could, as always, be explained by omitted variable bias. Although we control for political beliefs and alliances, personality traits, a barrage of other socioeconomics factors and in our preferred model, house-hold fixed-effects, the variation of cognitive ability within households could be correlated with other unobservable traits, attitudes and behaviours. The example which comes to mind is an individual’s trust in politicians and government. Then Prime Minister of the UK David Cameron publicly declared his support for remining in the EU, as did the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The UK Treasury published an analysis to warn voters that the UK would be permanently poorer if it left the EU [63]. In addition to this were the 10 Nobel-prize winning economists making the case in the days leading up to the referendum. Whilst cognitive ability has been linked with thinking like an economist [64,65], Carl [51] also finds evidence of a moderate positive correlation between trust in experts and IQ. Moreover, work on political attitudes and the referendum have shown that a lack of trust in politicians and the government is associated with a vote to Leave the EU [56]. Therefore, the positive relationship between cognitive ability and voting Remain could be attributable for those higher in cognitive function to place a greater weight on the opinion of experts. A final note is that our dependent variable is self-reported which may induce bias, for instance, social desirability bias. Against that, the majority (75.6%) of responses were recorded through a self-completion online survey and we do control for interview mode, which produces no statistically significant effects.

It’s important to consider all these alternative possibilities to the fullest before we assume, say, that improving cognitive ability will also lead to some political outcomes over others – or in fact before we entertain ideas about whether people whose cognitive abilities have declined, according to some tests and to below a particular threshold, should be precluded from participating in referendums. If nothing else, problems of discretisation quickly arise: i.e. where do we draw the line? For example, while people with Alzheimer’s disease can be kept from voting, should those who are mathematically illiterate, and would thus probably fail the fluid reasoning and numerical reasoning tests? Similarly, and expanding the remit from referendums to elections (which isn’t without problems), which test should potential voters be expected to pass before voting in different polls – say, from the panchayat to the Lok Sabha elections?

Consider also the debates at the time Haryana passed the Haryana Panchayati Raj (Amendment) Act in 2015, which stipulated among other things that to contest in panchayat polls, candidates had to have completed class 10 or its equivalent (plus adjustments if the candidates are from an SC community, women, etc.). Obviously those contesting the polls would be well past their youth and unlikely to return to school, so the Act effectively permanently disqualified them from contesting. As such, while the answers to the questions above may be clearer in less unequal societies like those of the UK, they are not so in India, where cognitively well-equipped people have been criminally selfish and public-spiritedness has been more strongly correlated with good-faith politics than education or literacy.

At the same time, the study and its findings also reiterate the significant role that mis/disinformation has come to play in influencing the way people vote, for example, which makes individuals’ cognitive abilities – and all the factors that influence them – another avenue through which to control, for better or for worse, the opportunities we have for healthy governance.

India has a right to noise

Excerpt from ‘More light, less sound: On firecrackers and a festival of light’, an editorial in The Hindu on November 7, 2023:

The Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules 2000 stipulate that firecrackers cannot be burst in ‘silence zones’, designated by State governments, and anywhere after 10 p.m. From 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. (i.e., ‘daytime’) and in industrial areas, firecracker noise cannot exceed 75 dB(A) Leq. The thresholds in commercial and residential areas are 65 dB(A) Leq and 55 dB(A) Leq, respectively. … Traffic noise has burgeoned in cities where haphazard development has forced motorists to overuse horns. Many religious occasions have become synonymous with noisy celebrations irrespective of the hour. … If, say, people burst firecrackers at 90 dB for 10 seconds and the ambient noise is 50 dB for 50 seconds, and this pattern continues for four hours followed by 12 hours of 50 dB noise, the 16-hour Leq is 74.5 dB – which merits a complaint in residential areas but not in commercial ones, yet the noise is already harmful. Different loudness zones are also seldom publicly demarcated while some places are both residential and commercial.

India has a big noise pollution problem, and firecrackers add to it in a bad way because the Noise Pollution Rules 2000 and improper urban zoning have together created a regulatory sieve through which firecracker noise can pass through without any consequences – except damage to human (and animal) health.

To the issues highlighted in the editorial, I’d like to add one that complicates both enforcement and judicial disputes: the argument that asking people to not combust firecrackers violates their right to religion. The national and state governments in India have kept the door open to this assertion by refusing to ban loud firecrackers altogether, instead creating allegedly ‘green’ alternatives that also produce less noise: around 120 dB instead of around 150 dB, which is laughable because the healthy threshold is somewhere around 40 dB!

On November 3, Justice Amit Rawal of the Kerala high court directed authorities to seize “illegally stored” firecrackers in temples across the state and ensure temples didn’t combust firecrackers at “odd time”. He added: “prima facie there is no commandment in any of the holy books to burst crackers for pleasing the god”. But today, November 7, a division bench set aside a part of the order to effectively reassert the terms set out in the Noise Pollution Rules 2000.

Before this, the state government had submitted, according to On Manorama, “that there are several religious festivals in the State wherein display of fireworks is an essential part of religions, which have been carried out since time immemorial”.

It’s unfortunate that we wield the right to religion maximally, to the expense of all other rights, and stop only when it’s confronted by an apparently implicit order of rights in the Indian Constitution. For example, by refusing to ban (noise) polluting firecrackers altogether, and by making the Rules so complicated, neither collecting nor easing public access to noise data, and slipshod urban planning (an oxymoron, really), India’s governments often leave the right to religion in conflict with the right to life. In the Constitution, however, the latter takes precedence.

In early 2021, for example, the Madras high court was hearing a case about allowing the Srirangam Temple authorities to conduct their rituals in full rather than in an abridged form due to limitations imposed by the government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The court observed that the right to religion was superseded by the right to life, so if the rituals had to be abridged for the sake of public health, they wouldn’t violate the right to religion.

The Telegraph also reported that the court “alluded to the Calcutta High Court’s earlier order to regulate crowds during Durga Puja for the same reason. It may be recalled here that the Supreme Court had ordered restrictions for Ratha Yatra in Odisha too.” I think courts have made similar observations vis-à-vis Deepavali firecrackers as well as the winter-time pollution in North India.

The right to life is predicated on threats to individuals’ well-being, which in turn is rooted in – among other things – where scientists are able to draw the line between good health and ill-health. For example, India’s permissible thresholds are higher than those of the WHO for different atmospheric pollutants. Biologically, people can (and often do) fall ill when the limits cross the WHO’s thresholds – but legally, we must wait for them to cross thresholds encoded in the relevant Act before we can claim injustice.

Similarly, loud noises are harmful beyond 50 dB itself (depending on the level and mode of exposure), but the Rules’ thresholds are even higher. In fact, they may well be out of reach: India also has too few noise monitors for its size, which means even after scientists draw the line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ noise levels, we may not know whether the place we’re located in has crossed over.

And so we go, round and round…

On Somanath withdrawing his autobiography

Excerpt from The Hindu, November 4, 2023:

S. Somanath, Chairman, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), told The Hindu that he’s withdrawing the publication of his memoir, Nilavu Kudicha Simhangal, penned in Malayalam. The decision followed a report in the Malayala Manorama on Saturday that quoted excerpts from the book suggesting K. Sivan, former ISRO chairman and Mr. Somanath’s immediate predecessor, may have hindered key promotions that Mr. Somanath thought were due.

“There has been some misinterpretation. At no point have I said that Dr. Sivan tried to prevent me from becoming the chairman. All I said was that being made a member of the Space Commission is generally seen as a stepping stone to (ISRO’s chairmanship). However a director from another (ISRO centre) was placed, so naturally that trimmed my chances (at chairmanship),” he told The Hindu, “Secondly the book isn’t officially released. My publisher may have released a few copies … but after all this controversy I have decided to withhold publication.”

I haven’t yet read this book nor do I know more than what’s already been reported about this new controversy. It has been simmering all evening but I assumed that it would simply blow over, as these things usually do, and that the book would be released with the customary pomp. But the book has indeed been withdrawn, which was less surprising than it should have been.

Earlier today, I was reading a paper uploaded on the Current Science website about Gold OA publishing. It was run-of-the-mill in many ways, but one of my peers sent me a strongly worded email decrying the fact that the paper wasn’t explicitly opposed to Gold OA. When I read the paper, I found that the authors’ statements earlier in the paper were quite tepid, seemingly unconcerned about Gold OA’s deleterious effects on the research publishing ecosystem, but later on, the paper threw up many of the more familiar lines, that Gold OA is expensive, discriminatory, etc.

Both Somanath’s withdrawn book and this paper have one thing in common: (potentially) literary laziness, which often speaks to a sense that one is entitled to the benefit of the doubt rather than being compelled to earn it.

Somanath told The Hindu and some other outlets that he didn’t intend to criticise Sivan, his predecessor as ISRO chairman, but that he was withholding the book’s release because some news outlets had interpreted the book in a way that his statements did come across as criticism.

Some important background: Since 2014, ISRO’s character has changed. Earlier journalists used to be able to more easily access various ISRO officials and visit sites of historic importance. These are no longer possible. The national government has also tried to stage-manage ISRO missions in the public domain, especially the more prominent ones like Chandrayaan-2 and -3, the Mars Orbiter Mission, and the South Asia Satellite.

Similarly, there have been signs that both Sivan and Somanath had and have the government’s favour on grounds that go beyond their qualifications and experiences. With Somanath, of course, we have seen that with his pronouncements about the feats of ancient India, etc., and now we have that with Sivan as well, as Somanath says that ISRO knew the Chandrayaan-2 lander had suffered a software glitch ahead of its crash, and didn’t simply lose contact with the ground as Sivan had said at the time. Recall that in 2019, when the mishap occurred, ISRO also stopped sharing non-trivial information about the incident and even refused to confirm that the lander had crashed until a week later.

In this milieu, Sivan and Somanath are two peas in a pod, and it seems quite unlikely to me that Somanath set out to criticise Sivan in public. The fact that he would much rather withhold the book than take his chances is another sign that criticising Sivan wasn’t his goal. Yet as my colleague Jacob Koshy reported for The Hindu:

Excerpts from the book, that The Hindu has viewed, do bring out Mr. Somanath’s discomfort with the “Chairman (Dr. Sivan’s)” decision to not be explicit about the reasons for the failure of the Chandrayaan 2 mission (which was expected to land a rover). The issue was a software glitch but was publicly communicated as an ‘inability to communicate with the lander.’

There is a third possibility: that Somanath did wish to criticise Sivan but underestimated how much of an issue it would become in the media.

Conveying something in writing has always been a tricky thing. Conveying something while simultaneously downplaying its asperity and accentuating its substance or its spirit is something else, requiring quite a bit of practice, a capacity for words, and of course clarity of thought. Without these things, writing can easily miscommunicate. (This is why reading is crucial to writing better: others’ work can alert you to meaning-making possibilities that you yourself may never have considered.) The Current Science paper is similar, with its awkward placement of important statements at the end and banal statements at the beginning, and neither worded to drive home a specific feeling.

(In case you haven’t, please read Edward Tufte’s analysis of the Challenger disaster and the failure of written communication that preceded it. Many of the principles he sets out would apply for a lot of non-fiction writing.)

Somanath wrote his book in Malayalam, his native tongue, rather than in English, with which, going by media interviews of him, he is not fluent. So he may have sidestepped the pitfalls of writing in an unfamiliar language, yet his being unable to avoid being misinterpreted – or so he says – still suggests that he didn’t pay too much attention to what he was putting down. In the same vein, I’m also surprised that his editors at the publisher, Lipi Books in Kozhikode, didn’t pick up on these issues earlier.

Understanding this is important because Somanath writing something and then complaining that it was taken in a way it wasn’t supposed to be taken lends itself to another inference that I still suspect the ruling party’s supporters will reach for: that the press twisted his words in its relentless quest to stoke tensions and that Somanath was as clear as he needed to be. As I said, I haven’t yet read the book, but as an editor (see Q3) – and also as someone for whom checking for incompetence before malfeasance has paid rich dividends – I would look for an intention-skill mismatch first.

Featured image: ISRO chairman S. Somanath in 2019. Credit: NASA.