Category: Op-eds

The spades

Donald Trump

When you criticise a person, you naturally take into account their office and assess whether you know all that you need to to come to your conclusions.

For a long time, this ‘stop and assess’ step prevented mediapersons, who generally like to be careful, from calling Donald Trump an outright liar or an incompetent bozo.

‘Stop and assess’ meant that journalists would hold back from calling a spade a spade if the spade wielded great power and influence over society, mostly in an effort to give it more credit than it actually deserved.

Matters would have had to have reached some kind of point of inflection before it would become ‘okay’ to call the American president a fool.

This delay – an offset between the people thinking him a fool and the media thinking him a fool – could fuel media distrust by giving the impression that the media isn’t going as hard as it needs to against this man.

Jay Rosen has written and tweeted about this a lot.

The delay would also more directly affect newsroom decision-making if everyone present thought the president deserved more credit by virtue of being president, and that they might not be privy to all the information needed to make rational decisions.

Persisting with this idea could in the longer run result in journalists making excuses for the president and presidential behaviour.

When this happens, shit has hit the fan because these journalists will no longer be able to feel the pulse of the people, so to speak, and could miss more significant developments while following trivial ones.

Narendra Modi

A similar concern has plagued my impression of the team Narendra Modi leads in the name of the government.

His ministers, and he himself, have been saying pseudoscientific things, often substituting scientific knowledge with traditional beliefs that over-glorify the achievements of pre-Mughal India.

At the recently concluded science/media workshop at Matscience, Sowmiya Ashok of the Indian Express said that when ministers make such claims, they should specify their sources, and that these sources should be collected in one place and displayed for all to see.

This is a good idea – if we are assuming that the ministers actually believe what they are saying.

My reluctance here is not about calling a spade a spade but about calling a non-spade a non-spade.

(a) If the ministers actually believe what they are saying, they are misguided, and I have no compunctions about calling them misguided.

(b) However, what if the ministers don’t actually believe what they are saying but (i) are continuing to do so in an effort to misdirect the public and (ii) are participating in a strange FFA game where the person who makes the most casteist/classist statement promoting Hindutva superiority can draw the attention of the prime minister while feeding the supporters of his sponsor, the RSS, at the same time?

Both (a) and (b) are hypotheses that can explain the string of stupid statements by ministers and, on the downside, both (a) and (b) are yet to be falsifiable.

However, (b) has a slight edge in that it can be checked if ministers make pseudoscientific claims when there is also one other controversial issue in the media that they would like no one to focus on, a.k.a. misdirection.

Trump recently did this when he wanted the media to spend its time and energy looking up (nonexistent) discrimination against white farmers in South Africa and not focus on Michael Cohen’s volte-face against him.

(I acknowledge that (a) and (b) are not entirely mutually exclusive but they could be in terms of their underlying intentions.)

Towards supporting (b), I posit that ministers will not want to collate their sources and make it available at one location because it beats the purpose of (ii).

Yuval Noah Harari

Unlike with Modi and Trump, or perhaps more illustratively, where the ‘stop and assess’ step has been surmounted with great confidence has been in reviews of the books of Yuval Noah Harari.

Of course, Harari is no public leader like Modi or Trump, and the derision towards his books may have been incentivised by their corresponding valorisation by the Silicon Valley types.

Nonetheless it has been heartening to read laborious assessments online about Harari’s thematic reluctance to engage deeply with the subjects of his ‘analysis’.

The same is also true of the words of Steven Pinker, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Richard Dawkins, Eric Lander, Devdutt Pattanaik,

We journalists are comfortable calling these men out but give them more power and it is as if some quantum field is born that skews our bearings.

I was prompted to think of Harari, and others like him, because of this review in particular, which is of his latest book. Excerpt (edited to be brief):

So it continues, great swathes of padding followed by dinner-party observations of crushing banality. The chapters cover some big subjects – war, terrorism, nationalism, God – but since most average about fifteen pages, they fall almost comically short of providing the ‘dazzling’ insights promised on the book’s cover. One sentence literally reads, ‘Humans have bodies.’ Amazing. ‘European civilisation is anything Europeans make of it.’ Profound. Where terrorism is concerned, ‘we just cannot prepare for every eventuality’. Dazzling.

On and on it goes. ‘With a single exception, all flags are rectangular pieces of cloth.’ Well I never. ‘A robot army would probably have strangled the French Revolution in its cradle in 1789.’ There’s a good Doctor Who story in that. ‘If the USA had had killer robots in the Vietnam War, the My Lai massacre might have been prevented.’ Is this Yuval Noah Harari or Alan Partridge?

… In reality, Harari’s political observations are fantastically bland. He likes equality, he thinks we should be humble, he thinks we should reach across national boundaries, he thinks that sometimes democracy gets it wrong – oh, I can barely bring myself to write this stuff down. Does he really believe that President Erdoğan will be heartened to learn that we ought to try to ‘make the world a little bit better’? Can he really believe that all this is likely to bring a smile to Vladimir Putin’s face? The truth is that Harari’s book is far more likely to send him to sleep.

‘Work from home’ is about culture, not economics

Working from home (WFH) is not for everyone or for every company. It works mostly when individual employees of an organisation don’t need to work together often, or are embedded in workflows where tasks move quickly from one stage to the next. On a personal level, WFH isn’t feasible if you lack self-discipline and/or need the presence of your colleagues people around you to keep you from feeling isolated from company matters or simply, and more distressingly, lonely.

I’ve been employed with The Wire for 38 months now, and have worked from home for 34 of those. As a higher-up editor in the organisation who almost never works with a local team of reporters, I’m constantly looking for productivity paradigms, and hacks, that will keep me going as well as at the top of my game despite being removed from decision-making at HQ. In this context, I recently stumbled upon a seemingly influential study published in 2014 about how WFH can improve employee productivity by leaps and bounds.

I’ve heard a few arguments over the years from various proponents of WFH who cite studies like this to make their point: that there is empirical evidence from the ‘wild’ to show that WFH doesn’t just work but in fact improves employee performance and company prospects. As much as I want WFH to be a thing among organisations with larger workforces (50+ people) and with HQs located in metropolitan cities or megalopolises, I’ve noted with disappointment that most people eager to forward this paradigm often forget cultural impediments to implementing it.

IMO, a decision about allowing regular WFH options is predominantly cultural, particularly in ways that econometric or parametric tests in general can’t capture. For example, many organisations allow people to work from home in exceptional circumstances not because their management is old school but because it needs to be: a large fraction of the urban Indian workforce is not used to being able to work that way.

One big reason this is the case is that “going to office” is part of the traditional mindset of middle-class and lower-upper-class workers. Outside of entrepreneurial centres like Bangalore and smaller pockets of other Indian tier I cities, it’s hard to find people who even want to do this. For example, in my own home, my folks took over 18 months to believe my job was important for The Wire and that WFH was a legitimate way of doing it. The practice is certainly becoming more common but it’s not that common yet in the country.

(A subset reason is that many, if not most, offices in India are better equipped than their employees’ homes are. It’s sort of like the midday meal scheme but in a corporate context. On a related note, you’ll notice that most stock photos depicting a WFH environment show Macbooks on a clean, white table. Where’s the dust da?)

Second, the participants of the influential study cited above were all call-centre employees. This is important because call centres typically have a unique type of office (if it can be called an ‘office’ at all). Its personnel all work individually, not collaboratively, and prize – as the study’s paper notes – a quieter working environment. So the touted “9.2% minutes more per shift” and the “13% performance increase” are both results of employees moving from louder to quieter environments and so answer phone calls better, faster.

To me, this is not a characteristic feature of working from home at all. The study is simply about the effects of the removal of an impediment for employees of an idiosyncratic sector of employment. I suspect the experiment’s effects can be recreated without instituting WFH and simply making their Shanghai office quieter. As Jerry Useem wrote in The Atlantic:

Don’t send call-center workers home, … encourage them to spend more time together in the break room, where they can swap tricks of the trade.

Of course, one could argue that another factor working in WFH’s favour is that the employees are saved the commute – especially in larger cities where the business/commercial district is located in the centre, where costs of living are absolutely prohibitive, and the more affordable residential district is to be found the farther you move away from that centre. Delhi is an obvious example: The Wire HQ is located five minutes from Connaught Place whereas the bulk of its employees are housed in Mayur Vihar or beyond in the east and Lajpat Nagar or beyond in the south – both areas at least 12 km away.

This would be legit except I personally won’t buy into it because I think it’s a failure of urban planning that people have to commute so much, drawing worse lines between their professional and personal lives as well as segregating their daily lives into distinct, monotonous units with only the pursuit of higher efficiency at its soul. I say “worse” instead of “starker” because the line is disappearing in some places where it shouldn’t, such as in the form of carrying a fragment of your workplace on your smartphone, wherever you go, leading employers to assume employees are always available and employees to assume they ought to be always available.

The glamourisation of productivity is everywhere. Credit: Carl Heyerdahl/ Unsplash
The glamourisation of productivity is everywhere. Credit: Carl Heyerdahl/ Unsplash

The attitude of Silicon Valley technology towards free time has been tendentiously wolfish, so much that self-discipline has become one of the greater and rarer virtues of our time. Where workplace laws won’t go, “work anywhere” has almost always been interpreted to mean “work everywhere”. So for a WFH policy to be meaningful, you need people in the office ready to understand the difference instead of gleefully rearing for the leap. This is why I think Slack should shutter its mobile apps or, if not, equip them with features that will allow employees to truly disconnect, beyond the recurring question of self-discipline.

(Remember Fiverr’s ‘do more or die trying’ ad campaign extolling the gig economy?)

Moreover, modern cities are almost exclusively designed to be economic engines constantly looking for solutions to problems instead of being oriented towards fostering healthy communities and communitarian aspirations. By going for the urban sprawl and, as Fouad Khan calls it, the consequential suburban alienation, the modern city organically gives rise to gender bias and class discrimination. From Khan’s essay (for Nautilus):

Like the physical boundaries it draws between commercial and residential zones, sprawl enforces the boundaries set by our roles in society. Specific times must be dedicated to specific activities such as picking up kids from school or doing groceries. The organic social interaction that a city is supposed to facilitate goes missing. Even when time is allocated for socialization as a dedicated activity, it takes the character of a chore like everything else on the calendar. When activities are spatially segregated we find our identities splitting among our various roles, never quite able to bring all of ourselves to anything. Alienation rises. Just as physical access is more restricted for women in these cities than men, the role imposition is also stricter.

(And before you know it, ‘meet spaces’ are going to become commoditised: “For $50 an hour, meet random people in a quiet, safe environment at Watr Coolr. Coffee and biscuits extra.”)

Finally, WFH is most effective when the tools necessary to ensure employees lose as little as possible as they shift out of the office and into their personal workspace are efficacious. And such efficacy is a product of excellent UI/UX, lower communication latency, affordability, access to high-quality supporting infrastructure, etc. But most important is the willingness of those within the office to use the same tools to help keep you, and others like you, in the loop.

For example, a supervisor might be okay with Skyping a WFH employee or two WFH employees might be okay with running things on WhatsApp between each other. But that’s not to say other colleagues will. I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to because using Skype is not the same thing as booting Skype. There’s a cognitive cost to booting Skype: you have to stop thinking about whatever you’re thinking about, think about Skype and then decide to use Skype. This cost only escalates the more such tasks you perform.

This is why I imagine few others would use tech when they don’t have to, thus making it harder for communication-that’s-not-about-work to survive, in effect preserving the misguided prioritisation of gainful productivity above all else. On the other hand, as Useem writes,

The power of presence has no simple explanation. It might be a manifestation of the “mere-exposure effect”: We tend to gravitate toward what’s familiar; we like people whose faces we see, even just in passing. Or maybe it’s the specific geometry of such encounters. The cost of getting someone’s attention at the coffee machine is low—you know they’re available, because they’re getting coffee—and if, mid-conversation, you see that the other person has no idea what you’re talking about, you automatically adjust.

So yeah, WFH works for some people. But it’s not a good idea to expect a company to make a decision about standardising WFH options for all employees based on empirical analyses.

Featured image credit: Ashim D’Silva/Unsplash.

Sexual harassment, etc.

The name of Sadanand Menon had found mention in Raya Sarkar’s list last year. Since then, a journalist and former student of the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) had published an article in The News Minute about how a noted scholar and culture critic had sexually harassed her. Though she hadn’t mentioned Menon by name at the time, his identity was revealed recently when the journalist’s complaint to the ICC at the ACJ, where Menon teaches, was dismissed.

Sashi Kumar, the college’s director, had said the accusation couldn’t be examined by college authorities because the alleged incident had happened after the journalist had graduated from ACJ and outside the ACJ campus. However, she, her supporters and many allies of the #metoo movement in India have been urging ACJ to conduct an investigation on moral grounds, saying, among other things, that it’s the college’s responsibility to provide a safe space for its students.

Earlier this week, a group of teachers, artists, activists and other people signed and released a letter in the public domain refuting allegations of moral corruption after theatre artistes had convened in Spaces, a space for non-mainstream artistic and cultural events maintained by Menon in Chennai, to discuss redressal mechanisms after one of their peers had been accused of sexual harassment.

The question of whether we can, or should, separate the artist from his art has always bothered me. After witnessing a brief but striking exchange on Twitter between astrophysicist Katie Mack and theoretical physicist Tommaso Dorigo, I was able to decide that the production and consumption of art, or science, enabled misogynist attitudes to survive in creative industries; that good art shouldn’t be an excuse to put up with unprincipled people.

Of course, this places us on a slippery slope. We may have decided to shun the work of people we know are morally corrupt; what about those creators whose work we enjoy but about whose inner lives we know very little? Second: everyone is flawed; does this mean we just don’t consume any art anymore?

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Xan Brooks in The Guardian, November 2017:

I’d love to follow [Peggy] Drexler’s advice. Keep the art clean and pure, exempt from the actions of its creator. I’m just not convinced it quite works in practice. If we accept that “bad” (subjective moral judgment) people can create “good” (subjective aesthetic judgment) art, then it follows that amoral artists can hold the world to a higher moral standard than they follow themselves. But isn’t art also an extension of the artist’s inner self? How does one begin separating the two? “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” as Yeats put it – though ought we still to quote Yeats, what with all that fascist-sympathising? If so, here’s another: “Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” …

For years I thrilled to the notion of the wild, outlaw artist. I thought of great, personal film-making as something torn from the heart, or a form of self-therapy. It was the process by which flawed, stumbling individuals could harness their demons and spin their basest matter into gold. That sounds wonderfully romantic. It may also be bullshit. Because what if it’s not that at all? How about, instead of harnessing the demons, the artistic process is a means of feeding the demons, of indulging them? Then the film is a fig leaf; even a by-product of abuse.

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Stray thought: It feels so much harder to navigate towards a solution in the non-technical sciences. Can think of three reasons: the lack of a fixed framework in which to ‘solve’ problems, the sheer number of ‘solutions’ that are required according to context, and the possibility that the tendency towards ‘solution’ as such might be unique to the technical sciences. And I think getting used to the last of the three reasons is where the pain lies.

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Of all places, I found on Scott Aaronson’s blog the perfect articulation of some feelings related to my sexual identity, particularly relating to how males privileged by their nerdiness are not entirely without suffering. Specifically, it’s comment #171 below a blog post published in 2014, by Aaronson himself. Excerpt:

Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison. And furthermore, that the people who did these things to me would somehow be morally right to do them—even if I couldn’t understand how.

You can call that my personal psychological problem if you want, but it was strongly reinforced by everything I picked up from my environment: to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that “might be” sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.

Contrary to what many people claimed, I do not mean to suggest here that anti-harassment workshops or reading feminist literature were the sole or even primary cause of my problems. They were certainly factors, but I mentioned them to illustrate a much broader issue, which was the clash between my inborn personality and the social norms of the modern world—norms that require males to make romantic and sexual advances, but then give them no way to do so without running the risk of being ‘bad people.’ Of course these norms will be the more paralyzing, the more one cares about not being a ‘bad person.’

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Of course, such suffering does not legitimise the privilege men like me have because it doesn’t live and die in our teenage years. It’s something we need to know is there, is all; beyond that, there’s still the patriarchy to face down. Laurie Penny spelled it out best in the New Statesman: that nerdy boys get out of their suffering into a world that respects them; nerdy girls get out of their suffering into a world of sexism. Feminism is a stand against every step of this painful journey, not just the one that keeps nerdy boys nervous about what to do next.

Heterosexuality is fucked up right now because whilst we’ve taken steps towards respecting women as autonomous agents, we can’t quite let the old rules go. We have an expectation for, a craving for of a sexual freedom that our rhetoric, our rituals and our sexual socialisation have not prepared us for. And unfortunately for men, they have largely been socialised – yes, even the feminist-identified ones – to see women as less than fully human. Men, particularly nerdy men, are socialised to blame women – usually their peers and/or the women they find sexually desirable for the trauma and shame they experienced growing up. If only women had given them a chance, if only women had taken pity, if only done the one thing they had spent their own formative years been shamed and harassed and tormented into not doing. If only they had said yes, or made an approach.

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Yes, a rubric about ‘what to do’ alongside ‘what not to do’ would be fantastic, but I think we need to figure that shit out for ourselves. Simultaneously, everyone needs to keep telling the world stories of what we – men, women and others – did and didn’t do to help it cope.

https://twitter.com/AWDubreuil/status/470362825529888768

Featured image credit: Alice Donovan Rouse/Unsplash.

Cognitive flexibility and nationalism

There’s something off about a new study that attempts to map the cognitive flexibility of people to their ideological preferences. To quote from the study’s ‘Significance’ section:

We found that individuals with strongly nationalistic attitudes tend to process information in a more categorical manner, even when tested on neutral cognitive tasks that are unrelated to their political beliefs. The relationship between these psychological characteristics and strong nationalistic attitudes was mediated by a tendency to support authoritarian, nationalistic, conservative, and system-justifying ideologies.

The intensity and extent of ideological divisions are being deepened across the world. This study examined over 300 citizens of the UK for “whether strict categorisation of stimuli and rules in objective cognitive tasks would be evident in strongly nationalistic individuals” – a nationalism indicated, for example, by these individuals being pro-Brexit. The results of the study could ostensibly apply to how certain groups around the world think: the extreme right in the US, the neo-Nazis in Germany, the National Front in France and the so-called “bhakts” in India.

These ideological divisions, imagined in the form of political polarisation, are bad enough as it is without people on one side of the aisle being able to accuse those on the other side of having “low cognitive flexibility”. The nuance can be worded as prosaically as the neuroscientists would prefer but this won’t – can’t – stop the less-nationalistic from accusing the more-nationalistic of simply being stupid, now with a purported scientific basis.

This is why I believe something has to be off about the study. The people on the right, as it were on the political spectrum, are not stupid. They’re smart just the way those of us on the left imagine ourselves to be. Now, one defence of the study may be that it attempts to map a hallmark feature of the global political right, sort of a rampant anti-intellectualism and irrationality, to its neurological underpinnings – but nationalism is more than its endorsement of traditions or traditional values.

While the outcomes of many socio-political actions may seem to promote irrational beliefs and practices, these actions are carefully engineered by very smart people and executed to perfection. One example that comes immediately to mind is the Bharatiya Janata Party’s social media strategy. Another is the resounding victory it achieved in the Lok Sabha and Uttar Pradesh elections in 2014 and 2017, resp.

(Both these enterprises are well-documented in the form of books – this and this, e.g. – and in fact make the less-nationalistic look quite silly for its sluggish group response. Would that say something about “our” cognitive abilities as well?)

Finally, a note about labels. Following astronomy research for half a decade has taught me that when stars explode, there is a tremendous variety of things that happen, such that it’s impossible for a five-century-old human enterprise to possibly identify, label, and categorise all of them within a small, finite group of processes. Similarly, trying to associate the symptoms of one infinite set (human socio-politics) with a finite-but-large set (human neurology) can be fraught with many mistakes.

Remembrance: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’

Since news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke last month, many of us have expressed apprehension – often on Facebook itself – that the social networking platform has transformed since its juvenile beginnings into an ugly monster.

Such moral panic is flawed and we ought to know that by now. After all, it’s been 50 years since 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, and a 100 since Frankenstein – both cultural assets that have withstood the proverbial test of time only because they managed to strike some deep, mostly unknown chord about the human condition, a note that continues to resonate with the passions of a world that likes to believe it has disrupted the course of history itself.

Gary Greenberg, a mental health professional and author, recently wrote that the similarities between Viktor Frankenstein’s monster and Facebook were unmistakable except on one count: the absence of a conscience was a bug in the monster, and remains a feature in Facebook. As a result, he wrote, “an invention whose genius lies in its programmed inability to sort the true from the false, opinion from fact, evil from good … is bound to be a remorseless, lumbering beast, one that does nothing other than … aggregate and distribute, and then to stand back and collect the fees.”

However, it is 2001‘s HAL 9000 that continues to be an allegory of choice in many ways, not least because it’s an artificial intelligence the likes of which we’re yet to confront in 2018 but have learnt to constantly anticipate. In the film, HAL serves as the onboard computer for an interplanetary spaceship carrying a crew of astronauts to a point near Jupiter, where a mysterious black monolith of alien origin has been spotted. Only HAL knows the real nature of the mission, which in Kafkaesque fashion is never revealed.

Within the logic-rules-all-until-it-doesn’t narrative canon that science fiction writers have abused for decades, HAL is not remarkable. But take him out into space, make sure he knows more than the humans he’s guiding and give him the ability to physically interfere in people’s lives – and you have not a villain waylaid by complicated Boolean algebra but a reflection of human hubris.

2001 was the cosmic extrapolation of Kubrick’s previous production, the madcap romp Dr Strangelove. While the two films differ significantly in the levels of moroseness on display as humankind confronts a threat to its existence, they’re both meditations on how humanity often leads itself towards disaster while believing it’s fixing itself and the world. In fact, in both films, the threat was weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Kubrick intended for the Star Child in 2001‘s closing scenes to unleash nuclear holocaust on Earth – but he changed his mind later and chose to keep the ending open.

This is where HAL has been able to step in, in our public consciousness, as a caution against our over-optimism towards artificial intelligence and reminding us that WMDs can take different forms. Using the tools and methods of ‘Big Data’ and machine learning, machines have defeated human players at chess and go, solved problems in computer science and helped diagnose some diseases better. There is a long way to go for HAL-like artificial general intelligence, assuming that is even possible.

But in the meantime, we come across examples every week that these machines are nothing like what popular science fiction has taught us to expect. We have found that their algorithms often inherit the biases of their makers, and that their makers often don’t realise this until the issue is called out.

According to (the modified) Tesler’s theorem, “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet”. When overlaid on optimism of the Silicon Valley variety, AI in our imagination suddenly becomes able to do what we have never been able to ourselves, even as we assume humans will still be in control. We forget that for AI to be truly AI, its intelligence should be indistinguishable from that of a human’s – a.k.a. the Turing test. In this situation, why do we expect AI to behave differently than we do?

We shouldn’t, and this is what HAL teaches us. His iconic descent into madness in 2001 reminds us that AI can go wonderfully right but it’s likelier to go wonderfully wrong if only because of the outcomes that we are not, and have never been, anticipating as a species. In fact, it has been argued that HAL never went mad but only appeared to do so because of the untenability of human expectations.

This is also what makes 2001 all the more memorable: its refusal to abandon the human perspective – noted for its amusing tendency to be tripped up by human will and agency – even as Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke looked towards the stars for humankind’s salvation.

In the film’s opening scenes, a bunch of apes briefly interacts with a monolith just like the one near Jupiter and quickly develops the ability to use commonplace objects as tools and weapons. The rest is history, so the story suddenly jumps four million years ahead and then 18 months more. As the Tool song goes, “Silly monkeys, give them thumbs, they make a club and beat their brother down.”

In much the same way, HAL recalls the origins of mainstream AI research as it happened in the late 1950s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston. At the time, the linguist and not-yet-activist Noam Chomsky had reimagined the inner workings of the human brain as those of a computer (specifically, as a “Language Acquisition Device”). According to anthropologist Chris Knight, this ‘act’ inspiredcognitive scientist Marvin Minsky to wonder if the mind, in the form of software, could be separated from the body, the hardware.

Minsky would later say, “The most important thing about each person is the data, and the programs in the data that are in the brain”. This is chillingly evocative of what Facebook has achieved in 2018: to paraphrase Greenberg, it has enabled data-driven politics by digitising and monetising “a trove of intimate detail about billions of people”.

Minsky founded the AI Lab at MIT in 1959. Less than a decade later, he joined the production team of 2001 as a consultant to design and execute the character called HAL. As much as we’re fond of celebrating the prophetic power of 2001, perhaps the film was able to herald the 21st century as well as it has because we inherited it from many of the men who shaped the 20th, and Kubrick and Clarke simply mapped their visions onto the stars.

Finding trash in the dumpster

Just as there’s no merit in writing a piece that is confused and incomplete, there’s no merit in digging through a dumpster and complaining that there’s trash. However, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt when The Quint publishes something as ass-backwards as this article, titled ‘SpaceX or ISRO, Who’s Winning the Race to Space?’, in a time when finally, at long fucking last, people are beginning to wake up to the idea that ISRO’s and SpaceX’s responsibilities are just different.

In fact, the author of this article seems (temporarily) aware of this distinction, writing, “You have to understand, both ISRO and SpaceX are different entities with different resources at their disposal and ultimately different goals”, even as he makes the comparison anyway. This is immature, irresponsible journalism (if that), worse than the Sisyphean he-said-she-said variety if only because the ‘he’ in this case is the author himself.

But more importantly, against the backdrop of the I&B ministry’s guidelines on combating fake news that were released, and then retracted, earlier today, I briefly wondered whether this Quint piece could be considered fake news. A friend quickly disabused me of the idea by pointing out that this isn’t exactly news, doesn’t contain factual mistakes and doesn’t seem to have malicious intent. All valid points. However, I’m still not sure I agree… My reasons:

1. News is information that is new, contemporary and in the public interest. While the last two parameters can be defined somewhat objectively, novelty can and is frequently subjective. Often, it also extends to certain demographic groups within a population, such as readers of the 18-24 age group, for whom a bit of information that’s old for others is new.

2. The article doesn’t contain factual mistakes but the relationships the author defines between various facts are wrong and untrue. There are also assumptions made in the article (dissected below) that make the author sound stupid more than anything else. One does have the freedom of expression but journalists and publishers also have a responsibility to be… well, responsible.

3. You can make rational decisions only when you know everything there is to know apropos said decisions. So when you deliberately ignore certain details that would render an argument meaningless just so you can make the argument yourself, that’s malice. Especially when you then click the ‘publish’ button and watch as a clump of irrational clutch of sememes reaches 19,000 people in 18 hours.

So to me, this article is fake news.

Here’s another locus: according to Dictionary.com, fake news is

false news stories, often of a sensational nature, created to be widely shared online for the purpose of generating ad revenue via web traffic or discrediting a public figure, political movement, company, etc.

The Quint article is sensational. It claims ISRO and SpaceX can’t be compared but goes on to make the comparison anyway. Why? Traffic, visibility and revenue (through ads on The Quint‘s pages). It’s textual faff that wastes the reader’s time, forces others to spend time correcting the irrational beliefs that will take root in people’s minds as a result of reading the article, and it’s just asinine of The Quint to lend itself as a platform for such endeavours. It’s the sort of thing we frequently blame the male protagonists in Indian films for: spending 150 minutes realising his mistakes.

But again, I do apologise for whining that there’s trash in the dumpster. (Aside: A recent headline in Esquire had just the term for journalism-done-bad – ‘trash avalanche’.)

§

I must dissect the article. It’s an addiction!

India’s premier space agency Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has built a reputation for launching rockets into space at very convenient prices. The consequent effect?

A lot of customers from around the world have come flocking to avail India’s economical rocket-launching services and this has helped the country make some extra bucks from its space exploration program.

Extra bucks, eh?

However, it’s a pretty competitive space.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has had a decent run in the past couple of days and the recent successful launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket has paved the way for launching heavy satellites into space.

You don’t say…

SpaceX and ISRO are competitors of sorts in the business of commercial satellite launches. The question is, how big of a threat is SpaceX to India’s space agency?

Wrong + 🚩

Okay, first some facts.

That’s kind of you.

ISRO is an experienced campaigner in the field of space exploration as it’s been launching rockets into space since as early as 1975. From sending India’s first satellite into space (Aryabhata), to successfully launching some of the most historic missions like Chandrayaan-1 (2008) and Mangalyaan (2013), ISRO has done it all.

You should check out some of the stuff NASA, JAXA and ESA have done. ISRO really hasn’t done it all – and neither have NASA, JAXA and ESA.

ISRO has carried out a total of 96 spacecraft missions, which involve 66 launch missions.

Apart from the above, it has various other goals, ranging from maintaining the communication satellite constellation around the Earth to sending manned missions into space. Not easy by any means.

Not easy to have goals? Have you seen the todo lists of most people?

Meanwhile, SpaceX is the new kid on the block and really isn’t a big space exploration agency (at least not as big as ISRO).

That’s a comparison 🚩

SpaceX was founded in 2002 by maverick entrepreneur Elon Musk with an aim to provide economically efficient ways to launch satellites and also colonise Mars!
Overall, since SpaceX’s first mission in June, 2010, rockets from the Falcon 9 family have been launched 51 times, out of which 49 have been successful. That’s a 96 percent success rate!

So, in terms of experience, SpaceX still has some catching up to do. But in terms of success rate, it’s tough to beat at 96 percent.

Do you know that if I launch one rocket successfully, I’ll have a success rate of 100%?

SpaceX is a privately-owned enterprise and is funded by big companies like Google and Fidelity. According to a Forbes, SpaceX is valued at more than $20 billion (Rs 13.035 crore) as of December 2017.

That’s Rs 1.3 lakh crore, not Rs 13.035 crore.

ISRO on the other hand is a state-owned entity and is run and controlled by the Government of India. Each year, the agency is allocated a certain part of the nation’s budget. For the year 2018-19, the Centre has allocated Rs 8,936 crore to the space organisation.

There is also a big difference in terms of cost per mission. For example, the Falcon 9 launch vehicle’s cost per launch comes up to $62 million, while ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) costs roughly $15 million per launch.

Why are you comparing the mission costs of one rocket that can carry 10,000+ kg to the LEO to a rocket that can carry 3,800 kg to the LEO? Obviously the former is going to be costlier!

The size of the payloads are different as the Falcon 9 carries much heavier bulk than India’s rockets.

Dear author: please mention that this fact renders the comparison in your previous line meaningless. At least refrain from using terms like “big difference”.

Currently, India makes very less on commercial missions as most of them carry small or nano-satellites. Between 2013 and 2015, ISRO charged an average of $3 million per satellite. That’s peanuts compared to a SpaceX launch, which costs $60 million.

First: Antrix, not ISRO, charges $3 million per satellite. Second: By not discussing payload mass and orbital injection specifications, he’s withholding information that will make this “peanuts” juxtaposition illogical. Third: ISRO and SpaceX operate out of different economies – a point incumbent ISRO chairman K. Sivan has emphasised – leading to different costing (e.g. have you considered labour cost?). Finally, source of data?

According to a 2016 report, India’s premier space agency earned a revenue of around Rs 230 crore through commercial launch services, which is about 0.6 percent of the global launch services market.

India is still to make big ‘moolah’ from their launches as small satellites don’t pull in a lot of money as compared to bigger ones.

That last bit – does the Department of Space know you’re feeling this way? Because if they did, they might not go ahead with building the Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV). So that’s another 🚩

Despite the fact that ISRO is considered competition for Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the business of commercial satellite launches,

Although this claim is bandied about in the press, I doubt it’s true given the differences in payload capacities, costs to space and launch frequencies of the PSLV/GSLV and the Falcon 9.

he doesn’t shy away from acknowledging how he is “impressed” by India’s frugal methods of conducting successful launch missions.

Is this a big deal? Or are you awed that India’s efforts are being lauded by a white man of the west?

Last year in February, India launched 104 satellites into space using a single rocket, which really caught Musk’s attention. This is a world record that India holds till date.

If that’s not impressive enough, India also launched it’s Mars probe (Mangalyaan) in 2014 which cost less than what it cost to make the Hollywood movie “The Martian”. Ironical?

It’s not “impressive enough”. It’s not ironic.

You have to understand, both ISRO and SpaceX are different entities with different resources at their disposal and ultimately different goals. But again, if Musk is impressed, it means ISRO has hit it out of the park.

But if Musk hadn’t been impressed, then ISRO would’ve continued to be a failure in your eyes, of course.

I am not going to pick a winner because of a lot of reasons. One of them is that I like both of them.

ISRO and SpaceX must both be so relieved.

SpaceX is a 15-year-old company, which has made heavy-lift reusable launch vehicle, while ISRO is a 40-year-old organisation making inroads into the medium-lift category; Not to mention it also has a billion other things to take care of (including working on reusable rockets).

Since the objective of both these organisations is to make frugal space missions possible, it’s no doubt that ISRO has the lead in this race.

How exactly? 🤔 Also, if we shouldn’t be comparing ISRO and SpaceX, how’re they in the same race?

Yes, there is a lot that SpaceX can learn from what India has achieved till now, but that can work both ways, considering the technology SpaceX is using is much more advanced. But in the end one cannot deny the fact that SpaceX is all about launching rockets and getting them back to Earth in one piece, not making satellites.

First temple, then launchpad?

ISRO chairman K. Sivan is free to worship and worship any deity he bloody well wants ∞; that’s his right. But it’s not entirely comforting when you think back about all the chairpersons ISRO has had – all men, all Hindus – who have made offerings at temples to “take ISRO to new heights” or similar.

Article 25 of the Indian Constitution guarantees the people’s right to any religion but Article 51AH, which asks people to cultivate a scientific temper, calls into question why those who are leaders of a national space industry have reason to leave anything about the missions they are responsible for in the hands of an “almighty” being.

Another thing that bothers me about ISRO’s supplicants-in-chief is also something that bothers me about the day-to-day practice of theism: attributing successes to the work of a deity instead of to the hard work and convictions of regular, whether or not particularly skilled, people (and elements of the natural universe). In the same vein, every time Sivan, K. Radhakrishnan, G. Madhavan Nair or K. Kasturirangan visited a temple – and all of them have – one felt as if ‘their ISRO’ itself was subject to the benevolence of a deity.

… and what has thus far only been upper-caste Hindu deities, an indictment of the lack of diversity at ISRO, in turn an echo of the lack of diversity within the space sector. Call me a cynic but I’m sure the RSS and its ilk would have given a more outrageous fuck had the chairperson been Muslim/Christian or of a lower caste. And I’m sure sections of the media would’ve lapped this up with extortionate delight.

But what irks me most of all is that these men are leaders. Millions of people look up to them, whether for guidance or for inspiration. Many of them are children – and a part of what they’re hearing is that some things at ISRO work out only if a god deigns it.

Irrespective of their being public figures, ISRO’s chairpersons are, “subject to public order, morality and health and to the other provisions of this Part” … “equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion” ∞. But because they are also public figures, which allows me to be concerned about what they’re up to, ISRO’s leaders who pay temple visits to “pray for ISRO” also have a duty to openly clarify the following:

  1. Why they are praying “for ISRO”
  2. If smart, hard and/or ethical work is a component of ISRO’s success
  3. Whether they or their beliefs have been the source of any discomfort within the organisation…

… every time they make a temple visit and then speak to the press.

Public displays of Hinduism, signalling ISRO as an organisation benefiting from Hindu benevolence, and shifting the focus away from hard scientific labour to the blessing of gods – all of these are messages with potential for malevolence, and public figures like ISRO chiefs have been legitimising them by communicating them.

Like I said before, Sivan can follow any religion he bloody well wants, but in a politico-religious climate like ours, people – whether public figures or not – must interrogate the meaning of various forms of public participation more before engaging with them. They need to be smarter about what they say and how they act in public. It’s not rocket science.

Featured image source: YouTube.

Looking for gemstones in the gutter

Just the other day, I’d mentioned to a friend that Steven Pinker was one of those rare people whose ideas couldn’t be appreciated by proxy, such as through the opinions of other authority figures, but had to be processed individually. This is because Pinker has found as much support as he has detraction – from Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True on the one hand to P.Z. Myers’s Pharyngula on the other. As an aspiring rationalist, it’s hard for me to place Pinker on the genius-lunatic circle because it’s hard to see how his own ideas are self-consistent, or how all of his ideas sit on a common plane of reason.

A 2013 article Pinker wrote in The New Republic only added to this dilemma. The article argued that science was not an enemy of the humanities, with Pinker trying to denounce whatever he thought others thought “scientism” stood for. He argued that ‘scientism’ was not the idea that “everything is about science”, rather a commitment to two ideals: intelligibility and that “the acquisition of knowledge is hard”. This is a reasonable elucidation necessary to redefine the role and place of science in today’s jingoistic societies.

However, Pinker manages to mangle the rest of the article with what I hope (but can’t really believe to be) was pure carelessness – even though this is also difficult to believe because we all seem to have this fixation at the back of our minds that Pinker is a smart man. He manages to define everything he thinks is in this world worth defining from the POV of natural science alone. Consider these lines:

Though the scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the possibilities. By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality. The scientific refutation of the theory of vengeful gods and occult forces undermines practices such as human sacrifice, witch hunts, faith healing, trial by ordeal, and the persecution of heretics.

Pinker has completely left out subjects like sociology and anthropology in his definition of the world and the values its people harbour. Though he acknowledges that “scientific facts don’t by themselves dictate values”, he’s also pompous enough to claim scientific reasoning alone has undermined human sacrifice, witch hunts, etc. Then why is it that senior ISRO officials, who are well-educated rocket scientists, offer rocket models at temples before upcoming launches? Why is it that IT employees who migrate from Chennai and Bangalore to California still believe that the caste system is an idea worth respecting?

He continues:

The facts of science, by exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, force us to take responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species, and our planet.

This seems to make logical sense… until you pause and wonder if that’s how people actually think. Did we decide to take control of our own welfare because “the laws governing the universe lack purpose”? Of course not. I’m actually tempted to argue that the laws governing the universe have been stripped of the ability to govern anthropic matters because we decided to take control of our welfare.

In fact, Pinker imputes the humanities and social sciences with intentions most institutions that study them likely don’t have. He also appropriates the ideas of pre-18th-century thinkers into the fold of science when it would’ve been wrong to do so: Hume, Leibniz and Kant (to pick only those philosophers whose work I’m familiar with) were not scientists. In fact, somehow, the one person who would’ve been useful to appropriate for the purposes of Pinker’s argument was left out: Roger Bacon. Then, deeper into the piece, there’s this:

The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness. And they have failed to define a progressive agenda. Several university presidents and provosts have lamented to me that when a scientist comes into their office, it’s to announce some exciting new research opportunity and demand the resources to pursue it. When a humanities scholar drops by, it’s to plead for respect for the way things have always been done.

With sweeping statements like these, Pinker leaves his head vulnerable to being bitten off (like here). At the same time, his conception of “scientism” burns bright like a gemstone lying in the gutter. Why can’t you be more clear cut like the gem, Pinker, and make it easier for all of us to get the hang of you? Can I trust in your definition of ‘scientism’ or should I wonder how you came upon it given the other silly things you believe? (Consider this: “The definitional vacuum [of what ‘scientism’ means] allows me to replicate gay activists’ flaunting of ‘queer’ and appropriate the pejorative for a position I am prepared to defend.” When was ‘queer’ ever a pejorative among gender/sexuality rights activists?) Oh, why are you making me think!

As I languished in the midst of this quandary and contemplated doing some actual work to get to the bottom of the Pinker puzzle, I came upon a review of his book Enlightenment Now (2018) authored by George Monbiot, whom I’ve always wholeheartedly agreed with. Here we go, I thought, and I wasn’t disappointed: Monbiot takes a clear position. In a bristling piece for The Guardian, Monbiot accuses Pinker of cherry-picking data and, in a few instances, misrepresenting facts to reach conclusions more favourable to his worldview, as a result coming off as an inadvertent apologist for capitalism. Excerpt:

Pinker suggests that the environmental impact of nations follows the same trajectory, claiming that the “environmental Kuznets Curve” shows they become cleaner as they get richer. To support this point, he compares Nordic countries with Afghanistan and Bangladesh. It is true that they do better on indicators such as air and water quality, as long as you disregard their impacts overseas. But when you look at the whole picture, including carbon emissions, you discover the opposite. The ecological footprints of Afghanistan and Bangladesh (namely the area required to provide the resources they use) are, respectively, 0.9 and 0.7 hectares per person. Norway’s is 5.8, Sweden’s is 6.5 and Finland, that paragon of environmental virtue, comes in at 6.7.

Pinker seems unaware of the controversies surrounding the Kuznets Curve, and the large body of data that appears to undermine it. The same applies to the other grand claims with which he sweeps through this subject. He relies on highly tendentious interlocutors to interpret this alien field for him. If you are going to use people like US ecomodernist Stewart Brand and the former head of Northern Rock Matt Ridley as your sources, you need to double-check their assertions. Pinker insults the Enlightenment principles he claims to defend.

To make sure I wasn’t making a mistake, I went through all of Coyne’s posts written in support of Pinker. It would seem that while there’s much to admire in his words, especially those concerning his area of expertise – psycholinguistics – Pinker either falls short when articulating his worldview or, more likely, the moment he steps out of his comfort zone and begins addressing the humanities, goes cuckoo. Coyne repeatedly asserts that Pinker is a classic progressive liberal who’s constantly misunderstood because he refuses to gloss over matters of political correctness that the authoritarian left doesn’t want you to discuss. But it’s really hard to stand by him when – like Monbiot says about Enlightenment Now – he’s accused of misrepresenting rape statistics in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011).

Anyway, the Princeton historian David Bell also joined in with a scathing review for The Nation, where he called Enlightenment Now a 20-hour TED talk pushing history as having been “just so” instead of acknowledging the many people’s movements and struggles that deliberately made it so.

Pinker’s problems with history are compounded even further as he tries to defend the Enlightenment against the many scholarly critics who have pointed, over the centuries, to some of its possible baleful consequences. Did Enlightenment forms of reasoning and scientific inquiry lie behind modern biological racism and eugenics? Behind the insistence that women do not have the mental capacity for full citizenship? Not at all, Pinker assures us. That was just a matter of bad science.

Indeed, it was. But Pinker largely fails to deal with the inconvenient fact that, at the time, it was not so obviously bad science. The defenders of these repellent theories, used to justify manifold forms of oppression, were published in scientific journals and appealed to the same standards of reason and utility upheld by Pinker. “Science” did not by itself inevitably beget these theories, but it did provide a new language and new forms of reasoning to justify inequality and oppression and new ways of thinking about and categorizing natural phenomena that suggested to many an immutable hierarchy of human races, the sexes, and the able and disabled. The later disproving of these theories did not just come about because better science prevailed over worse science. It came about as well because of the moral and political activism that forced scientists to question data and conclusions they had largely taken for granted.

It seems Pinker may not be playing as fast and loose with facts, philosophy and the future as sci-fi writers like Yuval Noah Harari (whose Homo Deus is the reason I’ve not read historical surveys since; I recommend John Sexton’s takedown) have, but he’s probably just as bad for riding a cult of personality that has brought, and continues to bring, him an audience that will listen to him even though he’s a psycholinguist monologuing about Enlightenment philosophy. And what’s more, all the reviews I can find of Enlightenment Now have different versions of the same complaints Monbiot and Bell have made.

So I’m going to wilfully succumb to two of the cognitive biases Pinker says blinkers our worldview and makes things seem more hopeless than they are – availability and negativity – and kick Enlightenment Now off my todo list.

In sum: what keeps Pinker au courant is his optimism. If only it weren’t so misinformed in its fundamentals…

Hat-tip to Omair Ahmad for flagging the New Republic article. Featured image: Steven Pinker. Credit: sfupamr/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

Moon mission pushed to October, so we wait

So, the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO’s) Chandrayaan 2 mission to the Moon has been pushed to October from April. Delays of this sort are to be expected for missions of this scale, although I’ve also heard that ISRO often does a poor job of setting realistic launch dates for its missions in general.

The actual launch window for Chandrayaan 2 had been April-November, but recent reports in the media quoting ISRO officials had created the impression that people were confident April would be it.

But now, with the announcement of delay, officials’ confidence on display earlier this year that the launch would happen in April is now in serious question. The most recent media report I can find that quotes a senior official saying Chandrayaan 2 will be launched in April is dated February 16, 2018. The primary Google search result still says “April 2018”.

Screen Shot 2018-03-03 at 20.50.47

I also find it curious that the mission’s delay was announced barely 30 or so days before it was slated to launch instead of much earlier. For missions of this size, delays can be anticipated sooner… unless something unexpected has happened. Has it? No clue. Is it because of the probe itself or the launcher, a GSLV Mk II? Again, no clue.

So we do what we always have: wait.

Mission readiness is one thing but setting realistic launch dates, communicating them to the public in a timely manner and keeping all stakeholders – including the people – informed of the reasons for delay are quite another.

Featured image credit: fernandozhiminaicela/pixabay.

Jayant Narlikar’s pseudo-defence of Darwin

Jayant Narlikar, the noted astrophysicist and emeritus professor at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, recently wrote an op-ed in The Hindu titled ‘Science should have the last word’. There’s probably a tinge of sanctimoniousness there, echoing the belief many scientists I’ve met have that science will answer everything, often blithely oblivious to politics and culture. But I’m sure Narlikar is not one of them.

Nonetheless, the piece IMO was good and not great because what Narlikar has written has been written in the recent past by many others, with different words. It was good because the piece’s author was Narlikar. His position on the subject is now in the public domain where it needs to be if only so others can now bank on his authority to stand up for science themselves.

Speaking of authority: there is a gaffe in the piece that its fans – and The Hindu‘s op-ed desk – appear to have glazed over. If they didn’t, it’s possible that Narlikar asked for his piece to be published without edits, and which could have either been further proof of sanctimoniousness or, of course, distrust of journalists. He writes:

Recently, there was a claim made in India that the Darwinian theory of evolution is incorrect and should not be taught in schools. In the field of science, the sole criterion for the survival of a theory is that it must explain all observed phenomena in its domain. For the present, Darwin’s theory is the best such theory but it is not perfect and leaves many questions unanswered. This is because the origin of life on earth is still unexplained by science. However, till there is a breakthrough on this, or some alternative idea gets scientific support, the Darwinian theory is the only one that should continue to be taught in schools.

@avinashtn, @thattai and @rsidd120 got the problems with this excerpt, particularly the part in bold, just right in a short Twitter exchange, beginning with this tweet (please click-through to Twitter to see all the replies):

Gist: the origin of life is different from the evolution of life.

But even if they were the same, as Narlikar conveniently assumes in his piece, something else should have stopped him. That something else is also what is specifically interesting for me. Sample what Narlikar said next and then the final line from the excerpt above:

For the present, Darwin’s theory is the best such theory but it is not perfect and leaves many questions unanswered. … However, till there is a breakthrough on this, or some alternative idea gets scientific support, the Darwinian theory is the only one that should continue to be taught in schools.

Darwin’s theory of evolution got many things right, continues to, so there is a sizeable chunk in the domain of evolutionary biology where it remains both applicable and necessary. However, it is confusing that Narlikar believes that, should some explanations for some phenomena thus far not understood arise, Darwin’s theories as a whole could become obsolete. But why? It is futile to expect a scientific theory to be able to account for “all observed phenomena in its domain”. Such a thing is virtually impossible given the levels of specialisation scientists have been able to achieve in various fields. For example, an evolutionary biologist might know how migratory birds evolved but still not be able to explain how some birds are thought to use quantum entanglement with Earth’s magnetic field to navigate.

The example Mukund Thattai provides is fitting. The Navier-Stokes equations are used to describe fluid dynamics. However, scientists have been studying fluids in a variety of contexts, from two-dimensional vortices in liquid helium to gas outflow around active galactic nuclei. It is only in some of these contexts that the Navier-Stokes equations are applicable; that they are not entirely useful in others doesn’t render the equations themselves useless.

Additionally, this is where Narlikar’s choice of words in his op-ed becomes more curious. He must be aware that his own branch of study, quantum cosmology, has thin but unmistakable roots in a principle conceived in the 1910s by Niels Bohr, with many implications for what he says about Darwin’s theories.

Within the boundaries of physics, the principle of correspondence states that at larger scales, the predictions of quantum mechanics must agree with those of classical mechanics. It is an elegant idea because it acknowledges the validity of classical, a.k.a. Newtonian, mechanics when applied at a scale where the effects of gravity begin to dominate the effects of subatomic forces. In its statement, the principle does not say that classical mechanics is useless because it can’t explain quantum phenomena. Instead, it says that (1) the two mechanics each have their respective domain of applicability and (2) the newer one must be resemble the older one when applied to the scale at which the older one is relevant.

Of course, while scientists have been able to satisfy the principle of correspondence in some areas of physics, an overarching understanding of gravity as a quantum phenomenon has remained elusive. If such a theory of ‘quantum gravity’ were to exist, its complicated equations would have to be able to resemble Newton’s equations and the laws of motion at larger scales.

But exploring the quantum nature of spacetime is extraordinarily difficult. It requires scientists to probe really small distances and really high energies. While lab equipment has been setup to meet this goal partway, it has been clear for some time that it might be easier to learn from powerful cosmic objects like blackholes.

And Narlikar has done just that, among other things, in his career as a theoretical astrophysicist.

I don’t imagine he would say that classical mechanics is useless because it can’t explain the quantum, or that quantum mechanics is useless because it can’t be used to make sense of the classical. More importantly, should a theory of quantum gravity come to be, should we discard the use of classical mechanics all-together? No.

In the same vein: should we continue to teach Darwin’s theories for lack of a better option or because it is scientific, useful and, through the fossil record, demonstrable? And if, in the future, an overarching theory of evolution comes along with the capacity to subsume Darwin’s, his ideas will still be valid in their respective jurisdictions.

As Thattai says, “Expertise in one part of science does not automatically confer authority in other areas.” Doesn’t this sound familiar?

Featured image credit: sipa/pixabay.