Tag: ad hominem

Questions we should be asking more often

1. Okay, but where’s the money coming from?

In a lecture at the Asian College of Journalism, where I was in the audience as a student, P. Sainath told us that if we needed one rule following which we’d be able to produce good stories, it’s “follow the money”. It’s remarkable how often this suggestion has been borne out (in the right contexts, of course) – and it’s even more remarkable how many people don’t follow it. Asking where the money is coming from also serves to enlighten people about why journalism works the way it does. I’m often asked by aspiring science journalists why a journalistic magazine devoted to, say, astronomy, physics or genomics doesn’t exist in India. I’ve always had the same answer: tell me how you’re going to make money (as in profits, not just revenues).

2. Okay, but what’s the power source?

The next time you receive a WhatsApp forward about a newfangled device that can do remarkable things, ask yourself where it could be getting its power – especially the requisite amount of electric power. Very few claims of amazing feats survive this check, especially as they pertain to very small objects like chips or transmitters being embedded in things and beaming signals to satellites. Depending on the medium through which they’re transmitting – air, soil, water, stone, etc. – and the distance to which they need to transmit, you can get a fair idea of the device’s power needs, and then set about figuring where the power is coming from. This question is analogous to ‘follow the money’; the currency here is energy.

3. Okay, but who’s behind the camera?

We seldom stop to think about the person behind the camera, especially if the picture is striking in some way. This goes for photos and videos about terrifying events like natural disasters, objects deep underwater and strange things in space. Pictures purporting to show something amazing but are actually fake are often taken from impossible vantage points, with a resolution that should be impossible to achieve with the device in use, with an impossible spatial scale, at locations that should have been impossible to reach at that time or by a cameraperson whose presence at the scene defies explanation. At other times, the photos appear as if they could only have been captured by specific people, and that in turn may impose some limitations on their public availability. For example, images captured by fighter-jet pilots shouldn’t be easily available – while those captured by policemen during riots could have been planted.

4. Okay, but who said so?

Ad hominem makes for bad arguments – but it’s very useful in fact-checking. It’s important who makes a certain claim so you can check their expertise and if they’re qualified to make the statement they did. If you’re looking for problems with Darwin’s theory of evolution, listen to an evolutionary biologist, not a geologist – not even if they’re a Nobel-Prize-winner. Asking for the source also helps push back on ‘data supremacy’, the tendency to defer to data just because it’s data and without checking for its provenance or quality, and on a general laziness to ascertain that a claim has been traced to its first-hand source, instead of feeding off of second-hand, third-hand, etc. sources.

5. Okay, but how many things had to fall in place?

The idea of the Occam’s razor has captured the imagination of many a rookie analyst, so much so that some of them over-apply its prescriptions to draw reductive conclusions. In their view, only the likeliest event happens all the time; when something unlikely happens, they smell something rotten – like conspiracy theorists do with the novel coronavirus. However, the mathematics of probability allows unlikely events to happen more often than you think, often because they were only seemingly unlikely to begin with. For example, the novel coronavirus was quietly evolving through other ‘forms’ in the wild before it became the strain adapted to infecting humans – the most widespread animal species on the planet. Even now, there may be other strains circulating in the wild, but we remain fixated on the one infecting us.

Science journalism, expertise and common sense

On March 27, the Johns Hopkins University said an article published on the website of the Centre For Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy (CDDEP), a Washington-based think tank, had used its logo without permission and distanced itself from the study, which had concluded that the number of people in India who could test positive for the new coronavirus could swell into the millions by May 2020. Soon after, a basement of trolls latched onto CDDEP founder-director Ramanan Laxminarayan’s credentials as an economist to dismiss his work as a public-health researcher, including denying the study’s conclusions without discussing its scientific merits and demerits.

A lot of issues are wound up in this little controversy. One of them is our seemingly naïve relationship with expertise.

Expertise is supposed to be a straightforward thing: you either have it or you don’t. But just as specialised knowledge is complicated, so too is expertise.

Many of us have heard stories of someone who’s great at something “even though he didn’t go to college” and another someone who’s a bit of a tubelight “despite having been to Oxbridge”. Irrespective of whether they’re exceptions or the rule, there’s a lot of expertise in the world that a deference to degrees would miss.

More importantly, by conflating academic qualifications with expertise, we risk flattening a three-dimensional picture to one. For example, there are more scientists who can speak confidently about statistical regression and the features of exponential growth than there are who can comment on the false vacua of string theory or discuss why protein folding is such a hard problem to solve. These hierarchies arise because of differences in complexity. We don’t have to insist only a virologist or an epidemiologist is allowed to answer questions about whether a clinical trial was done right.

But when we insist someone is not good enough because they have a degree in a different subject, we could be embellishing the implicit assumption that we don’t want to look beyond expertise, and are content with being told the answers. Granted, this argument is better directed at individuals privileged enough to learn something new every day, but maintaining this chasm – between who in the public consciousness is allowed to provide answers and who isn’t – also continues to keep power in fewer hands.

Of course, many questions that have arisen during the coronavirus pandemic have often stood between life and death, and it is important to stay safe. However, there is a penalty to think the closer we drift towards expertise, the safer we become — because then we may be drifting away from common sense and accruing a different kind of burden, especially when we insist only specialised experts can comment on a far less specialist topic. Such convictions have already created a class of people that believes ad hominem is a legitimate argumentative ploy, and won’t back down from an increasingly acrimonious quarrel until they find the cherry-picked data they have been looking for.

Most people occupy a less radical but still problematic position: even when neither life nor fortune is at stake, they claim to wait for expertise to change one’s behaviour and/or beliefs. Most of them are really waiting for something that arrived long ago and are only trying to find new ways to persist with the status quo. The all-or-nothing attitude of the rest – assuming they exist – is, simply put, epistemologically inefficient.

Our deference to the views of experts should be a function of how complex it really is and therefore the extent to which it can be interrogated. So when the topic at hand is whether a clinical trial was done right or whether the Indian Council of Medical Research is testing enough, the net we cast to find independent scientists to speak to can include those who aren’t medical researchers but whose academic or vocational trajectories familiarised them to some parts of these issues as well as who are transparent about their reasoning, methods and opinions. (The CDDEP study is yet to reveal its methods, so I don’t want to comment specifically on it.)

If we can’t be sure if the scientist we’re speaking to is making sense, obviously it would be better to go with someone whose words we can just trust. And if we’re not comfortable having such a negotiated relationship with an expert – sadly, it’s always going to be this way. The only way to make matters simpler is by choosing to deliberately shut ourselves off, to take what we’re hearing and, instead of questioning it further, running with it.

This said, we all shut ourselves off at one time or another. It’s only important that we do it knowing we do it, instead of harbouring pretensions of superiority. At no point does it become reasonable to dismiss anyone based on their academic qualifications alone the way, say, Times of India and OpIndia have done (see below).

What’s more, Dr Giridhar Gyani is neither a medical practitioner nor epidemiologist. He is academically an electrical engineer, who later did a PhD in quality management. He is currently director general at Association of Healthcare Providers (India).

Times of India, March 28

Ramanan Laxminarayanan, who was pitched up as an expert on diseases and epidemics by the media outlets of the country, however, in reality, is not an epidemiologist. Dr Ramanan Laxminarayanan is not even a doctor but has a PhD in economics.

OpIndia, March 22

Expertise has been humankind’s way to quickly make sense of a world that has only been becoming more confusing. But historically, expertise has also been a reason of state, used to suppress dissenting voices and concentrate political, industrial and military power in the hands of a few. The former is in many ways a useful feature of society for its liberating potential while the latter is undesirable because it enslaves. People frequently straddle both tendencies together – especially now, with the government in charge of the national anti-coronavirus response.

An immediately viable way to break this tension is to negotiate our relationship with experts themselves.

Fortitude

What’s the point of sweating to compose a good argument when the reader doesn’t exist who will rebut it instead of nosing around to figure out who penned it and going after them instead?

This is a question worth asking but the answer is even more important. When faced with an audience addicted to ad hominem and whatboutery, you rage against them, you surrender and lay down your weapons, you keep hammering your arguments out in the hope that one day you will be understood or you simply walk away, never to lift your finger over a keyboard again – at least not to compose anything that will eventually end up as some mouth-breather’s toilet paper.

Rage, it is commonly acknowledged, and the desire to exert control over things that cannot be controlled that underlies such passion is not tenable. Surrender and submission are equally misguided, not to mention privileged, positions. So what is left is your commitment to your intellect and your industry and the implication is that you must keep going on and on.

I think it’s hard to define some things that don’t simply embody a fixed definition as much as encompass a set of circumstances that together carry a certain quality. Fortitude is one such, and I don’t know what fortitude itself is considering what it represents can vary drastically depending on the circumstances.

But here, now, fortitude would seem to be this radioactive mix of persistence, a willingness to skirt the edge of insanity (according to Einstein’s definition), the constant belief that one is right at the risk of being wrong every now and then, and of course the mental clarity and determination to enter this fortress of conviction at the right moments and leave at others without inadvertently leaving parts of yourself behind on either side.

If only it were a drug.