Category: Op-eds

Something more foolish than completing phase 3 trials in 1.5 months?

That the Union government and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had entered into a more intimate, but not necessarily more beneficial, relationship became evident in 2019 when then ISRO chairman K. Sivan trotted out a series of dubious claims to massage the fate of the Chandrayaan 2 mission, whose lunar surface component had obviously failed. Anyone who follows Indian spaceflight news is familiar with the adage ‘space is hard’ and all of them abide by it (there’s an argument that we shouldn’t extend the same courtesy to more mature space programmes). Yet Sivan was determined to salvage even more, going so far at one point to call the whole mission (orbiter + lander) a “98% success”.

Shortly after news of the lander’s fate became clear to ground control, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was present as the chief guest, consoled Sivan with his customary hug even as ISRO at large withdrew into a shell of silence, offering only the occasional scrap of what it knew had happened to the lander. The vacuum of information allowed a trickle of speculation, but which was soon overwhelmed by a swell of conspiracies and, as is inevitable these days, a virtual barrier erected by right-wing commentators and bots that suppressed all questions asking for more information in the public domain. This ISRO, and the attendant public experience of India’s spaceflight programme, was markedly different from the ISRO of before – a feeling that Sivan deepened with other claims about the amount of time ISRO would need to realise its ‘Gaganyaan’ human spaceflight mission, which has already been delayed by three years. Sivan had unknowingly underestimated the amount, had deliberately communicated a shorter duration, had communicated the actual time but to which government officials couldn’t agree, or something else happened. The first possibility would’ve been unlikely were it not for the COVID-19 pandemic – but then it would seem that even if Sivan’s successor, S. Somanath, were to push back and ask for more time, the government has made up its mind: New Indian Express reported on December 8 that ISRO had received “instructions from the government” to send Indian astronauts to space on its GSLV Mk III rocket before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections! This has to be the second most unintelligent decision the government has made in the limited context of large-scale undertakings involving science and the lives of people, after Balram Bhargava’s subsequently rescinded threat in mid-2020 for researchers to complete the Covaxin phase 3 clinical trial in time for Prime Minister Modi’s Independence Day address less than two months away. It’s not clear if the government will rescind its demand of ISRO; the report itself is brief and doesn’t mention any resistance from the spaceflight mission team. But how this squares with minister Jitendra Singh’s statement in parliament last week, that the first crewed mission will only liftoff in late 2024 and that “crew safety is paramount”, is unclear. Assuming that the government will continue to push ISRO to launch in the first half of 2024, a flight based on a schedule modified to accommodate the demand may surpass the foolishness of Bhargava’s ask.

Every human spaceflight mission is inordinately complex. ISRO will have to design and test every component of the launch vehicle, crew capsule, mission profile, ground systems and crew management beforehand, in different conditions. It has to anticipate all possible failure scenarios and arrange for both failure-avoidance systems and failsafes. The timeline may have been more flexible in the early days of the undertaking, when the systems being tested were less composite, but not so today. When the government “instructs” ISRO to launch the ‘Gaganyaan’ crewed flight before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections (which are around 18 months away), it’s practically asking ISRO to devise a testing schedule that will be completed – irrespective of the tests’ outcomes – in this period all so it can use the mission’s outcomes (developed with government funds) as part of its election campaign. It’s effectively asking ISRO to sideline science, safety standards and good sense. Imagine one safety test going awry, and which ISRO might in other circumstances have liked to fix and redo. With “instructions” like those of the government, it won’t be able to – jeopardising the mission itself as well as the lives of the astronauts and the reputation of the Indian space programme in the international arena. The government simply shouldn’t make such a frighteningly asinine demand, and instead allow ISRO to take all the time it needs (within reasonable limits) to successfully complete its first human spaceflight mission.

ISRO has of late also embarked on programmes to increase its commercial revenue, even though it’s a “space research organisation”. If a crewed mission fails because the organisation let itself be cowed by the national government into trimming its testing process, all so a political party could use the launch as part of its poll propaganda, all of the organisation’s other rockets will confront doubts about their safety and whether they won’t threaten satellites worth hundreds of millions of dollars. A lot of ISRO’s work on ‘Gaganyaan’ has also happened to the exclusion of other launch vehicles and scientific missions, including (but not limited to) the reusable launch vehicle, the semi-cryogenic engine and the Aditya L1 space-probe. Its low rate of production of new rockets recently forced it to postpone the Chandrayaan 3 mission to accommodate the OneWeb satellites (in a commercial contract) in its launch manifest. Setting aside questions of ISRO’s relatively low funding and internal priorities, even if ‘Gaganyaan’ succeeds out of luck, the prospects of all of these adversely affected projects will suffer at least further reputational consequences. If ‘Gaganyaan’ fails, the future will be a lot worse.

Just as the Covaxin incident opened a window into how the Indian government was thinking about the COVID-19 vaccination drive and the role of science in shaping it, a demand of ISRO to launch realise its human spaceflight mission with a hard deadline opens a window into the Indian government’s considerations on ‘Gaganyaan’. The BJP government revived ISRO’s proposal for a human spaceflight mission in 2014, approved it in 2017 and allocated Rs 10,000 crore in 2018. Did it do so only because of how the mission’s success, should it come to pass, would help the party win elections? It’s desirable for a party’s goals and the country’s goals to be aligned – until the former crimps the latter. But more importantly, should we be concerned about the government’s heuristic for selecting and rejecting which spaceflight missions to fund? And should we be concerned about which publicly funded projects it will seek more accountability on?

There have been standing committee and audit reports calling ISRO out for slow work on this or that matter but the government at large, especially the incumbent one since 2019, has taken pains to maintain a front of amicability. It might be mildly amusing if a political party promises in its pre-poll manifesto to get ISRO in shape, and then in line, by readying a reusable launch vehicle for commercial missions by 2025 or launching five scientific missions in the next four years – but standing in the way of that is more than a knack to translate between public sentiment and technological achievement. It requires breaking a longstanding tradition of cosying up to ISRO as much as granting it autonomy while simultaneously underfunding it. We need the national government, most of all, to pay more attention to all ISRO projects on which there is evidence of dilly-dallying, and grapple honestly with the underlying issues, rather than poke its nose in the necessarily arduous safety-rating process of a crewed mission.

Featured image: A GSLV Mk III rocket lifts off on its first orbital flight, July 2017. Credit: ISRO.

US fusion bhashan

At 8.30 pm on December 13, US Department of Energy officials announced that the federally funded National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California had conducted a fusion test in which the energy yield was greater than that supplied to start it.

All of them seemed eager to say that this is what US leadership looks like, that this is proof of the US gunning for what was once thought impossible, that the US is where the world’s most brilliant minds work, that according to Joe Biden the US is the land of possibility – and it was hilarious.

The announcement pertains to a scientific demonstration that the NIF’s mode of achieving controlled fusion, called inertial confinement, works. After this come more tests and modelling, manufacturing to key components to very high quality standards, scaling up from the bare essentials to bigger tests, leading up to designing a commercial facility, then building and finally operating it – assuming success at every step. LLNL director Kim Budil said at the presser that commercial inertial confinement could be three or four decades away.

All this said, the test is actually far removed from “zero-carbon abundant fusion energy powering our society”, in the words of energy secretary Jennifer Granholm. My forthcoming article for The Hindu (Thursday) explains why. One important requirement is the energy gain: the ratio of the output energy to the input. The new test achieved a gain of around 1.5 – but only relative to the energy that started the fusion reactions, not the energy that the lasers consumed to produce and deliver it.

More importantly, for inertial confinement fusion to be practicable, it needs to achieve a gain in excess of at least 100. If scientists at NIF find that they’re unable to go past, say, a gain of 50, that will be the end of the road for commercial ICF using the NIF’s setup. So there’s a long, long way to go even before researchers conduct a test that’s a faithful proof of concept for practical nuclear fusion power.

But even more importantly, it’s spellbinding how the US government will stake its claims to being the country that achieves the impossible, etc. but will make all sorts of excuses to disguise its failure of leadership to mobilise $100 billion a year from economically developed countries for poorer countries to use to weather the climate crisis; to disguise its attempts to undermine, modify or defy commitments made under the Paris Agreement; and to evade, stall and deny efforts to set up a ‘loss and damage’ fund at COP27.

It’s a shame that the Conferences of the Parties to the UN FCCC have been spending bigger chunks of their agenda of late just to push back on the recalcitrance of the US et al. Yet here we are, with government officials blaring their trumpets for a proof of a proof of concept with several caveats (as I spell out in The Hindu). Granholm even called the result “one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century”, to applause from the audience, and said Joe Biden called it a BFD.

Of course it is. It’s an unexpectedly big umbrella that the US has got to unfurl over its climate action obligations.

The biopolitics of Covaxin

In a new investigation, STAT has reported fresh problems with Covaxin’s approval process in India, including the phase 2 trial dropping its placebo arm in favour of one preordained to make Covaxin look good and Bharat Biotech – the maker – commencing phase 3 trials based on results from animal studies. I’m also filing the report under “yet another instance of a pro-government Indian entity responding to the foreign press but not the local press” (following this). Krishna Mohan, one of the company’s directors, responded to STAT by admitting to a wrongdoing, massaging other similar actions, and pointing a finger at the Indian government.

Is this spine? In response to similar evidence-based allegations of wrongdoing, Bharat Biotech met The Wire Science and The Wire with a defamation suit, a demand of Rs 100 crore and that the two sites not publish articles with “defamatory content” vis-à-vis the company, and obtained an ex parte injunction against 14 articles. This was in addition to the seemingly blanket refusal to respond to our questions for reports we were filing. Other senior Bharat Biotech officials also refused to communicate to anyone else asking probing questions about Covaxin’s clinical trials. No: his quote sounds more like Mohan trying to save Bharat Biotech’s face in front of a western audience (the one our government wants us to believe is inferior) while spinning India’s Bharat’s own take on the vaccine approval process.

Mohan told STAT that they didn’t take any shortcuts – at least not those that weren’t first “vetted” by the Central Drug Standards Control Organisation (CDSCO), a.k.a. the drug regulator. That is to say, the shortcuts were CDSCO-approved, so they weren’t shortcuts. I’m inclined to agree: the rules are after all not based on principles of natural justice but on what the government deems acceptable. /s

Of all the allegations, the one that irks me most is the modification to the phase 2 trial. It compromises our ability to learn anything useful about Covaxin, replacing that knowledge with knowledge of how much better one formulation of Covaxin is from another. The drug regulator should have known this is what the trial would have ended up checking, and if it approved this design anyway, it has engaged in wilful neglect – neglect of science, neglect of integrity, neglect of its mandate to look out for the people. But if we’re to believe Mohan, it’s just “product development” for an unprecedented time, not public health:

“In a classic sense of product development, we would do everything the right way — play by the book and all the rules of the game would be followed. But here was a situation the world didn’t foresee. … Please don’t think there was any issue with the veracity of the data. Yes, it was an unusual approach, but it was dictated by the nature of the pandemic.”

Ah, a classic tactic: Why did you burn down the forest? “It’s the climate crisis, which is unprecedented, and we needed land to erect smog towers.”

Later in the article, in the face of a similar allegation – changing the phase 2 trial protocol – Mohan defends the regulator and blames discrepancies in trial numbers on a company struggling to coordinate multiple teams working separately from each other while being guided by the rule of “let’s get the data out”. I’d buy what he was saying if he was talking about his company HQ installing new air-conditioners and conducting tests of indoor air quality. But he’s talking about a clinical trial for a vaccine, placing misleading data in the public domain and – crucially – implicating a national drug regulator that he claims was in the know but didn’t act.

To STAT, he’s saying they were distracted by the “safety of individuals”, the “ethics of handling subjects” and “manufacturing”, but to Indian journalists, he as well as the regulator have been mum on questions raised by the WHO and ANVISA on manufacturing practices and by almost everyone else about the People’s Hospital death and data.

A (somehow) bigger problem arises soon after when Mohan says:

“Whatever we did was with the clear intention of doing it right. There was no question of reducing sample sizes. … There were not off the cuff or random thoughts. … It was extensively debated with keeping the final objective in mind of getting a vaccine in time and not cutting any corners.”

Getting a vaccine in time and not cutting any corners? It’s baffling that the last sentence is intended as clarification rather than as a potentially tacit admission of wrongdoing. I’m sure you remember when ICMR chief Balram Bhargava called on hospitals around India to complete Covaxin’s phase 3 trials in less than two months, in time for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to avail the vaccine for public use on Independence Day 2020. One independent scientist asked me what I thought Bhargava might have been smoking at the time; it was hard to say.

But what’s tempting to speculate now is that the government realised, based on the backlash to Bhargava’s announcement, that a) a phase 3 trial in six weeks was a bigger problem than it believed, b) it wouldn’t work to have its vaccine development plan in public, c) it could accelerate Covaxin’s clinical trials by forcing Bharat Biotech to do so, and d) approve Covaxin without phase 3 trials by assimilating the drug regulator – all to achieve a similar outcome. Or at least I speculate in the absence of evidence. And until there is, we remain needles in veins.

A story of dogs

This article in The Wire, while entirely compelling, also contains an unarticulated tension. Headline: ‘How a Missing Stray Dog Led to the Withdrawal of a Caribbean High Commissioner to India’. Excerpt:

Uploaded on social media, a grainy dimly-lit video apparently shows the night-time confrontation. A man, speaking English with an accent, stands outside the gate of a residential compound and tells a mask-wearing woman, “You want the dog, take it, put it between your legs, you probably want the dog to f… you, that’s what you want.”

Startled, the woman also uses an abuse against him and says he is drunk. “I don’t care who you are,” she said. “F… you,” replied the man, before turning to the person holding the camera – and the video ends.

Speaking to The Wire, Ghosh, an animal rights activist, said she had been feeding a blind, old dog living inside the compound for years. The new tenant of the house, Charrandas Persaud, had only arrived in India in March 2021.

The story describes among other things a government not being able to pursue a harsher course of action against an individual for bringing grave harm to a dog because the individual enjoyed diplomatic immunity – even if it’s the same government that includes Maneka Gandhi, who has doggedly threatened or pursued legal action against those who so much as dream of getting rid of street dogs in one constituency, and whose office has been known to ring up those accused of (as opposed to convicted of) not being considerate enough towards stray dogs (as opposed to being physically violent towards them).

Gandhi is a known dog-lover who has furthered in the country a pro-rights rather than a pro-welfare policy towards dogs – such that these poor creatures have been left to scrounge urban garbage piles and bank on the sympathy of locals for food. In the course of their lives, they are often ravaged by diseases and/or also spread disease-causing agents to other urban fauna and people. They also render public spaces unsafe by chasing after passersby, bicyclists and motorcyclists and by terrorising children. There have been several reports of stray dogs mauling children to death around India.

Despite this miserable reality, however, these dogs continue to enjoy several privileges but lack all guarantees that they won’t be a nuisance to themselves, to others and won’t die in peace. In The Wire article as well, as Devirupa Mitra narrates, the dog that went missing was blind.

Ghosh thought to speak to a man in her neighbourhood because a stray dog used to live thereabout but didn’t turn up one day to be fed at her hand. I don’t claim to know what Ghosh’s circumstances are (the article doesn’t discuss them other than to say she’s a professor of English at the University of Delhi), but while it was good of her to investigate the dog’s fate, eventually exposing a foul-mouthed fellow, they speak to one of the things that keeps stray dogs around in our cities: the attitude of the élite.

Many élites view the act of feeding stray dogs as an exercise of material giving: they have money/food/resources/etc. to spare, so they give. But these places where dogs are fed seldom lie near their own houses, and are often by the roadside. The people feed and leave, and the dogs continue to be a nuisance in that place. (Some people have also tied such acts of ‘giving’ with their religious beliefs, of being tolerant towards other creatures and to donate food, ignoring the systemic issues they maintain and that keep these dogs around in pitiable conditions, including considerable waste generation and their improper disposal.)

Obviously I don’t take the ambassador’s side nor do I condone him having the dog killed. What he did was awful and he deserved what he got. The demand of welfare activists, with which I also agree, is that problem dogs need to be euthanised, without pain, in the interest of their well-being, and not snuffed out with whatever means are available. But there is something to be said about a) some people ‘solving’ short-term problems (the dogs’ hunger) only to prolong a long-term convolution (the dogs’ unrelenting persistence in people’s lived environment), and b) some people not being the ones to suffer the negative consequences of their actions.

Bad responses to The Wire’s Meta reports

Note, September 18, 2023, 6:40 am: I’ve often returned to this post since The Wire retracted its ‘Meta’ reports, to see if I still stand by its contents. I do with the portions that I haven’t struck through. That said, I believe in hindsight that holding these positions alone can’t be a gainful way to judge this or any other story.

Note, October 19, 2022, 6:25 am: Quite a few people have checked in asking if I will update this post in the light of The Wire updating its position on its investigation into censorship by Meta. I don’t intend to change this post, other than adding this note, because the 10 points still stand irrespective of what The Wire‘s internal review finds.

Ten types of bad-faith responses to The Wire‘s stories – this and this – on Meta, Andy Stone and Amit Malviya, plus one that we expect to face soon.

1. “The Wire is afraid to give the source’s name.”

Protecting whistleblowers is a matter of integrity. Trying to save skin by outing one’s sources wouldn’t be the credible thing to do in a situation like this.

2. “So source’s point is ‘trust me, bro’.”

Yeah.

3. “The Wire has lied all its life, so it will double down on its claim to avoid losing its purpose.”

A falsifiable contention, or an unfalsifiable one to those bent on avoiding simple facts, so a waste of time.

4. “You have no credibility.”

Thanks for reading and sharing articles from The Wire.

5. “The Wire has a bad track record.”

Hardline right-wing commentators on social media platforms have disagreed with almost every other The Wire article over what they perceive to be bias when it is disagreement with their point of view. Given this, I don’t trust these commentators’ definition of “track record”.

6. “You see what you want to see” is both accusation and defence.

After The Wire‘s first report and then Andy Stone’s response, The Wire was accused of seeing only what it wanted to see. But when the reports doubled down, the hardline commentators started to see only what they wish to see as their arguments defaulted to “The Wire must be lying.”

7. “Facebook/Meta has denied it, this is credible.”

All the arguments so far were levelled by the usual suspects and in that regard were as expected. But when other journalists from other publications signalled their willingness to buy Meta’s/Facebook’s/Stone’s denial – “M/F/S usually don’t do this but now that they have, it must be true” – it was hard to believe.

It indicated one or some of the following to be likely: a) they were cowed by Meta/Facebook, by the deluge of comments on Twitter or by both to agree with Stone’s denial;  b) how Meta is behaving now, responding now, etc. is new – but even then to claim Stone’s response on Twitter to be “clean” or “credible” is a bridge too far; …

8. Just ignorance

c) they weren’t aware of the lack-of-integrity with which Facebook operates in India; or d) they weren’t aware of their ignorance.

The American commentariat has expected non-Western journalists before to go to greater lengths than journalists from their own part of the world to prove something to them because you’re not one of them, overlooking the fact that you’re in fact working in a different part of the world where it is easier for the government or the corporation to discredit you, which in turn gives you less latitude to ‘show’ your work in every way they’d like before conferring you with the privilege of their agreement, even as they continue sealioning and gaslighting you.

9. “Stone’s email address can’t be *@fb.com”

If you wish to hitch your wagon to the “Stone couldn’t possibly have replied from a *@fb.com address, so the email whose screenshot The Wire has is fabricated” argument, that’s your prerogative. But you immediately give me the right to step over you at the first appearance of an email from a Meta employee sporting a *@fb.com address. Et voilà.

10. [Ignore the posts that were taken down]

In all this hullabaloo, people have forgotten that Instagram took down @cringearchivist’s posts without specifying a reason other than that it contained nudity. It didn’t. Update, October 19, 2022, 6:35 am: Instagram/Meta quietly reinstated the posts by 4:16 pm yesterday. Still not clear why they were taken down or why they are now back online.

Preemptive: “Headers or it didn’t happen.”

The Wire‘s upcoming third report should clarify the point about email headers, but the (potential) problem here is larger: the audience isn’t entitled to all the evidence when any part of it may compromise the whistleblower’s identity, and particularly when some of those making the demands are just fuelled by bloodlust.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and never will be. Those who expect otherwise are kidding themselves, and probably willfully disregarding what they understand to be true.

Update, 6:43 am, October 15, 2022: There’s more happening here than I expected. After exchanges with with some of my colleagues, I now believe that there some gaps in my knowledge that complicate blanket statements like the one above. Instead, I will defer on this count to the third Meta report by The Wire, which will be published today. 5.55 pm: published.

WordPress.com rolls back its botched ‘experiment’

So, WordPress.com has restored the family of premium plans that it had until April this year, and has done away with the controversial ‘Starter’ and ‘Pro’ plans. The announcement on the WordPress.com blog yesterday has already garnered a high 65 comments, even as the post itself was brief and didn’t contain indication that WordPress.com had screwed up with the new plans. Excerpt:

Our philosophy has always been one of experimenting, learning, and adjusting. As we began to roll out our new pricing plans a couple of months back, we took note of the feedback you shared. What we heard is that some of you missed the more granular flexibility of our previous plans. Additionally, the features you needed and pricing of the new plans didn’t always align for you. This led us to a decision that we believe is the right call.

You might recall that when the new plans were announced in April, my blog post reacting to them became a big deal on the Hacker News forum on that day, and (probably) first drew the attention of Automattic chief Matt Mullenweg and WordPress.com CEO Dave Martin. Since then, WordPress.com has been working to adapt the ‘Starter’ and ‘Pro’ plans for different markets as well as introduced à la carte upgrades to remove ads, add custom CSS and buy more storage space. However, the company continued to receive negative feedback on the changes from the previous plans.

One vein that I really resonated with was a rebuttal of WordPress.com’s claim that the older plans were messy whereas the newer ones are clearer. That’s absolutely not true. But on July 21, they seemed to have finally really listened and changed their minds for the better. (And even then, there are many expressions of confusion among the 65 comments.)

I also want to point out here that WordPress.com is being disingenuous when it claims its new plans were an “experiment”. That’s bullshit. No experiment rolls out to all users on production, is accompanied by formal announcements of change on the official blog and, in the face of criticism, forces the CEO to apologise for a hamfisted rollout process – all without mentioning the word ‘experiment’ even once. WordPress.com is saying now that its development has followed the path of “experimenting, learning, and adjusting” when all it did was force the change, inform users post facto, then solicited feedback on which it acted (before doing that in advance), and finally reverted to a previous state.

With Gyanvapi article, Abhinav Prakash Singh does logic wapsi

The national vice-president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, Abhinav Prakash Singh, published an article on May 22 on the Gyanvapi mosque issue that is from start to finish an exercise in verbal sophistry. But while we have come to expect such nonsense from functionaries of the Bharatiya Janata Party, I was shocked to see this coming from Indian Express. (Some of my friends weren’t, so I am probably behind the curve here.)

Singh’s argument is not concerned with the historical facts of the case (many of which are gathered here) but with the people calling Gyanvapi a “controversy” hiding behind secularism, which according to him was developed to separate the state only from Abrahamic religions, and that the faux-controversy should nonetheless be allowed to blow through in favour of Hindus because the left is only resorting to “political rhetoric, academic obfuscation and chicanery”, and not because the right doesn’t seem concerned about the burden of proof. This is a defence of malice on the grounds of what it is not (not anti-national, not Islamic, not western, not leftist, not scholarly) over what it is (proofless, perfidious, communal). Oh, what it is also not is violent and riotous, which, in Singh’s telling, the protests against the farm laws and the CAA respectively were.

A national newspaper that believes it’ i’s okay to amplify lies can’t be on the side of democracy. And while India may be far from a perfect democracy at the moment, its institutions and civil society must still maintain their democratic tendencies, especially in the spirit defined by the constitution. This is more important than to be perfectly democratic at every moment, which is obviously not possible. Challenges will arise and there will be failures, and that is not an implicitly bad thing. When we tend to the best of our abilities, that is good enough. But a democratic nation will lose that character if we altogether stop aspiring in that direction and begin to admit exceptions to favour a political agenda and/or personal gain. It will also lose that character if we don’t employ common sense.

It will always be a virtue to be more informed (with reasonable exceptions), to keep learning and to value the methods by which we acquire knowledge and establish facts. One popular technique for this, standing on the deceptively simple foundation of logic, is called science – and in most democratic societies today, science and its exponents occupy a place of pride. But the unbridled application of science to solving society’s problems is not a good thing. Such overreach, called scientism but also encompassing hard-line rationalism, attempts to use science to solve problems that its methods and principles were never designed to solve, and eventually produces outcomes that subvert the proper functioning of a democracy in favour of a scientistic or falsely meritocratic agenda.

This said, scientism is not the only form in which science can get in the way of a functional democracy. Bharatiya Janata Party members’ claims that Ayurveda, yoga, the Vedas, the entangled Hindu state-culture-religion and whatever else anticipated and solved advanced problems that modern natural as well as social sciences still fumble with come first to mind. Ancient India’s feats, in the party’s telling, are a demonstration of its immense prowess and to which we must bow your heads without question. But the evidence for these claims is always, without exception, unfalsifiable: that which can neither be proved nor, more importantly, disproved.

This may be a carefully designed strategy at work but that doesn’t mean we’re obliged to recognise it as one. To everyone who has been to high school and studied a little bit of logic and set theory, it’s a blooper, and hopefully also a reminder that democracy can and is regularly undermined by our being okay with letting bloopers pass. For example, Abhinav Prakash Singh’s article is rife with pleas to let the Gyanvapi controversy swing in favour of the right-wing, each based on the premise that “what is not offensive is therefore good”. This is the fallacy of affirming the disjunct. It goes like this:

The left manufactured the Gyanvapi controversy because it has proof or it claims the supremacy of Islam.
The left is anti-Hindu and pro-Islam.
Therefore the left has no proof.

Does it make sense to you? It shouldn’t. It’s just how empty of meaning and substance Singh’s article is. The affirmation of the disjunct might tempt you to ask yourself whether there is something he knows that you don’t. Don’t give in; instead, ask whether there is anything rather than nothing at the heart of his argument. Don’t let his claim pass unchecked; don’t read it and believe that Singh may have a point. He and his colleagues seldom do, and prefer instead the use of kettle logic, as demonstrated in the opening lines of a recent article by Apoorvanand: “Who could have thought that an argument for syncretism and the blurry nature of culture can be used to first enter the religious or sacred places of non-Hindu communities and then lay claim over them?” Most of all, read Singh’s article and conclude, because Singh himself forces us to, that his remarks are foolish. All he has are big words wrapped around a statement that can’t possibly make sense.

Hat-tip to Jahnavi Sen

Why there’s no guarantee that Musk’s Twitter will resemble Dorsey’s

A lot of folks are saying they’re not going to leave Twitter, in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform, because Musk and its once and long-time CEO and cofounder Jack Dorsey aren’t very different: both are billionaires, tech-bros, libertarian and pro-cryptocurrencies. And they say that they did okay under Dorsey, so why wouldn’t we under Musk? I find this argument to only be partly acceptable. The other part is really two parts.

First, Twitter under Dorsey is significantly different because he cofounded the platform and nurtured through a few years of relative quiescence, followed by a middle period and finally to the decidedly popular platform that it is today. (I joined Twitter in the middle period, in 2008, when it was hard to say if the next person you were going meet in real-life was be on Twitter. Today the converse is true.)

Musk, however, is inheriting a more matured platform, and one whose potential he believes hasn’t been “fulfilled”. I’m not sure what that means, and the things Musk has said on Twitter itself haven’t inspired confidence. Both men may be evil billionaires but setting aside the sorts of things Dorsey supports for a moment, you’ve got to admit he doesn’t have nearly the persona, the reputation and the cult-following that Musk does. These differences distinguish these men in significant ways vis-à-vis a social media platform – a beast that’s nothing like EVs, spaceflight or renewables.

(In fact, if Musk were to adopt an engineer’s approach to ‘fixing’ whatever he believes he’s wrong with Twitter, there are many examples of the sort of problematic solutions that could emerge here.)

The second part of the “Musk and Dorsey are pretty much the same” misclaim is that a) Musk is taking the company private and b) Musk has called himself a “free-speech absolutist”. I’m not a free-speech absolutist, in fact most of the people who have championed free speech in my circles are not. Free-speech absolutism is the view that Twitter (in this context) should support everyone’s right to free speech without any limitations on what they’re allowed to say. To those like me who reject the left-right polarisation in society today in favour of the more accurate pro-anti democracy polarisation, Twitter adopting Musk’s stance as policy would effectively recast attempts to curtail abuse and harrassment directed at non-conservative voices as “silencing the right”, and potentially allow their acerbic drivel to spread unchecked on the platform.

Running Twitter famously affected Dorsey. Unless we can be sure that the platform and its users will have the same effect on Musk, and temper his characteristic mercuriality, Twitter will remain a place worth leaving.

To be better at being anti-crypto

Molly White has a difficult read, one that I’m forced to agree with in spite of my vehemently anti-cryptocurrency position. Three representative paragraphs from her post:

I … think that [cryptocurrency-based financial solutions] are enormously attractive to people who see them as a tangible option in a world where these problems are not being solved—where we are being failed by our political establishments in so, so many ways. I don’t think they are a feasible solution, and in fact I think they will worsen many of the problems they ostensibly aim to solve, but they are certainly being sold as the solution, and a solution that people desperately need.

And I really can’t fault someone for deciding to hitch their wagon to crypto and web3 because they are hopeful that those salesmen might be on to something. I can disagree with them, I can explain my point of view, I can think that their engagement is in some small way enabling something I fundamentally disagree with and believe to be harmful—but I can’t believe that buying some crypto, collecting an NFT, or joining a DAO automatically make someone a bad person.

…

If you feel the urge to “cyberbully” someone in crypto, direct it at the powerful players behind crypto projects that are actively taking advantage of the vulnerable. Or, just as reasonably, direct it at the powerful tech executives, venture capitalists, elected representatives, and lobbyists who have contributed to the untenable situation we find ourselves in. Or the policymakers and governmental agencies who have failed to uphold their duty in regulating crypto and enforcing existing regulation that would protect people from rampant fraud. But not the artist who hoped to earn a few bucks selling their digital art in what is otherwise an extremely difficult field, or the person who hoped that maybe a lucky crypto buy could help them dig out of crushing debt just a tiny bit faster.

This is a sensible position – and one that’s hard to remember in the heat of an argument when the other side defends a choice to invest in or deepen one’s position on cryptocurrencies. But to this picture of two sides I’d add two more (in fact, it may well be a continuous spectrum of positions):

  1. Those who back cryptocurrencies knowing the harm it causes, to the environment as much as social justice, while also not exploring other financial options well enough.
  2. Those who invest in cryptocurrencies in ignorance of its nature, technological sophistry and ontological vacuity, and later claim they “didn’t know” but also don’t/can’t exist because they have sunk costs.

These people are certainly less in the wrong than those who are outright evil – the people deserving of our vitriol, in White’s estimation. And even between these two ‘new’ groups, I think those who are lazy are wronger than those who are ignorant. I was prompted to think of these two gradations to White’s spectrum because they describe some of my friends. In fact, I think I have at least one friend belonging to each of the four groups before us:

  • “Those without another solution available to problem at hand”,
  • “Those who trip into it even though they’re educated well-enough to not”,
  • “Those reaching for cryptocurrencies without sufficiently exploring other options”, and
  • “Those aware of the bad outcomes but doing it anyway to become richer”.

I should of course clarify that these two additional groups exist principally because of privilege. That is, they become visible when you look at White’s first group through the prism of privileges that accrue to different social groups in India, particularly among the upper class, upper caste lot: they have, without exception, passively but automatically foregone ignorance or another similar excuse for their actions. And it’s because of their privileges, and not particularly because its wanton exercise has been directed at cryptocurrencies on this occasion, that they don’t deserve to be spared our scorn.

Renewable energy and technological debt

It’s sensible to read anything the World Bank puts down in words and feel like something’s amiss. I also recently read the following, on the Yale E360 blog (h/t @SanerDenizen):

… policymakers and funders still mostly prefer engineering solutions. [One study] found that less than 10 percent of funding for climate adaptation in the least-developed nations – which are usually the most vulnerable –went into projects that harnessed nature. The remaining 90 percent “poured concrete.” Overall, the UN Environment Programme and the Global Commission on Adaptation, an international body set up by the Dutch government, both estimate that about 1 percent of total climate finance has so far gone toward such nature-based adaptation projects.

Put these two together and then read this tweet:

… and you might start to wonder if renewable energy is the new oil – deemed to be necessary, even vital, in the nascent stages; lending itself to the persistence of extractive economies and resource colonialism; open to being prospected by engineers in various countries by potential and capacity; guaranteeing predictable outcomes (over the implicit variance of those of nature-based solutions) up to the medium term but leading to over-engineering in the longer; and finally leading the way to obsolescence, disorganisation and technical debt.