Category: Analysis

When a teenager wants to solve poaching with machine-learning…

We always need more feel-good stories, but we need those feel-good stories more that withstand closer scrutiny instead of falling apart, and framed the right way.

For example, Smithsonian magazine published an article with the headline ‘This Teenager Invented a Low-Cost Tool to Spot Elephant Poachers in Real Time’ on August 4. It’s a straightforward feel-good story at first glance: Anika Puri is a 17-year-old in New York who created a machine-learning model (based on an existing dataset) “that analyses the movement patterns of humans and elephants”. The visual input for the model comes from a $250 thermal camera attached to an iPhone attached to a drone, which flies over problem areas and collects data, and which the model then sifts through to pick out the presence of humans. One caveat: the machine-learning model can detect people, not poachers.

Nonetheless, this is clearly laudable work by a 17-year-old – but the article is an affront to people working in India because it plainly overlooks everything that makes elephant poaching tenacious enough to have caught Puri’s attention in the first place. A 17-year-old did this and we should celebrate her, you say, and that’s fair. But we can do that without making what she did sound like a bigger deal than it is, which would also provide a better sense of how much work she has left to do, while expressing our belief – this is important – that we look forward to her and others like her applying their minds to really doing something about the problem. This way, we may also be able to salvage two victims of the Smithsonian article.

The first is why elephant poaching persists. The article gives the impression that it does for want of a way to tell when humans walk among elephants in the wild. The first red-flag in the article, to me at least, is related to this issue and turns up in the opening itself:

When Anika Puri visited India with her family four years ago, she was surprised to come across a market in Bombay filled with rows of ivory jewelry and statues. Globally, ivory trade has been illegal for more than 30 years, and elephant hunting has been prohibited in India since the 1970s. “I was quite taken aback,” the 17-year-old from Chappaqua, New York, recalls. “Because I always thought, ‘well, poaching is illegal, how come it really is still such a big issue?'”

I admit I take a cynical view of people who remain ignorant in this day and age of the bigger problems assailing the major realms of human enterprise – but a 17-year-old being surprised by the availability of ivory ornaments in India is pushing it, and more so by being surprised that there’s a difference between the existence of a law and its proper enforcement. Smithsonian also presents Puri’s view as an outsider, which she is in more than the geographical sense, followed by her resolving to do something about it from the outside. That was the bigger issue and a clear sign of the narrative to come.

Poaching and animal-product smuggling persist in India, among other countries, sensu lato because of a lack of money, a lack of personnel, misplaced priorities and malgovernance and incompetence. The first and the third reasons are related: the Indian government’s conception of how the country’s forests ought to be protected regularly exclude the welfare of the people living in and dependent on those forests, and thus socially and financially alienates them. As a result, some of those affected see a strong incentive in animal poaching and smuggling. (There are famous exceptions to this trend, like the black-necked crane of Arunachal Pradesh, the law kyntang forests of Meghalaya or the whale sharks off Gujarat but they’re almost always rooted in spiritual beliefs – something the IUCN wants to press to the cause of conservation.)

Similarly, forest rangers are underpaid, overworked, use dysfunctional or outdated equipment and, importantly, are often caught between angry locals and an insensitive local government. In India, theirs is a dispriting vocation. In this context the use of drones plus infrared cameras that each cost Rs 20,000 is laughable.

The ‘lack of personnel’ is a two-part issue: it helps the cause of animal conservation if the personnel include members of local communities, but they seldom do; second, India is a very large country, so we need more rangers (and more drones!) to patrol all areas, without any blind spots. Anika Puri’s solution has nothing on any of these problems – and I don’t blame her. I blame the Smithsonian for its lazy framing of the story, and in fact for telling us nothing of whether she’s already aware of these issues.

The second problem with the framing has to do with ‘encouraging a smart person to do more’ on the one hand and the type of solution being offered to a problem on the other. This one really gets my goat. When Smithsonian played up Puri’s accomplishment, such as it is, it effectively championed techno-optimism: the belief that technology is a moral good and that technological solutions can solve our principal crises (crises that techno-optimists like to play up so that they seem more pressing, and thus more in need of the sort of fixes that machine-centric governance can provide). In the course of this narrative, however, the sociological and political solutions that poaching desperately requires fall by the wayside, even as the trajectories of the tech and its developer are celebrated as a feel-good story.

In this way, the Smithsonian article has effectively created a false achievement, a red herring that showcases its subject’s technical acumen instead of a meaningful development towards solving poaching. On the other hand, how often do you read profiles of people, young or old, whose insights have been concerned less with ‘hardware’ solutions (technological innovation, infrastructure, etc.) and more with improving and implementing the ‘software’ – that is, changing people’s behaviour, deliberating on society’s aspirations and effecting good governance? How often do you also encounter grants and contests of the sort that Puri won with her idea but which are dedicated to the ‘software’ issues?

Yes, scientific journals should publish political rebuttals

(The headline is partly click-bait, as I admit below, because some context is required.) From ‘Should scientific journals publish political debunkings?’, Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie, August 27, 2022:

Earlier this week, the “news and analysis” section of the journal Science … published … a point-by-point rebuttal of a monologue a few days earlier from the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight, where the eponymous host excoriated Dr. Anthony Fauci, of “seen everywhere during the pandemic” fame. … The Science piece noted that “[a]lmost everything Tucker Carlson said… was misleading or false”. That’s completely correct – so why did I have misgivings about the Science piece? It’s the kind of thing you see all the time on dedicated political fact-checking sites – but I’d never before seen it in a scientific journal. … I feel very conflicted on whether this is a sensible idea. And, instead of actually taking some time to think it through and work out a solid position, in true hand-wringing style I’m going to write down both sides of the argument in the form of a dialogue – with myself.

There’s one particular exchange between Ritchie and himself in his piece that threw me off the entire point of the article:

[Ritchie-in-favour-of-Science-doing-this]: Just a second. This wasn’t published in the peer-reviewed section of Science! This isn’t a refereed paper – it’s in the “News and Analysis” section. Wouldn’t you expect an “Analysis” article to, like, analyse things? Including statements made on Fox News?

[Ritchie-opposed-to-Science-doing-this]: To be honest, sometimes I wonder why scientific journals have a “News and Analysis” section at all – or, I wonder if it’s healthy in the long run. In any case, clearly there’s a big “halo” effect from the peer-reviewed part: people take the News and Analysis more seriously because it’s attached to the very esteemed journal. People are sharing it on social media because it’s “the journal Science debunking Tucker Carlson” – way fewer people would care if it was just published on some random news site. I don’t think you can have it both ways by saying it’s actually nothing to do with Science the peer-reviewed journal.

[Ritchie-in-favour]: I was just saying they were separate, rather than entirely unrelated, but fair enough.

Excuse me but not at all fair enough! The essential problem is the tie-ins between what a journal does, why it does them and what impressions they uphold in society.

First, Science‘s ‘news and analysis’ section isn’t distinguished by its association with the peer-reviewed portion of the journal but by its own reportage and analyses, intended for scientists and non-scientists alike. (Mea culpa: the headline of this post answers the question in the headline of Ritchie’s post, while being clear in the body that there’s a clear distinction between the journal and its ‘news and analysis’ section.) A very recent example was Charles Piller’s investigative report that uncovered evidence of image manipulation in a paper that had an outsized influence on the direction of Alzheimer’s research since it was published in 2006. When Ritchie writes that the peer-reviewed journal and the ‘news and analysis’ section are separate, he’s right – but when he suggests that the former’s prestige is responsible for the latter’s popularity, he’s couldn’t be more wrong.

Ritchie is a scientist and his position may reflect that of many other scientists. I recommend that he and others who agree with him consider the section from the PoV of a science journalist, when they will immediately see as we do that it has broken many agenda-setting stories as well as has published several accomplished journalists and scientists (Derek Lowe’s column being a good example). Another impression that could change with the change of perspective is the relevance of peer-review itself, and the deceptively deleterious nature of an associated concept he repeatedly invokes, which could as well be the pseudo-problem at the heart of Ritchie’s dilemma: prestige. To quote from a blog post in which University of Regensburg neurogeneticist Björn Brembs analysed the novelty of results published by so-called ‘prestigious’ journals, and published in February this year:

Taken together, despite the best efforts of the professional editors and best reviewers the planet has to offer, the input material that prestigious journals have to deal with appears to be the dominant factor for any ‘novelty’ signal in the stream of publications coming from these journals. Looking at all articles, the effect of all this expensive editorial and reviewer work amounts to probably not much more than a slightly biased random selection, dominated largely by the input and to probably only a very small degree by the filter properties. In this perspective, editors and reviewers appear helplessly overtaxed, being tasked with a job that is humanly impossible to perform correctly in the antiquated way it is organized now.

In sum:

Evidence suggests that the prestige signal in our current journals is noisy, expensive and flags unreliable science. There is a lack of evidence that the supposed filter function of prestigious journals is not just a biased random selection of already self-selected input material. As such, massive improvement along several variables can be expected from a more modern implementation of the prestige signal.

Take the ‘prestige’ away and one part of Ritchie’s dilemma – the journal Science‘s claim to being an “impartial authority” that stands at risk of being diluted by its ‘news and analysis’ section’s engagement with “grubby political debates” – evaporates. Journals, especially glamour journals like Science, haven’t historically been authorities on ‘good’ science, such as it is, but have served to obfuscate the fact that only scientists can be. But more broadly, the ‘news and analysis’ business has its own expensive economics, and publishers of scientific journals that can afford to set up such platforms should consider doing so, in my view, with a degree and type of separation between these businesses according to their mileage. The simple reasons are:

1. Reject the false balance: there’s no sensible way publishing a pro-democracy article (calling out cynical and potentially life-threatening untruths) could affect the journal’s ‘prestige’, however it may be defined. But if it does, would the journal be wary of a pro-Republican (and effectively anti-democratic) scientist refusing to publish on its pages? If so, why? The two-part answer is straightforward: because many other scientists as well as journal editors are still concerned with the titles that publish papers instead of the papers themselves, and because of the fundamental incentives of academic publishing – to publish the work of prestigious scientists and sensational work, as opposed to good work per se. In this sense, the knock-back is entirely acceptable in the hopes that it could dismantle the fixation on which journal publishes which paper.

2. Scientific journals already have access to expertise in various fields of study, as well as an incentive to participate in the creation of a sensible culture of science appreciation and criticism.

Featured image: Tucker Carlson at an event in West Palm Beach, Florida, December 19, 2020. Credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

What makes ‘good science journalism’?

From ‘Your Doppelgänger Is Out There and You Probably Share DNA With Them’, The New York Times, August 23, 2022:

Dr. Esteller also suggested that there could be links between facial features and behavioral patterns, and that the study’s findings might one day aid forensic science by providing a glimpse of the faces of criminal suspects known only from DNA samples. However, Daphne Martschenko, a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics who was not involved with the study, urged caution in applying its findings to forensics.

There are two big problems here: 1) Esteller’s comment is at the doorstep of eugenics, and 2) the reporter creates a false balance by reporting both Esteller’s comment and Martschenko’s rebuttal to that comment, when in fact the right course of action would’ve been to drop this portion entirely, as well as take a closer look at why Esteller et al. conducted the study in the first place and whether the study paper and other work at the Esteller lab is suspect.

This said, it’s a bit gratifying (in a bad way) when a high-stature foreign news publication like The New York Times makes a dangerous mistake in a science-related story. Millions of people are misinformed, which sucks, but when independent scientists and other readers publicly address these mistakes, their call-outs create an opportunity for people (though not as many as are misinformed) to understand exactly what is wrong and, more importantly from the PoV of readers in India, that The New York Times also makes mistakes, that it isn’t a standard-bearer of good science journalism and that being good is a constant and diverse process.

1) “NYT also makes mistakes” is important to know if only to dispel the popular and frustrating perception that “all American news outlets are individually better than all Indian news outlets”. I had to wade through a considerable amount of this when I started at The Hindu a decade ago – at the hands of most readers as well as some colleagues. I still face this in a persistent way in the form of people who believe some article in The Atlantic is much better than an article on the same topic in, say, The Wire Science, for few, if any, reasons beyond the quality of the language. But of course this will always set The Atlantic and The Wire Science and its peers in India apart: English isn’t the first language for many of us – yet it seldom gets in the way of good storytelling. In fact, I’ve often noticed American publications in particular to be prone to oversimplification more often than their counterparts in Europe or, for that matter, in India. In my considered (but also limited) view, the appreciation of science stories is also a skill, and the population that aspires to harbour it in my country is often prone to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

2) “NYT isn’t a standard-bearer of good science journalism” is useful to know because of the less-than-straightforward manner in which publications acquire a reputation for “good science journalism”. Specifically, publications aren’t equally good at covering all branches of scientific study; some are better in some fields and others are at some others. Getting your facts right, speaking to all the relevant stakeholders and using sensitive language will get you 90% of the way, but you can tell the differences between publications by how well they cover the remaining 10%, which comes from beat knowledge, expertise and having the right editors.

3) “Being good is a constant and diverse process” – ‘diverse’ because of the previous point and ‘constant’ because, well, that’s how it is. It’s not that our previous work doesn’t keep us in good standing but that we shouldn’t overestimate how much that standing counts for. This is especially so in this age of short attention spans, short-lived memories and the subtle but pervasive encouragement to be hurtful towards others on the internet. “Good science journalism” is a tag we need to get by getting every single story right – and in this sense, you, the reader, are better off not doling out lifetime awards to outlets. Instead, understand that no outlet is going to be uniformly excellent at all times and evaluate each story on its own merits. This way, you’ll also create an opportunity for Indian news outlets to be free of the tyranny of unrealistic expectations and even surprise you now and then with excellence of our own.

Finally, none of this is to say that these mistakes happen. They shouldn’t and they’re entirely preventable. Instead, it’s a reminder to keep your eyes peeled at all times and not just when you’re reading an article produced by an Indian outlet.

Dams are bad for rivers. Are skyscrapers bad for winds?

I was recently in Dubai and often in the shadow of very tall buildings, including the Burj Khalifa and many of its peers on the city’s famed Sheikh Zayed Road. The neighbourhood in which my relatives in the city live has also acquired several new tall apartment buildings in the last decade. My relatives lost their view of the sunrise, sure, but they also lost the wind as and when it blew. And I began to wonder whether, just as dams and gates can kill a river by destroying its natural flow, skyscrapers could distort the wind and consequently the way both people and air pollution are affected by it.

Wind speed is particularly interesting. When architects design tall buildings, they need to account for the structure’s ability to withstand wind velocity, which increases with altitude and whose effects on the structure also diversify. For example, when a building causes a wind current to split up to either side as it flows past, the current forms vortices on the other side of the building. This phenomenon is called vortex-shedding (see the video below). The formation of these vortices causes the wind pressure around the building to undulate in a way that can sway the building from side to side. Depending on the building’s integrity and design, this can lead to anything from cracked window glass to… well, catastrophe.

However, it seems such effects – of the wind on buildings – are relatively more popular than the effects of tall buildings on the wind itself. For starters, a building that presents a flat face to oncoming wind can force the wind to scatter across the face (especially if the building is the tallest in the area). So a part of the wind flows upwards along the building, some flows around the sides and some flows downwards. The last one has been known to lead to a downdraughts strong enough to topple standing lorries and move cars.

The faster the wind, the faster the downdraught. A paper published in December 2019 reported that the average wind speed around the world has been increasing since 2010. The paper was concerned with the effects of this phenomenon on opportunities for wind-based power but it should be interesting to analyse its conclusions vis-à-vis the world’s, including India’s, skyscrapers as well.

If the streets around the building are too narrow for a sufficient distance, they can further accelerate the downdraught, as well as natural low-altitude winds, turning the paths into deadly wind tunnels. This is due to the Venturi effect. A 1990 study found that trees can help counter it.

With the exception of Mumbai, most Indian cities don’t yet have the skyscraper density of, say, Singapore, New York or Dubai, but the country is steadily urbanising and its cities’ population densities are on the rise. (Pardon me, I’ve made a rookie mistake: skyscrapers aren’t high density – see this and this. Instead, let me say:) The rich in India are becoming richer, and as cities expand, there’s no reason why more skyscrapers shouldn’t pop up – either as lavish residences for the ultra-wealthy or to accommodate corporate offices. We are all already familiar with an obsession among the powers that be with building increasingly taller structures as a pissing contest.

A view of a portion of Mumbai's skyline on March 25, 2023.
A view of a portion of Mumbai’s skyline, March 25, 2023. Credit: আজিজ/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

This possibility is encouraged by the fact that most of India’s cities (if not all of them) are semi-planned at best. City officials also seldom enforce building codes. Experts have written about the effects of the latter on Indians’ exposure to hydro/seismological disasters (remember: buildings kill people), but in future, we should expect there to be an effect due to the buildings’ interaction with the wind as well.

Poorly enforced building codes, especially when helped along by corrupt government, also have the effect of enabling builders to violate floor-safety indices and build structures so tall that they exacerbate water shortage, water pollution, local road traffic, power consumption, etc. The travails of South Usman Road in Chennai, where I lived for many years, come to mind. In fact, it is telling that India’s tallest building, the Palais Royal in Mumbai, has also been beleaguered by litigation over illegalities in its construction. According to a 2012 post on the Structural Engineering Forum of India website, consulting firm RWDI analysed the effects of winds on the Palais Royal but the post has nothing to suggest the reciprocal was also true.

Remember also that most of India’s cities already have very polluted air (AQI in excess of 200), so we can expect the downdraughts to be foul as well, effectively bringing pollutants down to where the people walk. I’m also similarly concerned about the ability of relatively higher winds to disperse pollutants if they are going to be scattered more often by a higher density of skyscrapers, akin to the concept of a mean free path in physics.

One thing is for sure: our skyscrapers’ wind problem isn’t just going to blow over.

The importance of sensible politics to good science

Stuart Ritchie writes a newsletter-blog that I quite like, called Science Fictions. On May 30, he published a post on this blog entitled ‘Science is political – and that’s a bad thing’. I thought the post missed some important points, which I want to set out here. First, the gist of his argument:

[About the “argument from inevitability”] After a decade of discussion about the replication crisis, open science, and all the ways we could reform the way we do research, we’re more aware than ever of how biases can distort things – but also how we can improve the system. So throwing up our hands and saying “science is always political! There’s nothing we can do!” is the very last thing we want to be telling aspiring scientists, who should be using and developing all these new techniques to improve their objectivity. … [About the “activist’s argument”] If you think it’s bad that politics are being injected into science, it’s jarringly nonsensical to argue that “leaving politics out of science” is a bad thing. Isn’t the more obvious conclusion that we should endeavour to lessen the influence of politics and ideology on science across the board? If you think it’s bad when other people do it, you should think it’s bad when you do it yourself. … If we encourage scientists to bring their political ideology to the lab, do we think groupthink—a very common human problem which in at least some scientific fields seems to have stifled debate and held back progress—will get better, or worse?

There’s also a useful list of what people mean when they say “science is political”:

Ritchie writes below the list: “There’s no argument from me about any of those points. These are all absolutely true. … But these are just factual statements – and I don’t think the people who always tell you that ‘science is political’ are just idly chatting sociology-of-science for the fun of it. They want to make one of two points” – referring to the inevitability and activism argument-types.

I agree with some of his positions here, not all, but I also think it might be useful to specify an important set of differences with the way the terms “politics” and “science” are used, and in the contexts in which they’re used. The latter are particularly important.

The statement “science is political” is undeniably legitimate in India – a country defined by its inequalities. Science and technology have historically enjoyed the patronage of the Indian state (in the post-war period) and the many effects of this relationship are visible to this day. State-sanctioned S&T-related projects are often opaque (e.g. ISRO, DAE and DRDO), top-down (e.g. Challakere and INO) and presume importance (e.g. Kudankulam and most other power-generation projects).

India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru baked science into the Indian nation-project with his stress on the “scientific temper”; his setting up of institutes of higher science education and research; and the greater liberty – and protection from having to justify their priorities – he accorded the nuclear and space programmes (yoking them to the nation’s prosperity but whose work and machinations today are not publicly accessible).

But counterproductively, the Nehru government’s policies also stunted the diffusion of ‘higher’ technologies into society. Currently, this access is stratified by class, caste, location and gender: wealthy upper-caste men in cities and poor lower-caste women in villages lie at the two extremes of a spectrum that defines access to literacy and numeracy, healthcare, public transport, electricity and water, financial services, etc.

Second, asking the question “is science political?” in some country in which English is the first language is different from asking it in a Commonwealth country. Pre-Independence and for many years after, English-speakers in government were typically Brahmins hired to help run the colonial government; outside of government, access to the English language was limited, though not uncommon. Today, access to English – the language of science’s practice – is controlled through the institutions that teach and/or regularly use the language to conduct trade and research. Yet English is also the language that millions aspire to learn because it’s the gateway to better wages and working conditions, and the means by which one might navigate the bureaucracy and laws more effectively.

In these ways, a question arises of who can access the fruits of the scientific enterprise – as well as, perhaps more importantly, whether one or a few caste-class groups are cornering the skills and benefits relevant to scientific work for ends that their members deem to be worthier. When a member of an outgroup thus breaks into a so-called “top” research institute with the characteristics described above, their practice of science – including the identifies of existing scientists, and their languages, aspirations, beliefs and rituals – is inevitably going to be a political experience as well. Put another way, as access to science (knowledge, tools, skills, findings, rewards) expands, there are also going to be political tensions, questions and ultimately reorganisations, if we take ‘politics’ to mean the methods by which we govern ourselves.

In this regard, the political experience of science in India is inevitable – but that doesn’t mean it will always be: the current historical era will eventually make way for a new one (how political the practice of science will be, and its desirability, in that period is a separate question). Nor does it mean we should lower the thresholds that define the quality of science (relevant to points 2, 6 and 8 in Ritchie’s list) in our country. But it does mean that the things about science that concern a country like ours (post-colonial/imperial, agricultural, economically developing, patriarchal, majoritarian, diverse) can be very different from those that concern the UK or the US, and which in turn also highlights the sort of political questions that concern a country the most.

With this in mind, I’d also contend against junking the “argument from inevitability” simply because, in India, it risks prioritising the needs of science over those of society. A very simple (and probably relatable) example: if a lab that has been producing good research in field X one day admits an ESL student belonging of a so-called “lower” caste, it has to be able to tolerate changes in its research output and quality until this individual has settled in, both administratively and in terms of their mental health. If the lab instead expects them to work at the same pace and with the same quality as existing members, the research output will suffer. The student will of course produce “sub-par” work, relative to what has been expected of the lab, and might be ejected while the institutional causes of her reasons to “fail” will be overlooked.

By undertaking such socially minded affirmative action, research labs can surmount the concerns Ritchie flags vis-à-vis the “argument from inevitability” (i.e. by recalibrating v. compromising their expected outcomes). They can also ensure the practice of science produces benefits to society at large, beyond scientific knowledge per se – by depoliticising science itself by admitting the political overtones mediating its practice and improving access to the methods by which good science is produced. It bears repeating, thus, that where science is a reason of state and daily life in all its spheres is governed by inequalities, science needs to be political.

How much of a milestone is AzaadiSAT?

At 9.18 am today, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched the first developmental flight of its new Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV), a three-stage modular launch vehicle designed to carry a payload of up to 500 kg to the low-Earth orbit and to go from assembly to launch readiness in six days. The existence of such a vehicle in the ISRO stable at this time is a milestone in and of itself but it’d be naïve to assume that Prime Minister Narendra would allow that to be the only one so close to Independence Day, that too the country’s 75th. So the SSLV-D1 mission will fly a satellite called AzaadiSAT in addition to the primary payload, an optical remote-sensing satellite.

As many news reports have been touting for a week (News18, CNBC TV18, Times Now, Hindustan Times, Economic Times, WION, She The People and PTI), AzaadiSAT has been “built” by 750 girls from 75 schools around the country. I put “built” in double-quotes because while the word appears in all these reports, it’s been misused. A company named SpaceKidz India (SKI) and NITI Aayog together conceived of the project. According to News18, SKI developed and tested “the main systems, including the onboard computer, flight software, electrical power system, telemetry and tele-command”. According to the SKI website, the company also “developed basic and simple experiments that students can learn and assemble with the simultaneous support of their science teachers and our SKI team’s online coaching”.

So what the students did was take existing payloads and learn how their software components fit together, using – according to Times of India – the Arduino IDE. Let’s be clear: this is a far, far cry from saying the students built the satellite! They did no such thing. “It’s just language,” you say, but that’s the problem, no? We’re claiming a feat that we haven’t accomplished. And by believing we’ve accomplished it, we have a higher estimation of what our students are capable of, what a national programme like AzaadiSAT is capable of, that is increasingly removed from reality. These 750 students have no idea what it’s like to build a satellite. In fact what they’ve done is much closer to what the likes of White Hat, Jr. purport to do – to teach school students to code different types of apps (and even then it’s hard to say if they learn the philosophy of computer science in the process).

This is Gaganyaan and the Bose hologram all over again: we don’t know what whatever we’ve done now means for whatever comes next. To be clear, the answer to this question is ‘undetermined’ in every case. ISRO is launching Indian astronauts to space on an Indian launch vehicle but the organisation’s officials don’t have a roadmap (at least in the public domain) for what Gaganyaan will gainfully do for the Indian space programme, most likely because there’s no plan for the Indian space programme itself that far ahead. Prime Minister Modi inaugurated a hologram of Subhash Chandra Bose in New Delhi except it is completely stationary, works only at night and for which the projector alone cost Rs 15 lakh (other capital costs and operational expenses separate). As a result, it utilised none of the affordances of hologram technology, was a costlier and flashier but also emptier substitute for a straightforward sculpture or metal cast, and only put Prime Minister Modi in the limelight.

Now, we have AzaadiSAT: a device with a six-month lifespan and not built by girl students but more like introduced to them after most of it was ready. In fact, according to SKI, it was “conceptualised” expressly “to pay our tribute to mark the 75th anniversary of Independence”. And why only 75 schools, 75 payloads and 750 students? The tokenism is bloody well cringe-inducing – more so if you consider the fact that “this is a first of its kind space mission with an ‘all women concept’ to promote Women in STEM as this year’s UN theme is ‘Women in Space’,” per SKI, while the control room and the adjacent viewing gallery were one big sausage fest.

SKI CEO also told News18 “that AzaadiSAT will also carry a recorded version of the national anthem sung by Rabindranath Tagore which they plan to play in space to pay tribute to the country”. If any song is played in space, it will be inaudible – the vacuum of space can’t transmit sound – so how will that pay tribute to the country? And if this song being played in low-Earth orbit is ‘heard’ via data receivers on the ground, it will be only because the song is transmitted to the receivers, and not because it was played on speakers. So is the point here that radio-scanner operators will be able to receive the national anthem transmission as a fun exercise? How would that amount to paying tribute to the country? (Of course, I don’t understand what “paying tribute to the country” itself even means.)

We seem to believe that simply exposing these students to certain concepts and/or environments that they might not encounter in the regular course of their schooling will somehow have a transformative impact on their academic and professional trajectories. This belief has been pervasive in institute-mediated scicomm at least, but there have been very few attempts to actually measure the extent to which this belief is justified. The SKI CEO even told WION that “AzaadiSAT is going to motivate more girls into the space industry or to take up STEM subjects”. We don’t know this.

It’s also often dangerously the case that the institutes, or even entities like the SKI, that make this ‘exposure’ argument also get away with superficial scicomm efforts that lack any continuous engagement or follow-ups. School students are exposed once to, for example, high-brow concepts like particle physics, gene-editing or remote-sensing, none of which has any relevance to what they’re learning in school at that time or what they need to pass their exams.

Many institutes are often eager to have their scientists speak to students enrolled in poorly funded schools often run by the local government in order to maximise the ‘impact’ of their efforts, but unmindful of the facts that a) they’re effectively talking down to these students with a view to “lifting them up” and b) they’re being ignorant of the conditions in which these students are studying and what they actually need over some scientist talking at them about why her work is important.

Why, these outreach efforts don’t even bother to check if all of the students shipped in from a local school are even interested in science or want to become scientists (which SKI sidesteps by picking only 10 students from each school). These efforts may be exercises in broadening one’s horizons but, as I said, that requires sustained engagement, not a one-off flash-bang event. On a related note, it’s curious why none of these students were present in the viewing gallery adjacent to the control room, where they could’ve seen launch operations in action, and were seated in the outdoor viewing area instead.

There is already some awareness that simply getting students to meet Nobel Prize winners is far less useful on multiple levels than having a smart and empathetic teacher. In much the same way, the AzaadiSAT seems like a lot of tokenism bundled into a project that serves nationalistic pride but leaves behind many open questions about whether the girls who all these news articles and press releases proudly claim built the satellite will regularly use the payloads they ideated over, and in a meaningful way – by which I mean both controlling the devices over time using code they wrote on their laptops or phones, receiving and processing the data from these payloads, and using them in a constructive way going into the future.

The question of access to the relevant devices is significant because, according to SKI, “Niti Aayog has partnered for this project to bring this opportunity to the Government school Girl children across India” – the same government schools that, in general, struggled to adopt virtual classrooms during the pandemic. An SKI video description also claims that the company picked students from “economically weak backgrounds”.

Building a satellite is no small feat but as I said before, these girls didn’t build the satellite. Our students should build satellites – it’s just that efforts like AzaadiSAT don’t represent this milestone. I remember when I was in college that an American professional organisation (can’t recall the name now) would provide some funds and raw materials to two groups of students – picked from the engineering streams – who’d then have to built rudimentary cars out of them with their professors’ help in two years and race them to win. A similarly long-term engagement with school students, involving all satellite components instead of just the data acquisition system, will surely be better than what SpaceKidz and NITI Aayog are currently doing.

And because ISRO actually launches satellites built by students for free into low-Earth orbit, we must ask what these satellites do. It’s been a decade of India launching student-built satellites and it’s been the same decade of our student-built satellites doing very little, if anything (surrounded often by deliberately misleading narratives) – other than making for press releases with a shelf-life overlapping with some nationalist occasion.

The physics of Spain’s controversial air-con decree

The Government of Spain published a decree earlier this week that prevents air-conditioners from being set at a temperature lower than 27º C in the summer in an effort to lower energy consumption and wean the country off of natural gas pumped from Russia.

A Twitter thread by Euronews compared the measure to one by France, to keep the doors and windows of air-conditioned spaces closed. However, the two measures are not really comparable because the France’s measure is in a manner of speaking shallower, because it doesn’t go as far as thermodynamics allows us. Instead, Spain’s move is comparable to one that Japan instituted a couple years ago. Some basic thermodynamics here should be enlightening.

Let us consider two scenarios. In the first: Air-conditioners operate at different efficiencies at different temperatures. From about five years ago, I remember the thermodynamic efficiency variation to be around 10% across the range of operating temperatures. Also note that most air-conditioners are designed and tested to operate at or near 23º to 25º C – an ambient temperature range that falls within the ideal ranges across most countries and cultures, although it may not account for differences in wind speed, relative humidity and, of course, living conditions.

So let’s say an air-conditioner operates at 55% efficiency when the temperature setting is at 27º C. It will incur a thermodynamic penalty if it operates at a lower temperature. Let’s say the penalty is 10% at 20º C. (I’ve spelt out the math of this later in this post.) This will be 10% of 55%, which means the thermodynamic efficiency at 20º C will be 55% – 5.5% = 49.5%. Similarly, there could be a thermodynamic efficiency gain when the air-conditioner temperature is set at a higher 32º C instead of 27º C. This gain translates to energy saved. Let’s call this figure ES (for ‘energy saved’).

In the second scenario: the air-conditioner works by pumping heat out of a closed system – a room, for example – into the ambient environment. The cooler the room needs to be, the more work the air-conditioner has to undertake to pump more heat out of the room. This greater work translates to a greater energy consumption. Let’s call this amount EC.

Now, the question for policymakers is whether ES is greater than EC in the following conditions:

  1. The relative humidity is below a certain value;
  2. When the room’s minimum temperature is restricted to 27º C;
  3. The chances of thermal shock; and
  4. The given strength of the urban heat-island effect.

Let’s cycle through these conditions.

1. Relative humidity – The local temperature and the relative humidity together determine the wet-bulb temperature. As I have explained before, exposure to a wet-bulb temperature greater than 32º C can quickly debilitate humans, and after a few hours could even lead to death. But as it happens, if the indoor temperature is 27º C, the wet-bulb temperature can never reach 32º C; even at 99% relative humidity, it reaches a value of 26.92º C.

2. 27º C limit – The operating range of the sole air-conditioner in my house is 18º to 32º C when the ambient temperature is 18º to 48º C. In thermodynamic speak, an air-conditioner operates on the reverse Carnot cycle, and for such cycles, there is a simple, fixed formula to calculate the maximum coefficient of performance (CoP). The higher the CoP, the higher the machine’s thermodynamic efficiency. (Note that while the proportionality holds, the CoP doesn’t directly translate to efficiency.) Let’s fix the ambient temperature to 35º C. If the indoor temperature is 20º C, the max. CoP is 1.33, and if the indoor temperature is 27º C, the max. CoP is 3.37. So there is an appreciable thermodynamic efficiency gain if we set the air-conditioner’s temperature to a higher value (within the operating range and assuming the ambient temperature is greater than the indoor temperature).

3. Thermal shock – The thermal shock is an underappreciated consequence of navigating two spaces at markedly different temperatures. It arises particularly in the form of the cold-shock response, when the body is suddenly exposed to a low temperature temperature after having habituated itself to a higher one – such as 20º C versus 40º C. The effect is especially pronounced on the heart, which has to work harder to pump blood than it did when the body was in warmer surroundings. In extreme cases, the cardiac effects include vasoconstriction and heart failure. Cold-shock response is most relevant in areas where the ambient conditions are hot and arid, such as in Rajasthan, where the outdoors routinely simmer at 40-45º C in the summer while people intuitively respond by setting their air-conditioners to 18º C or even lower.

4. Urban heat islands – When a single air-conditioner is required to extract enough heat from a room to lower the room’s temperature by 15º C instead of by 8º C, it will consume more energy. If its thermal efficiency is (an extremely liberal) 70%, 30% of the heat it consumes will be discarded as waste heat back into the environment. Imagine a medium-sized office building fit with 25 such air-conditioners, a reasonable estimate. During the day, then, it will be similarly reasonable to conclude that the temperature in the immediate vicinity of the building will increase by 0.5º or so. If there are a cluster of buildings, the temperature increase is bound to be on the order of 2º to 3º C, if not more. This can only exacerbate the urban heat-island effect, which adds to our heat stress as well as degrades the local greenery and faunal diversity.

Take all four factors together now and revisit the Spanish government’s decree to limit air-conditioners’ minimum operating temperature to 27º C during summer – and it seems entirely reasonable. However, a similar rule shouldn’t be instituted in India because Spain is much smaller and has lower meteorological and climatological variations, and also has less income inequality, which translates to lower exposure to life-threatening living conditions and better access to healthcare on average.

The question of Abdus Salam ‘deserving’ his Nobel

Peter Woit has blogged about an oral history interview with theoretical physicist Sheldon Glashow published in 2020 by the American Institute of Physics. (They have a great oral history of physics series you should check out if you’re interested.) Woit zeroed in on a portion in which Glashow talks about his faltering friendship with Steven Weinberg and his issues with Abdus Salam’s nomination for the physics Nobel Prize.

Glashow, Weinberg and Salam together won this prize in 1979, for their work on the work on electroweak theory, which describes the behaviour of two fundamental forces, the electromagnetic force and the weak force. Glashow recalls that his and Weinberg’s friendship – having studied and worked together for many years – deteriorated in the 1970s, a time in which both scientists were aware that they were due a Nobel Prize. According to Glashow, however, Weinberg wanted the prize to be awarded only to himself and Salam.

This is presumably because of how the prize-winning work came to be: with Glashow’s mathematical-physical model published in 1960, Weinberg building on it seven years later, with Salam’s two relevant papers appeared a couple years after Glashow’s paper and a year after Weinberg’s. Glashow recalls that Salam’s work was not original, that each of his two papers respectively echoed findings already published in Glashow’s and Weinberg’s papers. Instead, Glashow continues, Salam received the Nobel Prize probably because he had encouraged his peers and his colleagues to nominate him a very large number of times and because he set up the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste.

This impression, of Salam being undeserving from a contribution-to-physics point of view in Glashow’s telling, is very at odds with the impression of Salam based on reading letters and comments by Weinberg and Pervez Hoodbhoy and by watching the documentary Salam – The First ****** Nobel Laureate.

The topic of Salam being a Nobel laureate was never uncomplicated, to begin with: he was an Ahmadi Muslim who enjoyed the Pakistan government’s support until he didn’t, when he was forced to flee the country; his intentions with the ICTP – to give scholars from developing countries a way to study physics without having to contend with often-crippling resource constrains – were also noble. Hoodbhoy has also written about the significance of Salam’s work as a physicist and the tragedy of his name and the memories of his contributions having been erased from all the prominent research centres in Pakistan.

Finally, one of Salam’s nominees for a Nobel Prize was the notable British physicist and Nobel laureate Paul A.M. Dirac, and it seems strange that Dirac would endorse Salam if he didn’t believe Salam’s work deserved it.

Bearing these facts in mind, Glashow’s contention appears to be limited to the originality of Salam’s work. But to my mind, even if Salam’s work was really derivative, it was at par with that of Glashow and Weinberg. More importantly, while I believe the Nobel Prizes deserve to be abrogated, the prize-giving committee did more good than it might have realised by including Salam among its winners: in the words of Weinberg, “Salam sacrificed a lot of possible scientific productivity by taking on that responsibility [to set up ICTP]. It’s a sacrifice I would not make.”

Glashow may not feel very well about Salam’s inclusion for the 1979 prize and the Nobel Prizes as we know are only happy to overlook anything other than the scientific work itself, but if the committee really screwed up, then they screwed up to do a good thing.

Then again, even though Glashow wasn’t alone (he was joined by Martinus J.G. Veltman on his opinions against Salam), the physicists’ community at large doesn’t share his views. Glashow also cites an infamous 2014 paper by Norman Dombey, in which Dombey concluded that Salam didn’t deserve his share of the prize, but the paper’s reputation itself is iffy at best.

In fact, this is all ultimately a pointless debate: there are just too many people who deserve a Nobel Prize but don’t win it while a deeper dive into the modern history of physics should reveal a near-constant stream of complaints against Nobel laureates and their work by their peers. It should be clear today that both winning a prize and not winning a prize ought to mean nothing to the practice of science.

The other remarkable thing about Glashow’s comments in the interview (as cited by Woit) is what I like to think of as the seemingly eternal relevance of Brian Keating’s change of mind. Brian Keating is an astrophysicist who was at the forefront of the infamous announcement that his team had discovered evidence of cosmic inflation, an epoch of the early universe in which it is believed to have expanded suddenly and greatly, in March 2014. There were many problems leading up to the announcement but there was little doubt at the time, and Keating also admitted later, that its rapidity was motivated by the temptation to secure a Nobel Prize.

Many journalists, scientists and others observers of the practice of science routinely and significantly underestimate the effect the Nobel Prizes exert on scientific research. The prospect of winning the prize for supposedly discovering evidence of cosmic inflation caused Keating et al. to not wait for additional, confirmatory data before making their announcement. When such data did arrive, from the Planck telescope collaboration, Keating et al. suffered for it with their reputation and prospects.

Similarly, Weinberg and Glashow fell out because, according to Glashow, Weinberg didn’t wish Glashow to give a talk in 1979 discussing possible alternatives to the work of Weinberg and Salam because Weinberg thought doing such a thing would undermine his and Salam’s chances of being awarded a Nobel Prize. Eventually it didn’t, but that’s beside the point: this little episode in history is as good an illustration as any of how the Nobel Prizes and their implied promises of laurels and prestige render otherwise smart scientists insecure, petty and elbows-out competitive – in exchange for sustaining an absurd and unjust picture of the scientific enterprise.

All of this goes obviously against the spirit of science.

Immunity for scientists? Err…

On the sidelines of a screening of the semi-fictional biopic of beleaguered ISRO scientist Nambi Narayanan, the Madhavan-starrer Rocketry: The Nambi Effect, Narayanan told journalists on August 1 that “scientists should” receive immunity against “arbitrary police action” (source).

“It is not just ISRO… scientists working in the Department of Science and Technology, the Department of Atomic Energy and others too. As part of their job, they travel a lot. … They have to be protected from random police action, else you can go on booking people and put them behind the bars”.

This is a strange statement to make, with quite a bit to unpack.

No one – not just scientists – deserves to be at the receiving end of arbitrary police action. Singling scientists out here transforms a right into a privilege and scientists into an arbitrarily exceptional class of citizens. Narayanan suffered considerably after the Kerala police falsely accused him of espionage and derailed his career and life, and the response to this should include among other things the elimination of all arbitrary action, instead of vouchsafing the cruelty of it for some non-elite group.

Narayanan’s statement is also vague about what he considers to be “arbitrary” and whom he considers to be “scientists”. If he is using “arbitrary” as a synonym for ‘baseless’, his statement is immediately a statement about the arrests and harassment of journalists, activists and political leaders around the country. The police and state governments also arrested and harassed social scientists. To want scientists alone to be protected in this regard is disingenuous – and in the process raises the question of “protection from what?”.

Baseless police action against scientists who spoke up is baseless police action against scientists who spoke up against state failure and overreach. These scientists are not simply – to use a cliché – doing their jobs, as Narayanan was, but also exercised their rights as citizens of the country to call out and protest communalism and corruption. Narayanan on the other hand was persecuted for two decades for having done nothing at all. Both actions were wrong but for significantly different reasons. Importantly, cases like his have been rare while those unlike his are the norm today.

And finally, Narayanan’s statement presumes an implicit distinction between scientists’ work and their political engagement. He seems to invoke, by asking for immunity, that exceptionalism again: that there is nothing worth taking police action over as well as that scientists are above it all. Granting them and only them immunity from police action could consequently render their comments on political matters (even more) irrelevant, coming as they will from a position of incredible privilege, but it is far more likely that senior scientists (an important distinction because younger scientists have on average been better) will interpret the decree to mean they’re obligated to the state to stay in their lane.

The only part of Narayanan’s statement that makes sense is the one that expects the police to give scientists, and for that matter people of any profession, the benefit of the doubt – to admit, essentially, that a conspiracy isn’t the only explanation for a researcher in a well-funded research facility to travel to or be in touch with their counterparts from other countries.

Should ‘geniuses’ be paid extra?

A newsletter named Ideas Sleep Furiously had an essay propounding a “genius basic income” on May 28. Here are the first two paragraphs that capture a not-insignificant portion of the essay’s message:

Professor Martin Hairer is one of the world’s most gifted mathematicians. An Austrian-Brit at Imperial College London, he researches stochastic partial differential equations and holds two of maths’ most coveted prizes. In 2014, he became only the second person with a physics PhD to win a Fields Medal, an award granted every four years to mathematicians under 40 and considered to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Hairer also won the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, which comes with a $3 million cheque. When the Guardian covered Hairer’s win, they noted: ‘[his] major work, a 180-page treatise that introduced the world to “reguarity structures”, so stunned his colleagues that one suggested it must have been transmitted to Hairer by a more intelligent alien civilisation.’ The journalist asked Hairer how he’d spend the prize money. His response: “We moved to London somewhat recently, three years ago, and we are still renting. So it might be time to buy a place to live.”

Most readers of the Guardian that day no doubt understood the absurdity of London house prices. Morning coffee in hand, many will have tut-tutted in dismay at Hairer’s comical remark and mentally filed it under somebody really ought to fix this housing crisis. But how many stopped to consider the greater absurdity? After all, here was a man who, not that long ago, would’ve had a team around him devoted to deflecting such petty problems, to getting others out of his way and allowing him to focus on the thing that only he and a handful of people could understand, let alone do. But the real story wasn’t that a maths genius in modern Britain couldn’t afford a comfortable home close to work. The real story was that it passed without comment.

Matthew Archer, the essay’s author (and who ends the newsletter edition with a request to readers to share it “to spread the gospel of rationality”), contends that people like Hairer ought to be freed of the tedium of figuring out where to live, how to get around the city, groceries, and other “quotidian constraints that plague mere mortals”. Instead, Archer argues, a “genius” like Hairer ought to be paid a “genius basic income” so that he, and his brain “built for advanced mathematics”, can focus on solving hard problems that contribute to human welfare and civilisation.

Archer’s essay addresses this problem both within and without university settings, but within academic ones. Another important thrust of his essay is the way American ‘child geniuses’ are treated at American schools, and how inefficiencies in the country’s school system have the eventual effect of encouraging these children not to develop their special skills but to fit in, leading to an “epidemic of gifted underachievement”. This is quite likely true of the Indian school system as well, but his overall idea is not a good one – especially in India, and probably in the West as well. Archer’s essay is undergirded by a few assumptions and this is where the problems lie.

The first is that a country (I’m highly uncertain about the world) can and must reap only one sort of benefit from the “geniuses” at its universities. This is an insular view of the problems that are deemed worthy of solving, by privileging the interests of the “genius” over the interests of the higher education and research system. If a “genius” is to be paid more, they must also assume more responsibilities than doing the work that they are already doing because they must also dispense their social responsibilities to their university.

If a mathematician is considered to be the only one who can solve a very difficult problem, encourage them to do so – but not at the expense of them also taking on the usual number of PhD students, teaching hours and other forms of mentorship. We don’t know what we will stand to lose if the mathematical problem goes unsolved but we’re well aware of what we lose when we prevent aspiring students from pursuing a PhD because a suitable mentor isn’t available or capable students from receiving the right amount of attention in the classroom.

The second is that we need “geniuses”. Do we? Instead of a “genius basic income” that translates to a not insubstantial hike for the “geniuses” at a university or a research facility, pay all students and researchers a proportionate fraction of their incomes more so that they all can worry just a little less about “quotidian constraints”.

There is a growing body of research showing that the best way to eliminate poverty appears to be giving poor people money and letting them spend it as they see fit. There are some exceptions to this view but they are centered entirely on identifying who is really deserving – a problem that goes away both in the academic setting, where direct income comparisons with the cost of living are possible, and in India (see the third point). I sincerely believe the same could be true vis-à-vis inequities within our education and research systems, which are part of a wider environment of existence that has foisted more than mere “quotidian constraints” on its members and which will almost certainly benefit from relieving all of them just a little at a time instead of a select few a lot.

(Archer quotes David Graeber in his essay to dismiss a counterpoint against his view: “To raise this point risks a tsunami of ‘whataboutery’—what about the average person who can’t afford a home? What about the homeless?! The same people tend to suggest that a highly paid academic doing a job he loves and living in one of the world’s best cities is enough of a reward. In itself this is a sign of a remarkable shift in values. It is also the inheritance of an older belief system, Puritanism, where, in the words of the late anthropologist David Graeber, ‘one is not paid money to do things, however useful or important, that one actually enjoys.'” When Graeber passed away in September 2020, I remember anthropologist Alpa Shah tweeting this: “I often thought of David Graeber as a genius. But of the many things that David taught me, it was that there is in fact a genius in each of us.”)

In India in particular, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research doesn’t pay students and researchers enough as well as has a terrible reputation of paying them so late that many young researchers are in debt or are leaving for other jobs just to feed their families.

(Aside: While Hairer suggests that he could think about buying a house in London only after he’d won $3 million with a Breakthrough Prize, the prize itself once again concentrates a lot of money into the hands of a few that have already excelled, and most of whom are men.)

The third assumption is that school and education reform is impossible and even undesirable. Archer writes in his essay:

“It was only in October last year that the then Mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, announced the city’s gifted programme would be replaced because non-white students were underrepresented. Yet as Professor Ellen Winner noted in her 1996 book, Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, scrapping gifted programmes in the name of diversity, equality, and inclusion, has rather ironic effects. Namely, gifted children embedded within a culture, which might not value high achievement …, have no other children ‘with whom to identify, and they may not feel encouraged to develop their skills.’ The activists, then, practice discrimination in the name of non-discrimination.”

This argument advances a cynical view of the sort of places we can or should expect our schools to be for our children. Keeping a policy going so that white students can receive help with developing their special skills is an abject form of status-quoism that overlooks the non-white students who are struggling to fit in, and are apparently also not being selected for the ‘gifted children’ programme. Clearly, the latter is broken. I would much rather advocate school-level reforms where the institution accommodates everyone as well as pays more and/or different attention to those children who need it, including arranging for activities designed to help develop their skills as well as improve social cohesion.

The fourth assumption is specific to India and concerns the desirability of the unbalanced improvement of welfare. Providing a few a “genius basic income” will heap privilege on privilege, because those who have already been identified as “geniuses” in India will have had to be privileged in at least two of the following three ways: gender, class and caste.

Put another way, take a look at the upper management of India’s best academic and research centres, government research bodies and private research facilities, and tell me how many of these people aren’t cis-male Brahmins, rich Brahmins or rich cis-males (‘rich’ here is being used to mean access to wealth before an individual entered academia). If they make up more than 10% of the total population of these individuals, I’ll give you a thousand rupees, even if 10% would also still be abysmal.

The Indian academic milieu is already highly skewed in favour of Brahmins in particular, and any exercise here that deals with identifying geniuses will identify only Brahmin “geniuses”. This in turn will attach one more casteist module to a system already sorely in need of affirmative action.

I’m also opposed to the principle outlined by contentions of the type “we don’t have enough money for research, so we should spend what we have wisely”. This is a false problem created by the government’s decision to underspend on research, forcing researchers to fight among themselves about whose work should receive a higher allocation, or any allocation at all. I thought that I would have to make an exception for the “genius basic income”, i.e. that researchers do have only a small amount of money and that they can’t afford such an income for a few people – but then I realised that this is a red herring: even if India invested 1% or even 2% of its GDP in research and development activities (up from the current 0.6%), a “genius basic income” would be a bad idea in principle.

The fourth assumption allows us to circle back to a general, and especially pernicious, problem, specific to one line from Archer’s essay: “A world in which the profoundly gifted are supported might be a world … with a reverence for the value that gifted people bring.”

The first two words that popped into my ahead upon reading this sentence were “Marcy Pogge”. Both Geoffrey Marcy and Thomas Pogge were considered to be “geniuses” in their respective fields – astronomy and philosophy – before a slew of allegations of sexual harrassment, many of them from students at their own universities, the University of California and Yale University, revealed an important side of reality: people in charge of student safety and administration at these universities turned away even when they knew of the allegations because the men brought in a lot of grant money and prestige.

Chasing women out of science, forcing them to keep their mouth shut if they want to continue being in science (after throwing innumerable barriers in their path to entering science in the first place) – this is the unconscionable price we have paid to revere “genius”. This is because the notion of a “genius” creates a culture of exceptionalism, founded among other things on the view (as in the first assumption) that “geniuses” have something to contribute that others can’t and that this contribution is inherently more valuable than that of others. But “geniuses” are people, and people can be assholes if they’re allowed to operate with impunity.

Archer may contend that this wasn’t the point of his essay; that may be, but ‘reverence’ implies little else. And if this is the position towards which he believes we must all gravitate, forget everything else – it’s reason enough dismiss the idea of a “genius basic income”.