Category: Op-eds

Let the arrogators write

Bora Zivkovic, the former ‘blogfather’ of the Scientific American blogs network, said it best: journalists are temporary experts. Reporters have typically got a few days to write something up on which scientists have been working for years, if not decades. They flit from paper to paper, lab to lab; without the luxury of a beat, they often cover condensed matter physics one day, spaceflight the next, ribosomes the day after, and exomoons after that. Over time, they become the somewhat-jacks of many trades, but there is only one that they are really trying to master: writing.

The editors they work with to have these stories published are also somewhat-jacks in their own right. Many of them will have been reporters, probably still are from time to time, and further along the road (by necessity) to understanding what will get stories read.

However, there is a tendency among many of the scientists I work with to trivialise these proficiencies, as if they are products of a lesser skill, a lesser perseverance even. There have even been one or two so steeped in the notion that science reporters and editors wouldn’t be employed if the scientists hadn’t undertaken their pursuits of truths that they treat editors with naked disdain. Some others are less contemptuous but still aver that journalists are at best adjacent to reality, and lower on some imagined hierarchy as a result.

If these claims don’t immediately seem ludicrous to you, then you are likely choosing to not see why.

First: If a person in any profession believes that it is easy to reach the masses and then cites Facebook and Twitter as proof, it is not that they don’t know how journalism works. It is that they don’t know what journalism is as well as are professing ignorance of their personal definition being wrong. The fourth estate is responsible for keeping democracy functional. It is not as simple as putting all available information in the public domain or breaking complex ideas down to digestible tidbits. It is about figuring out how “write a story people will like reading” is tied to “speak truth to power”.

Second: I am not going to say reporting and editing engage the mind as much as science does because I wouldn’t know how I would go about proving such a thing. Axiomatically, I will say that those who believe reporting and editing are somehow ‘softer’ therefore ‘lesser’ pursuits (machismo?) or that they are less engaging and/or worthwhile are making the same mistake. There is no way to tell. There is also no admission of the alternative that editors and reporters – by devoting themselves to deceptively simple tasks like stating facts and piecing narratives together – are able to find greater meaning, agency and purpose in them than the scientist is able to comprehend.

Third: This tendency to debase communication and its attendant skills is bizarre considering the scientist himself intends to communicate (and it is usually a ‘him’ doing the debasing). If I had to guess, I would say these beliefs exist because they are proxies for a subconscious reluctance to share the power that is their knowledge, and the expression of such beliefs a desperate attempt to exert control over what they may believe is rightfully theirs. There is some confidence in such speculation as well because I actually know one scientist who believes scientists attempting to communicate their work are betraying their profession. But that story is for another day.

All these reasons together is why I would ask the arrogators to write more for news outlets instead of asking them to stop. It is not that we get to cut off their ability to reach the masses – that could worsen the sense of victimisation and, thus, entitlement – but that we have an opportunity to chamfer their privilege upon the whetstone of public engagement. This after all is one of the purposes of journalism. It works even when we let the powerful write instead of the powerless because its strength lies as much in the honest conduct of it as its structure. The plain-jane conveyance of information is a very small part of it all.

Featured image credit: Edgar Guerra/Unsplash.

Expertise’s place

Over 1,600 scientists have signed a letter of protest addressed to the White House against its proposed definition of ‘gender’ that purportedly disidentifies transgender and intersex people. According to a press statement issued alongside the letter,

The letter was a grassroots effort. Immediately following the publication of the New York Times article about the administration’s proposal, with its “grounded in science” claim, scientists began voicing their objections on social media. Twenty-two biologists and other scientists in related fields planned and wrote the letter collaboratively.

The letter asks for the administration to withdraw the draft policy and for the petitioners’ “elected representatives to oppose its implementation”. It has been signed by over 1,600 people working as “biologists, geneticists, psychologists, anthropologists, physicians, neuroscientists, social scientists, biochemists, mental health service providers,” and in other fields.

However, subject expertise has little role to play in the context of the letter, and certainly shouldn’t let the Trump administration off the hook simply because it believes only ‘scientific things’ are entitled to legal protection.

If technical expertise were really necessary to disabuse the Trump administration of its misbelief that gender is a biological construct, the experts at the forefront should have included those qualified to comment meaningfully on how people build and negotiate gender. But even this wouldn’t save the letter from its principal problem: it seems to be almost exclusively offended by the Trump administration’s use of the phrase “grounded in science” over anything else, and devotes three paragraphs underlining the lack of empirical knowledge on this count. This is problematic.

In transgender individuals, the existence and validity of a distinct gender identity is supported by a number of neuroanatomical studies. Though scientists are just beginning to understand the biological basis of gender identity, it is clear that many factors, known and unknown, mediate the complex links between identity, genes, and anatomy.

In intersex people, their genitalia, as well as their various secondary sexual characteristics, can differ from what clinicians would predict from their sex chromosomes. In fact, some people will live their entire lives without ever knowing that they are intersex. The proposed policy will force many intersex people to be legally classified in ways that erase their intersex status and identity, as well as lead to more medically unnecessary and risky surgeries at birth. Such non-consensual gender assignment and surgeries result in increased health risks in adulthood and violate intersex people’s right to self-determination.

Millions of Americans identify as transgender or gender non-conforming, or have intersex bodies, and are at increased risk of physical and mental health disorders resulting from discrimination, fear for personal safety, and family and societal rejection. Multiple standards of health care for transgender and intersex people emphasise that recognising an individual’s self-identified gender, not their external genitalia or chromosomes, is the best practice for providing evidence-based, effective, and lifesaving care. Our best available evidence shows that affirmation of gender identity is paramount to the survival, health, and livelihood of transgender and intersex people.

A socio-cultural description of some of the ways in which Americans interpret gender, the challenges they may face and what they believe could be the appropriate way to address them are all conspicuous by absence. People are not rallying to this cause because science doesn’t yet know; that would be disingenuous. Instead, they are speaking up because the cultural experience of gender is missing from the White House’s articulation.

Finally, more than following Trump’s draft policy into its hole of cultural elision, the letter itself seems to fail to distinguish between sex and gender. It says:

The relationship between sex chromosomes, genitalia, and gender identity is complex, and not fully understood. There are no genetic tests that can unambiguously determine gender, or even sex.

The relationship between sex chromosomes and genitalia is much better understood than the relationship between the two and gender identity. Further, sex can indeed be determined to a large extent by genetic tests. It is gender that is harder to associate with one’s genes because it is a social/cultural/political construct and genes aren’t its sole determinants. Sex is entirely biological and doctors around the world routinely determine the sex of newborns by studying their chromosomes.

The following para also notes:

In transgender individuals, the existence and validity of a distinct gender identity is supported by a number of neuroanatomical studies.

It is doubtful if these studies demonstrate causation together with correlation.

Notwithstanding the legal protections afforded to people of non-binary gender and the terms of their provision, the letter would have benefited by calling the policy out for framing it as an insular problem of science, not putting up an equally insular counter-argument and by being more wary of the language it employs to defend its stance. But as it stands, it proves to be by itself controversial.

Climate fear

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently published a report exhorting countries committed to the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to an additional 1.5º by the end of this century. As if this isn’t drastic enough, one study has also shown that if we’re not on track to this target in the next 12 years, then we’re likely to cross a point of no return and be unable to keep Earth’s surface from warming by 1.5º C.

In the last decade, the conversation on climate change passed by an important milestone – that of journalists classifying climate denialism as false balance. After such acknowledgment, editors and reporters simply wouldn’t bother speaking to those denying the anthropogenic component of global warming in pursuit of a balanced copy because denying climate change became wrongful. Including such voices wouldn’t add balance but in fact remove it from a climate-centred story.

But with the world inexorably thundering towards warming Earth’s surface by at least 1.5º C, if not more, and with such warming also expected to have drastic consequences for civilisation as we know it, I wonder when optimism will also become pulled under the false balance umbrella. (I have no doubt that it will so I’m omitting the ‘if’ question here.)

There were a few articles earlier this year, especially in the American media, about whether or not we ought to use the language of fear to spur climate action from people and governments alike. David Biello had excerpted the following line from a new book on the language of climate change in a review for the NYT: “I believe that language can lessen the distance between humans and the world of which we are a part; I believe that it can foster interspecies intimacy and, as a result, care.” But what tone should such language adopt?

A September 2017 study noted:

… the modest research evidence that exists with respect to the use of fear appeals in communicating climate change does not offer adequate empirical evidence – either for or against the efficacy of fear appeals in this context – nor would such evidence adequately address the issue of the appropriateness of fear appeals in climate change communication. … It is also noteworthy that the language of climate change communication is typically that of “communication and engagement,” with little explicit reference to targeted social influence or behaviour change, although this is clearly implied. Hence underlying and intertwined issues here are those of cogent arguments versus largely absent evidence, and effectiveness as distinct from appropriateness. These matters are enmeshed within the broader contours of the contested political, social, and environmental, issues status of climate change, which jostle for attention in a 24/7 media landscape of disturbing and frightening communications concerning the reality, nature, progression, and implications of global climate change.

An older study, from 2009, had it that using the language of fear wouldn’t work because, according to Big Think‘s break down, could desensitise the audience, prompt the audience to trust the messenger less over time and trigger either self-denial or some level of nihilism because what else would you do if you’re “confronted with messages that present risks” that you, individually, can do nothing to mitigate. Most of all, it could distort our (widely) shared vision of a “just world”.

On the other hand, just the necessary immediacy of action suggests we should be afraid lest we become complacent. We need urgent and significant action in both the short- and long-terms and across a variety of enterprises. Fear also sells. it’s always in demand irrespective of whether a journalist is selling it, or a businessman or politician. It’s easy, sensational, grabs eyeballs and can be effortlessly communicated. That’s how you have the distasteful maxim “If it bleeds, it leads”.

In light of these concerns, it’s odd that so many news outlets around the world (including The Guardian and The Washington Post) are choosing to advertise the ’12-year-deadline to act’ bit (even Forbes’s takedown piece included this info. in the headline). A deadline is only going to make people more anxious and less able to act. Further, it’s odder that given the vicious complexities associated with making climate-related estimates, we’re even able to pinpoint a single point of no return instead of identifying a time-range at some point within which we become doomed. And third, I would even go so far as to question the ‘doomedness’ itself because I don’t know if it takes inflections – points after which we lose our ability to make predictions – into account.

Nonetheless, as we get closer to 2030 – the year that hosts the point of no return – and assuming we haven’t done much to keep Earth’s surface warming by 1.5º C by the century’s close, we’re going to be in neck-deep in it. At this point, would it still be fair for journalists, if not anyone else, to remain optimistic and communicate using the language of optimism? Second, will optimism on our part be taken seriously considering, at that point, the world will find out that Earth’s surface is going to warm by 1.5º C irrespective of everyone else’s hopes.

Third: how will we know if optimistic engagement with our audience is even working? Being able to measure this change, and doing so, is important if we are to reform journalism to the extent that newsrooms have a financial incentive to move away from fear-mongering and towards more empathetic, solution-oriented narratives. A major reason “If it bleeds, it leads” is true is because it makes money; if it didn’t, it would be useless. By measuring change, calculating their first-order derivatives and strategising to magnify desirable trends in the latter, newsrooms can also take a step back from the temptations of populism and its climate-unjust tendencies.

Climate change journalism is inherently political and as susceptible to being caught between political faultlines as anything else. This is unlikely to change until the visible effects of anthropogenic global warming are abundant and affecting day-to-day living (of the upper caste/upper class in India and of the first world overall). So between now and then, a lot rests on journalism’s shoulders; journalists as such are uniquely situated in this context because, more than anyone else, we influence people on a day-to-day basis.

Apropos the first two questions: After 2030, I suspect many people will simply raise the bar, hoping that some action can be taken in the next seven decades to keep warming below 2º C instead of 1.5º C. Journalists will make up both the first and last lines of defence in keeping humanity at large from thinking that it has another shot at saving itself. This will be tricky: to inspire optimism and prompt people to act even while constantly reminding readers that we’ve fucked up like never before. I’d start by celebrating the melancholic joy – perhaps as in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1891) – of lesser condemnations.

To this end, journalists should also be regularly retrained – say, once every five years – on where climate science currently stands, what audiences in different markets feel about it and why, and what kind of language reporters and editors can use to engage with them. If optimism is to remain effective further into the 21st century, collective action is necessary on the part of journalists around the world as well – just the way, for example, we recognise certain ways to report stories of sexual assault, data breaches, etc.

What the Nobel Prizes are not

The winners of this year’s Nobel Prizes are being announced this week. The prizes are an opportunity to discover new areas of research, and developments there that scientists consider particularly notable. In this endeavour, it is equally necessary to remember what the Nobel Prizes are not.

For starters, the Nobel Prizes are not lenses through which to view all scientific pursuit. It is important for everyone – scientists and non-scientists alike – to not take the Nobel Prizes too seriously.

The prizes have been awarded to white men from Europe and the US most of the time, across the medicine, physics and chemistry categories. This presents a lopsided view of how scientific research has been undertaken in the world. Many governments take pride in the fact that one of their citizens has been awarded this prize, and often advertise the strength of their research community by boasting of the number of Nobel laureates in their ranks. This way, the prizes have become a marker of eminence.

However, this should not blind us from the fact that there are equally brilliant scientists from other parts of the world that have done, and are doing, great work. Even research institutions do this; for example, this is what the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, New Jersey, says on its website:

The Institute’s mission and culture have produced an exceptional record of achievement. Among its Faculty and Members are 33 Nobel Laureates, 42 of the 60 Fields Medalists, and 17 of the 19 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as many MacArthur Fellows and Wolf Prize winners.

What the prizes are

Winning a Nobel Prize may be a good thing. But not winning a Nobel Prize is not a bad thing. That is the perspective often lost in conversations about the quality of scientific research. When the Government of India expresses a desire to have an Indian scientist win a Nobel Prize in the next decade, it is a passive admission that it does not consider any other marker of quality to be worth the endorsement. Otherwise, there are numerous ways to make the statement that the quality of Indian research is at par with the rest of the world’s (if not better in some areas).

In this sense, what the Nobel Prizes afford is an easy way out. Consider the following analogy: when scientists are being considered for promotions, evaluators frequently ask whether a scientist in question has published in “prestigious” journals like Nature, Science, Cell, etc. If the scientist has, it is immediately assumed that the scientist is undertaking good research. Notwithstanding the fact that supposedly “prestigious” journals frequently publish bad science, this process of evaluation is unfair to scientists who publish in other peer-reviewed journals and who are doing equally good, if not better, work. Just the way we need to pay less attention to which journals scientists are publishing in and instead start evaluating their research directly, we also need to pay less attention to who is winning Nobel Prizes and instead assess scientists’ work, as well as the communities to which the scientists belong, directly.

Obviously this method of evaluation is more arduous and cumbersome – but it is also the fairer way to do it. Now the question arises: is it more important to be fair or to be quick? On-time assessments and rewards are important, particularly in a country where resource optimisation carries greater benefits as well as where the population of young scientists is higher than in most countries; justice delayed is justice denied, after all. At the same time, instead of settling for one or the other way, why not ask for both methods at once: to be fair and to be quick at the same time? Again, this is a more difficult way of evaluating research than the methods we currently employ, but in the longer run, it will serve all scientists as well as science better in all parts of the world.

Skewed representation of ‘achievers’

Speaking of global representation: this is another area where the Nobel Foundation has faltered. It has ensured that the Nobel Prizes have accrued immense prestige but it has not simultaneously ensured that the scientists that it deems fit to adorn that prestige have been selected equally from all parts of the world. Apart from favouring white scientists from the US and Europe, the Nobel Prizes have also ignored the contributions of women scientists. Thus far, only two women have won the physics prize (out of 206), four women the chemistry prize (out of 177) and 12 women the medicine prize (out of 214).

One defence that is often advanced to explain this bias is that the Nobel Prizes typically reward scientific and technological achievements that have passed the test of time, achievements that have been repeatedly validated and whose usefulness for the common people has been demonstrated. As a result, the prizes can be understood to be awarded to research done in the past – and in this past, women have not made up a significant portion of the scientific workforce. Perhaps more women will be awarded going ahead.

This arguments holds water but only in a very leaky bucket. Many women have been passed over for the Nobel Prizes when they should not have been, and the Nobel Committee, which finalises each year’s laureates, is in no position to explain why. (Famous omissions include Rosalind Franklin, Vera Rubin and Jocelyn Bell Burnell.) This defence becomes even more meaningless when you ask why so few people from other parts of the world have been awarded the Nobel Prize. This is because the Nobel Prizes are a fundamentally western – even Eurocentric – institution in two important ways.

First, they predominantly acknowledge and recognise scientific and technological developments that the prize-pickers are familiar with, and the prize-pickers are a group made up of all previous laureates and a committee of Swedish scientists. Additionally, this group is only going to acknowledge research that is already familiar with and by people its own members have heard of. It is not a democratic organisation. This particular phenomenon has already been documented in the editorial boards of scientific journals, with the effect that scientific research undertaken with local needs in mind often finds dismal representation in scientific journals.

Second, according to the foundation that awards them, the Nobel Prizes are designated for individuals or groups who work has granted the “greatest benefit on mankind”. For the sciences, how do you determine such work? In fact, one step further, how do we evaluate the legitimacy and reliability of scientific work at all? Answer: we check whether the work has followed certain rules, passed certain checks, received the approval of the author’s peers, etc. All of these are encompassed in the modern scientific publishing process: a scientists describes the work they have done in a paper, submits the paper to a journal, the journal gets the paper reviewed up the scientist’s peers, once it is okay the paper is published. It is only when a paper is published that most people consider the research described in it to be worth their attention. And the Nobel Prizes – rather the people who award them – implicitly trust the modern scientific publishing process even though the foundation itself is not obligated to, essentially as a matter of convenience.

However, what about the knowledge that is not published in such papers? More yet, what about the knowledge that is not published in the few journals that get a disproportionate amount of attention (a.k.a. the “prestige” titles like Nature, Science and Cell). Obviously there are a lot of quacks and cracks whose ideas are filtered out in this process but what about scientists conducting research in resource-poor economies who simply can’t afford the fancy journals?

What about scientists and other academics who are improving previously published research to be more sensitive to the local conditions in which it is applied? What about those specialists who are unearthing new knowledge that could be robust but which is not being considered as such simply because they are not scientists – such as farmers? It is very difficult for these people to be exposed to scholars in other parts of the world and for the knowledge they have helped create/produce to be discovered by other people. The opportunity for such interactions is diminished further when the research conducted is not in English.

In effect, the Nobel Prizes highlight people and research from one small subset of the world. There are a lot of people, a lot of regions, a lot of languages and a lot of expertise excluded from this subset. As the prizes are announced one by one, we need to bear these limitations in mind and choose our words carefully, so as to not exalt the prizewinners too much and downplay the contributions of numerous others in the same field as well as in other fields and, more importantly, we must not assume that the Nobel Prizes are any kind of crowning achievement.

The Wire
October 1, 2018

An epistocracy

The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has proposed a new textbook that will discuss the ‘Indian knowledge system’ via a number of pseudoscientific claims about the supposed inventions and discoveries of ancient India, The Print reported on September 26. The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) signed off on the move, and the textbook – drawn up by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan educational trust – is set to be introduced in 80% of the institutions the AICTE oversees.

According to the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan website, “the courses of study” to be introduced via the textbook “were started by the Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology under the Delhi Kendra after entering into an agreement with the AICTE”. They include “basic structure of Indian knowledge system; modern science and Indian knowledge system; yoga and holistic health care”, followed by “essence of Indian knowledge tradition covering philosophical tradition; Indian linguistic tradition; Indian artistic tradition and case studies”.

In all, the textbook will be available to undergraduate students of engineering in institutions other than the IITs and the NITs but still covering – according to the Bhavan – “over 3,000 engineering colleges in the country”.

Although it is hard to fathom what is going on here, it is clear that the government is not allowing itself to be guided by reason. Otherwise, who would introduce a textbook that would render our graduates even more unemployable, or under-employed, than they already are? There is also a telling statement from an unnamed scholar at the Bhavan who was involved in drafting the textbook; as told to The Print: “For ages now, we have been learning how the British invented things because they ruled us for hundreds of years and wanted us to learn what they felt like. It is now high time to change those things and we hope to do that with this course”.

The words “what they felt like” indicate that the people who have enabled the drafting and introduction of this book, including elected members of Parliament, harbour a sense of disenfranchisement and now feel entitled to their due: an India made great again under the light of its ancient knowledge, as if the last 2,000 years did not happen. It also does not matter whether the facts as embodied in that knowledge can be considered at par with the methods of modern science. What matters is that the Government of India has today created an opportunity for those who were disempowered by non-Hindu forces to flourish and that they must seize it. And they have.

In other words, this is a battle for power. It is important for those trying to fight against the introduction of this textbook or whatever else to see it as such because, for example, MHRD minister Prakash Javadekar is not waiting to be told that drinking cow urine to cure cancer is pseudoscientific. It is not a communication gap; Javadekar in all likelihood is not going to drink it himself (even though he is involved in creating a platform to tell the masses that they should).

Instead, the stakeholders of this textbook are attempting to fortify a power structure that prizes the exclusion of knowledge. Knowledge is power, after all – but an epistocracy cannot replace a democracy; “ignorance doesn’t oppress in the same way that knowledge does,” to adapt the words of David Runciman. For example, the textbook repeatedly references an older text called the ‘Yantra Sarvasva’ and endeavours to establish it as a singular source of certain “facts”. And who can read this text? The upper castes.

In turn, by awarding funds and space for research to those who claim to be disseminating ancient super-awesome knowledge and shielding them from public scrutiny, the Narendra Modi government is subjecting science to power. A person who peddles a “fact” that Indians flew airplanes fuelled by donkey urine 4,000 years ago no longer need aspire to scholarly credentials; he only has to want to belong to a socio-religious grouping that wields power.

A textbook that claims India invented batteries millennia before someone in Europe did is a weapon in this movement but does not embody the movement itself. Attempts to make this textbook go away will not make future textbooks go away, and attempts to counter the government’s messaging using the language of science alone will not suffice. For example, good education is key, and our teachers, researchers, educationists and civil society are a crucial part of the resistance. But even as they complain about rising levels of mediocrity and inefficiency, perpetrated by ceaseless administrative meddling, the government does not seek to solve the problem as much as use it as an excuse to perpetrate further mediocrity and discrimination.

There was no greater proof of this than when a member of the National Steering Committee constituted by the Department of Science and Technology to “validate research on panchgavya” told The Wire in 2017, “With all-round incompetence [of the Indian scientific community], this is only to be expected. … If you had 10-12 interesting and well-thought-out good national-level R&D programmes on the table, [the ‘cowpathy’] efforts will be seen to be marginal and on the fringe. But with nothing on the table, this gains prominence from the government, which will be pushing such an agenda.”

But we do have well-thought-out national-level R&D programmes. If they are not being picked by the government, it must be forced to provide an explanation as to why, and justify all of its decisions, instead of letting it bask in the privilege of our cynicism and use the excuse of our silence to sustain its incompetence. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s textbook exists in the wider political economy of banning beef, lynching Dalits, inciting riots, silencing the media and subverting the law, and not in an isolated silo labeled ‘Science vs. Pseudoscience’. It is a call to action for academics and everyone else to protest the MHRD’s decision and – without stopping there – for everyone and the academics to vocally oppose all other moves by public institutions and officials to curtail our liberties.

It is also important for us to acknowledge this because we will have to redraft the terms of our victory accordingly. To extend the metaphor of a weapon: the battle can be won by taking away the opponent’s guns, but the war will be won only when the opponent finds its cause to be hopeless. We must fight the battles but we must also end the war.

The Wire
September 27, 2018

Political activation

… all forms of knowledge are implicated in political structures in one way or another. If the people who actually have expertise in that form of knowledge are not the ones activating it politically, then someone else is going to do it for them.

– Curtis Dozier, publisher of Pharos. Source of quote here.

Scientists communicating their work to the people is a way for them to take control of the narrative such that they can guide it the way they want it to go, they way they think it should go. But this is a small component of the larger idea of science stewardship. Without stewards – who can chaperone scientific knowledge through corridors of power as much as they can through the many streams of public dialogue – science, even if just the label, is going to be appropriated by “someone else” to be activated politically unto their ends. When the “someone else” is also bound to an enthno-nationalistic ideology, science is doomed.

I don’t want your ideas

Tommaso Dorigo published a blog post on the Science 2.0 platform, where he’s been publishing his writing, that I would have liked to read. It was about whether neural networks could help design particle detectors on accelerators of the future. This is an intriguing idea considering neural networks have been pressed into improving diagnostic and problem-solving tasks in various other fields in an effort to leapfrog over barriers to the field’s expansion. And particle physics is direly in need of such efforts given the increasing gap between theoretical and experimental results.

However, I couldn’t concentrate on Dorigo’s piece because the moment I realised that he was the author (having discovered the piece through its headline), my mind was befouled by the impression I have of him as a person – which is poor. This was the result of an interaction he had had on Twitter with astrophysicist Katherine Mack last year, in which he came across – from my POV – as an insensitive and small-minded person. I had written shortly after on the basis of this interaction that as much as we need more scientific insights, they or their brilliance should not excuse troubling behaviour on the scientist’s part.

In other words, no matter how brilliant the scientist, if he is going to joke about matters no one should be joking about and simply being juvenile in his conduct, then he should not be accommodated in academia – or in public discourse – without sufficient precautions that will prevent him from damaging the morale of his non-male colleagues and peers. I am aware that there is no way Dorigo’s unwholesome ideas can affect my life but at the same time I don’t want to consume what he publishes and so contribute to the demand for his writing (even passively). This isn’t a permanent write-off: Dorigo is yet to apologise for his words (that I know of); silent repentance is not useful for those who witnessed that very public exchange with Mack.

However, at the end of all this, there is no way for me to remove the idea of neural networks designing particle detectors from my consciousness. Plus given that ideas in science have to be attributed to those who originated them, this means I can’t explore Dorigo’s idea without reading more of Dorigo’s writing.

At this point, I am tempted to ask that publishers, distributors, aggregators and platforms – all entities that share and distribute content on various platforms and through different services – ensure that the name of the author is present and accessible in the platform/service-specific metadata. This is because more and more people are starting to have discussions about whether genius should excuse, say, misogyny and concluding that it shouldn’t. People are also becoming more conscious of whose writing they are consuming and whose they are actively avoiding for various reasons. These decisions matter, and content distributors need to assist them actively.

For example, I came upon Dorigo’s article via a Google News Alert for ‘high-energy physics’. The corresponding email alert looked like this:

screen-shot-2018-09-21-at-18-40-03

The headline, publisher’s name and the first score or so words of the article are visible in the article preview provided by Google. In the first item: the fact that it is also a press release is mentioned, but I am not sure if this is a regular feature. Although it is not immediately evident if the publisher is who it says it is, Google does not mask the URL if you hover over the link, there is only a forwarding prefix (`google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=<link>`).

I have essentially framed my argument as a contest between discovering new ideas and avoiding others. For example, by choosing to avoid Dorigo’s writing, I am also choosing to avoid discovering the arguably unique ideas that Dorigo might have – and in the long-run give up on all that knowledge. However, this is an insular counterargument because there is a lot to be learnt out there. There is no reason I should have to put up with someone like Dorigo. Should a subsequent question arise as to whether we should tolerate someone who is doing something unique while also being misogynistic, etc.: the answer is still ‘no’ because it remains that nothing should excuse bad behaviour of that kind.

Appeasement v. truth

Late last year, Facebook inducted The Weekly Standard (TWS), an American news outlet, as one of its only five fact-checkers and the sole conservative voice in the group. Earlier this week, TWS raised objections about an article published by Think Progress, a liberal news outlet, prompting the latter to claim it was being discriminated against for its ideological slant. Obviously, the event has raised a furore on Twitter, with many more liberal voices piping up in favour of Think Progress and denouncing Facebook’s attempt to appease everyone instead of aligning itself with the truth. There’s a lot going on here that I’d like to unpack.

The Think Progress headline reads: ‘Brett Kavanaugh said he would kill Roe v. Wade last week and almost no one noticed.’

First – As Think Progress has discussed, it doesn’t make sense that Facebook recruited TWS into its fact-checkers’ fold when it hadn’t been subjected to the same evaluation standards as the social platform’s four other fact-checkers (AP, Factcheck, PolitiFact and Snopes) – until you suspect Zuckerberg is indeed trying to appease both sides of the political spectrum. This doesn’t bode well for a platform that constantly aspires to be the place people get their news in nor does it bode well for publishers, who now have a disincentive to be liberal or more generally disagree with TWS.

Second – It’s possible that Think Progress has been penalised for its ideological slant here. Liberal v. conservative rivalries in the news space are increasingly becoming the norm, with some outlets pointedly aiming their guns at what their ‘opponent’ outlets are saying. That said, the headline for the original Think Progress article was, in fact, misleading and deserved to be cautioned about.

When you say a judge has “said he would kill” a law or previous judgment, you are immediately implying he intends to undo it. But this is not what Kavanaugh said. According to the Think Progress article itself, and explainers by Vox and The Conversation, Kavanaugh is opposed to the precedent set by Roe v. Wade. As an associate justice nominee to the SCOTUS, if Kavanaugh makes it to the bench, there will be a 5-4 majority to overturn Roe v. Wade. Does the Think Progress headline imply that he will vote that way? Yes. But has Kavanaugh said he will vote that way? No.

Third – Michael Stern argued on Slate that it was unfair for TWS to dock Think Progress for an opinion piece and label it as “false news” on Facebook. But opinion or not, Think Progress is guilty of misrepresenting reality in its headline. As TWS appears to have asserted, changing the headline will remove it from Facebook’s ‘beware’ bin. This is also where a point made by Brendan Nyhan, a public policy expert who contributes to Upshot NYT, is relevant: that on Facebook, most people see only the headline.

At The Wire, we have often observed that an article with a striking headline will receive a lot of engagement on Facebook for the headline alone, and with the numbers suggesting those sharing the link may not even have read the article. So the headline plays an outsized role on Facebook and Think Progress should have exercised restraint with that component of the standard article, and not have tried to hide behind nuanced analyses and hedging syntax following in the body.

Fourth – While Nyhan makes a useful point about how it is Think Progress that is really resorting to the ‘liberal v. conservative’ defence, and not TWS, I think he falters in believing that fact-checking wasn’t exercised as a form of censorship here as well as in not considering if TWS itself may have stepped over the line.

Both these concerns are tied to how Facebook handles content that makes questionable claims. For example, Think Progress has alleged that:

When an article is labeled false under Facebook’s third-party fact-checking system, groups that share that article on Facebook receives a notification informing them that the article received a “False Rating” and that “pages and websites” that share that piece “will see their overall distribution and their ability to monetize and advertise removed.” Facebook’s notification regarding our piece on Kavanaugh and Roe v. Wade effectively warned outlets not to share ThinkProgress content or risk censorship themselves.

(I’m not on Facebook and can’t check for myself.)

Separately, Nyhan shared a screenshot of a message he had received when he attempted to share the Think Progress article:

Zuckerberg has also said that content marked as “fake” or “false” will be demoted on Facebook and rendered invisible to up to 80% of all the people who could have seen it otherwise.

My takeaways from these messages are the following:

  1. Facebook doesn’t care how wrong an article is – it can be entirely wrong or it can have one wrong sentence –, it will still be graded on a single-point scale (falseness: 0/1) instead of providing users with a more meaningful assessment of the problem.
  2. If an article is marked as “fake” or “false”, it will lose 80% of its audience. If this isn’t censorship, what is?
  3. The fact-checker gets to plonk its own article in front of another on the same topic but which it has deemed unreliable. Thus, given Facebook’s apparent intent to appease all sides, including TWS among its fact-checkers runs the risk of magnifying conservative voices over liberal ones. Can we expect that Facebook will soon include a liberal voice, you know, just to please everyone?

Fifth – The essential problem with treating the political right and political left on equal footing, as much as treating the social conservative and the social liberal on equal footing, is that such an equation contains a Trojan horse that most people don’t account for: the right/conservative frequently make claims and argue from a position that is not rooted in rational beliefs and, in the US, yearn for originalist interpretations of constitutional values. As I wrote two days ago,

As such, [a realistic ‘idea of India’] is hard to come by in the media because, as Ram Guha explains, it is unglamorous and difficult to sell, even as the press is the institution responsible for the viewpoint’s day-to-day distribution and maintenance. As a result, you get partisanship more often than deliberation. … It might be useful to clarify here that such deliberation is not between leftwing and rightwing vantages but between reason and reason. Unreason has no place here, nor does its conflation with partisanship. And it is often the case that the right is aligned with pseudoscience and illogic that it confuses resistance against unreason with resistance against itself. It is frustrating not because the pedantic distinction is lost in the muddle – who cares – but because the result is often that the leftists co-opt your turf simply because you’re not right enough.

A similar endeavour to co-opt territories has happened here: because Facebook screwed up its fact-checkers’ ability to respond meaningfully to an article that was partly flawed, it gave Think Progress the ammunition it needed to claim that it had been wronged by a conservative competitor. So an effort to appease both sides – as undertaken by Facebook, for example – will remain an appeasement and will never qualify as any kind of attempt at fairness. This doesn’t negate TWS’s calling out Think Progress as much as assert that Facebook is chiefly responsible for this mess being what it is.

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Idea of a country

The short excerpt below from Patriots and Partisans by Ram Guha caught my attention because it offers a simple definition of the idea of India (at the risk of oversimplification). One may have encountered it recently in Amartya Sen’s Argumentative Indian as well but that book was too dense for me. As such, this ‘idea’ is hard to come by in the media because, as Guha explains, it is unglamorous and difficult to sell, even as the press is the institution responsible for the viewpoint’s day-to-day distribution and maintenance. As a result, you get partisanship more often than deliberation. It’s easier.

It might be useful to clarify here that such deliberation is not between leftwing and rightwing vantages but between reason and reason. Unreason has no place here, nor does its conflation with partisanship. And it is often the case that the right is aligned with pseudoscience and illogic that it confuses resistance against unreason with resistance against itself. It’s frustrating not because the pedantic distinction is lost in the muddle – who cares – but because the result is often that the leftists co-opt your turf simply because you’re not right enough.

Anyway:

The groups and individuals mentioned in the preceding paragraph are, of course, merely illustrative [Ela Bhatt, Jean Drèze, etc.]. The work that they and others like them undertake is rarely reported in the mainstream media. For, the task of reform, of incremental and evolutionary change, is as unglamorous as it is necessary. It is far easier to speak of a wholesale, structural transformation, to identify one single variable that, if acted upon, will take India up and into the straight high road to superstardom. Among the one-size-fits-all solutions on offer are those promoted by the Naxalites, whose project is to make India into a purer, that is to say more regimented, version of Communist China; by the Sangh Parivar, who assure the Hindus that if they discover their religion they will (again) rule the world; and by the free-market ideologues, who seek to make India into an even more hedonistic version of the United States of America.

Based as it is on dialogue, compromise, reciprocity and accommodation, the idea of India does not appeal to those who seek quick and total solutions to human problems. It thus does not seem to satisfy ideologues of left or right, as well as romantic populists.

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The editor, the writer and the exclusivity

Do all editors share that excoriating sensation that carves through one’s gut when one sees one’s writer writing for another publication?

Of course, “one’s writer” is unjust phrasing because writers don’t belong to editors and are free to write for whoever they please.

However, this isotropic sea of writer-editor relationships is more suitable for the writer than it is for the editor.

Editors build publications – that means responsibilities that don’t look all that beautiful under the light of day.

One such responsibility is to build exclusivity, which is the notion that in order to read writer W, you must read publication P.

If the writer is good, then the editor is implicitly required to encourage the writer to write more, to help them become better, without encouraging diversification.

For writers, however, it is more desirable to diversify, to write for more outlets so that their name is accessible to the public memory through a variety of sources.

Depending on the writer’s choice of outlets, it also means diverse audiences to speak to and diverse opportunities to access.

Most good writers share healthy relationships with the editors they regularly work with, which often leads to long-lasting friendships.

So a friendly editor might encourage a writer to diversify if he has the liberty to think beyond the needs of his publication.

I don’t know how often this is or isn’t the case, but when it is, TFW you see a writer belonging to your vision of exclusivity writing for a competitor is pure pain.

To an outsider, the exclusivity drive may seem like an unfair, even unnecessary, ideal because it acts against the interests of the writer.

Eminently, exclusivity seems opposed to nurturing a community of good writers capable of weathering risk as well as to the democratisation of journalism.

The latter is in that all people have access to all stories because all journalists write for all publications.

In fact, this would be the most efficient way, in all senses of the term, to conduct journalism as a business – as an open, social enterprise.

However, this worldview conveniently forgets that competition exists and extant journalism organisations are founded on market forces, not social good.

Exclusivity exists because competition exists: it is the conservation law born when the competition orders the system along a new symmetry.

There are two forms of exclusivity: of stories and of writers; but where one exists, the other will too, which exposes the distinction for its pedantry.

The point is you, the editor, need both forms in order to orient your organisation towards profitability; without exclusivity, you have no edge.

And of course, competition is as competition does, putting editors at odds with their writers in a proxy battle for the organisation’s conquest for new edges.

The question now is whether writers should be expected to understand all of this and act in a way that protects the editor’s interests to the extent possible.

This is because, if exclusivity is on the table, editors are also likelier to give the writers more leeway in terms of what to write and how.

One might argue that a good editor will always be able to wrangle a good story out of a writer.

However, it is not possible to understate the importance of a long-standing editor-writer relationship and what that can produce.

Perhaps journalism would be more benefited by an arrangement where all editor-writer pairs can work for all publications, instead of just writers.

This is in effect a framing of the ‘story’ as the nuclear unit of journalism instead of the storyteller, an identity that excludes the editor.

Such an arrangement would protect the interests of the editor as well as the writer, and ensure that publications can also produce better stories as a result.

Of course, this would mean more work for the editor but it could also conceivably mean more business.

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