democracy – Close Read

Free-speech as an instrument of repression

One of the more eye-opening discussions on Elon Musk’s attempt to take control of Twitter, and the Twitter board’s attempts to defend the company from the bid, have been playing out on Hacker News (here and, after Twitter’s response, here) – the popular discussion board for topics related to the tech industry. The first discussion has already racked up over 3,000 comments, considered high for topics on the platform – but most of them are emblematic of the difference between the industry’s cynical view of politics and that of those who have much more skin in the game, for whom it’s a problem of regulation, moral boundaries and, inevitably, the survival of democracies. (Here is one notable exception.)

For example, the majority of comments on the first discussion are concerned with profits, Twitter’s management, the stock market and laws pertaining to shareholding. The second one also begins with a comment along similar lines, repeating some points made in the ‘All In Podcast’, together with an additional comment about how “one AI engineer from Tesla could solve Twitter’s bot and spam problem”. The podcast is hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg, all investors and entrepreneurs of the Silicon Valley variety. A stream of comments rebuts this one, but in terms of it being an engineering problem instead of the kind of place Twitter might be if Musk takes ownership.

There have also been several comments either along the lines of or premised on the fact that “many people don’t use Twitter anyway, so Twitter’s board shouldn’t deprive its shareholders of the generous premium that Musk is offering”. Not many people use Twitter compared to Facebook – but the platform is in sufficient use in India and in other countries for its misuse to threaten journalists, activists and protestors, to undermine public dialogue on important government policies, and to spread propaganda and misinformation of great consequence. Such a mentality – to take the money and run, courtesy of a business mogul worth $260 billion – represents an onion of problems, layer over layer, but most of all that those running a company in one small part of one country can easily forget that social media platforms are sites of public dialogue, that enable new forms of free speech, in a different country.

If Twitter goes down, or goes to Musk, which is worse, those who are nervous enough will switch to Mastodon (I have been running a server for three years now), but if this is an acceptable outcome, platforms like Twitter can only encourage cynicism when they seek to cash in on their identities as supporters of free speech but then buckle with something Muskesque comes calling. Thus far, Twitter hasn’t buckled, which is heartening, but since it is a private company, perhaps it is just a matter of time.

Another point that grates at me is that there seems to be little to no acknowledgment in the Hacker News discussions that there are constitutional limits to free speech in all democracies. (Again, there are nearly 4,000 comments on both discussions combined, so I could have missed some.) As Article 19(2) of the Indian Constitution reads:

(2) Nothing in sub-clause (a) of clause (1) shall affect the operation of any existing law, or prevent the State from making any law, in so far as such law imposes reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right conferred by the said sub-clause in the interests of 4[the sovereignty and integrity of India], the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.

Musk has said he wants to take over Twitter because, in a letter he wrote to the company, it “will neither thrive nor serve [its free speech] societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.” He also said separately that “having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilisation”. Yet his own conviction in the virtues of free-speech absolutism has blinded him from seeing he’s simply bullying Twitter into changing its agenda, or that he is bullying its hundreds of millions of users into accepting his.

He also seems unable to acknowledge that “maximally trusted and broadly inclusive” – by which I’m not-so-sure he means both the far-left and the far-right should be allowed to mouth off, without any curbs – points only to one type of social media platform: one that is owned, run and used by the people (Mastodon is one example). As another point from the ‘All In Podcast’ was quoted on the forum: “The elites have somehow inverted history so they now believe that it is not censorship that is the favored tool of fascists and authoritarians, even though every fascist and despot in history used censorship to maintain power, but instead believe free speech, free discourse, and free thought are the instruments of repression.” It’s hard to tell which ‘free speech’ they mean: the one in both the US and India, where it is limited in ways that are designed to protect the safety of the people and their rights, or the lopsided one in Musk’s mind that free speech must be guaranteed in the absolute.

I have no interest in listening to the podcast – but the latter is entirely plausible: while keeping the rest of us occupied with fact-checking The Party’s lies, lodging police complaints against its violent supporters and protecting the rights of the poor and the marginalised, the ministers can run the country in peace.

On the NBDSA opinion against Zee News

On April 5, JNU PhD student Shehla Rashid tweeted that the National Broadcasting and Digital Standards Agency (NBDSA) had ordered Zee News to remove links to a show it had broadcast in November 2020, alleging that Rashid was indulging in “anti-national activities” and that she was “funding terror”.

The program was hosted by Zee News editor-in-chief Sudhir Chaudhary, who, the NBDSA statement found, hadn’t bothered to present Rashid’s defence of herself on the same show nor stopped to check if the claims being made on the show – by Rashid’s father, from whom she her mother and her sister are estranged – were true.

Even if they haven’t watched the show in question, readers of this blog must know by now what its tone, style and decibel-level must have been: shows like this have been regular programming at a clump of pseudo-news-sites trumpeting Hindutva ideals and hate. These outlets deserve without exception to be brought to book by the relevant national institutions, including the NBDSA – even as Rashid added, agreeably, that simply asking hateful content to be taken down from their pages doesn’t suffice. They need to issue public apologies and pay steep fines, say as a fixed percentage of their revenues, for every transgression identified by the NBDSA.

But even as we rejoice – just a little – in the knowledge that the NBDSA had some integrity where many other national institutions haven’t, I wish it had used different language in its statement upbraiding Zee News. Rashid had shared a screenshot of a part of the NBDSA’s statement showing the bottom fifth of one page and the top four-fifths of the next one. In this portion, the NBDSA is concerned repeatedly with the “impartiality and objectivity” and their absence in Zee News’s show. To quote:

With regard to the broadcast, NBDSA was of the view that the issue under consideration is whether the programme lacked objectivity, impartiality, neutrality and whether it violated the complainant’s privacy. NBDSA noted that by allowing the interviewee … the channel had presented only one side of the story. Further, not only had the broadcaster failed to approach the complainant for her version prior to telecasting the impugned programme but bymaking only a fleeting reference to her denial of the allegations, the broadcaster had also failed to adequately present her version. In any case, the Authority noted that to broadcast the version of the complainant available in her social posts was not sufficient compliance of the [Code of Ethics and Broadcasting Standards and] Guidelines.

That Zee News failed to accord any meaningful screen time to Rashid in a programme about slinging mud on her work and views is a cardinal sin. Even if you have a great investigative story on your hands, with documentary evidence for every claim, not giving the implicated parties a chance to defend themselves will only undermine the story. It’s a small step and often an easy one: either the parties will decline comment, as many in India have chosen to do of late, or seize the chance to air their side of the story. This opportunity reflects, among other things, the media’s refusal to serve as an arbiter but also its implicit acknowledgment of the possibility that it its narrative isn’t the ‘ultimate truth’, however that’s defined.

However, the NBDSA has tied this rule to “objectivity”, which doesn’t make sense. This is because Zee News, from its point of view, surely believes that it has been objective: Rashid’s father does hold the views that he does, and Zee News has broadcast them without alterations. There is no violation of objectivity here per se.

Even when unscrupulous outlets like OpIndia quote ministers and government officials spouting hateful rhetoric or articulating policies grounded in dubious assumptions, they are being objective in the sense that these statements do exist – i.e. their existence is a fact – leaving the outlets to simply report these facts to a larger audience. And even if OpIndia, and Zee News for that matter, aren’t objective in other ways (esp. when they publish false news first-hand), the definition of objectivity encompasses the reporting of facts and thus allows them to claim to the consumers of their bilge that they’re being “objective” where others aren’t.

This is how the pursuit of objectivity can be, and often is, anti-democracy. Many feckless (pseudo) news publishers in India have hijacked the false virtue of objectivity to project themselves as the purveyors of ‘real journalism’, while many of the rest of us have allowed them to do so by vying for the same objectivity. We don’t need to be objective; we need to be pro-democracy: the latter compels a greater fidelity to the truth, in substance as well as spirit, that proscribes technicalities of the sort that pro-Hindutva ‘reporters’ have been known to employ.

If the NBDSA had instead pulled up Zee News for not being on the side of democracy, instead of not being on the side of objectivity, (that part of) its statement would have been perfect. It would also have set an important precedent for other news outlets, at least those that are interested and willing, to follow.

Cooperative distrust

Is there a doctrine or manifesto of cooperative distrust? Because I think that’s what we need today, in the face of reams of government data — almost all of it, in fact — that is untrustworthy, and the only way it can support our democracy is if the public response to it (if and when it becomes available in the public domain) is led by cooperative distrust: one and all distrusting it, investigating the specific way in which it has been distorted, undoing that distortion and, finally, reassessing the data.

The distrust here needs to be cooperative not to undermine the data (and thus avoid spiralling off into conspiracies) but to counteract the effects of ‘bad data’ on ethical public governance. There are some things that we the public trust our government to not undercut – but our present one has consistently undercut government while empowering the party whose members occupy it.

In the latest, and quite egregious, example, the Indian government has said an empowered committee it set up during the country’s devastating second COVID-19 outbreak to manage the supply of medical oxygen does not exist. Either the government really didn’t create the committee and lied during the second wave or it created the committee but is desperately trying to hide its proceedings now by lying. Either way, this is a new low. But more pertinently, the government is behaving this way because it seems to be intent on managing each event to the party’s utmost favour – pointing to a committee when having one is favourable, pretending it didn’t exist when it is unfavourable – without paying attention to the implications for the public memory of government action.

Specifically, the government’s views at different points of time don’t – can’t – fit on one self-consistent timeline because its reality in, say, April 2021 differs from its reality in August 2021. But to consummate its history-rewrite, it has some commentators’ help; given enough time, OpIndia and its ilk are sure to manufacture explanations for why there never was a medical oxygen committee. On the other hand, what do the people remember? Irrespective of public memory, public attention is more restricted and increasingly more short-lived, and it has always boded poorly that both sections of the press and the national government have been comfortable with taking advantage of this ‘feature’, for profits, electoral gains, etc.

Just as there is a difference between what the world really looks like and what humans see (with their eyes and brains), there is a significant difference between history and memory. Today, remembering that there was a medical oxygen committee depends simply on recent memory; one more year and remembering the same thing will also demand the inclination to distrust the government’s official line and reach for the history books (so to speak).

But the same government has also been eroding this inclination – with carrots as well as sticks – and it will continue, resulting ultimately in the asymptotic, but fallacious and anti-democratic, convergence of history and memory. Cooperative distrust can be a useful intervention here, especially as a matter of habit, to continuously reconcile history and memory (at least to the extent to which they concern facts) into a self-consistent whole at every moment, instead of whenever an overt conflict of facts arises.

Freatured image credit: geralt/pixabay.

Pandemic: Science > politics?

By Mukunth and Madhusudhan Raman

Former Union health secretary K. Sujatha Rao had a great piece in The Indian Express on January 14, whose takeaway she summarised in the following line:

Science, evidence and data analytics need to be the bedrock of the roll-out policy, not politics and scoring brownie points for electoral advantages.

However, we can’t help but be reminded of the difference between what should be and what will be. We all (at least those of us who have been on the same side since 2014) know what should be. But as we’ve seen with the National Registry of Citizens (NRC), the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) 2019 and most recently the farm laws, our present government doesn’t change its mind.

In the last example, the Supreme Court intervened to stay the laws’ implementation but the mediation committee it put together somehow wound up with most members being known to be sympathetic to the government’s position. So what will be, will be – and this is likely to be true vis-à-vis Covaxin as well.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already guaranteed as much by determining to foot the cost of 5.5 million doses of Covaxin using the PM CARES fund, which lies beyond public oversight. The Central Drug Standards Control Organisation also played its part by pushing through Covaxin’s approval on terms no one has heard of – and which no one can therefore falsify.

However, this isn’t a pitch for a nihilist position. When Sujatha Rao writes that the government should prize science, evidence and data more than politics and elections, she is right – but we must also ask why. The government has clear incentives to prioritise politics. By thrusting Bharat Biotech – Covaxin’s maker – to the forefront, Modi can claim his ‘Atma Nirbhar’ and ‘Make in India’ schemes have been successful. Also, two important state elections are around the corner: West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.

These are issues that people, but especially ‘Middle Indians’, have an eye on and according to which they vote. The government has also said it is approving Covaxin because it is concerned with the ‘UK variant’. While no reason can be good enough to justify the use of a vaccine candidate in the population sans data from phase 3 clinical trials, the government has effectively set up Covaxin to be failure-proof: if it works, it works; if it doesn’t, it becomes the fault of the variant.

Taken together, Modi’s biggest mistake here is criminal negligence – for pushing Covaxin in the absence of efficacy data (which leads to a cascade of ethical dilemmas) – especially since there are fewer questions over Covaxin’s safety. And negligence is a difficult case to stick to this party or in fact to many people.

Granted, public-spirited science teachers, communicators and journalists can take it upon themselves (ourselves) to persuade readers as to why Covaxin’s approval is really bad – that though everything may turn out okay, it sets a terrible precedent for what this government is allowed to do, how such unchecked power may wreak deadly havoc in future crises, and ultimately that we become a people okay with settling for less, increasingly blind to the banal incrementalism of evil.

In fact, if the mainstream press manages to forget concerns about vaccine apartheid within the country, the dominant narrative as the vaccine roll-out is a few months in is going to be: “India is doing just fine, thank you very much.”

But while the Modi government’s actions may only be negligent – albeit criminally so – in the domains of public healthcare and ‘scientific temper’, they amount to something more egregious if we include the political dimensions of our present moment as well.

None of this means words like those of Sujatha Rao are unnecessary. We need to never forget what should be, and we need to keep protesting for our own sakes. (“Protests sometimes look like failures in the short term, but much of the power of protests is in their long-term effects, on both the protesters themselves and the rest of society.” – Zeynep Tufekci) If we don’t, this government might pretend even less than it currently does that it is following some rules or guidelines from time to time.

However, limiting our exhortations to insist at every turn that “science is more important than politics during a pandemic” risks playing down the importance and influence of political motivations altogether – as well as assuming that the state machinery will automatically give way to scientific ones when lives are at stake.

A politician’s principal responsibility is not to govern but to win elections; good governance is a means to this electoral end. And the way people have voted for many decades attests to the reality of this incentive. While this claim may not be palatable from a theoretical point of view, consider it empirically: the Indian government has seldom responded to national crises to the detriment of potential electoral gains. Examples of such crises include the 1962, 1971 and 1999 conflicts, the nuclear tests and economic liberalisation. During the Emergency, the government itself embodied this crisis.

More recently, numerous ministers and diplomats urged the India and Pakistan governments to find diplomatic solutions after the Pulwama attack and also after the questionable Balakot airstrike, in early 2019. In previous years, they had been preceded by the disagreeable events of Aadhaar implementation, demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax. But Modi and his fellows won by a bigger margin in 2019 than they had five years earlier.

This happened partly because his success in elections rests on his impression as the Strongman of India, so his resolutions of choice involve flashy displays of strength and machismo.

Against this background: we need to admit political factors into the conversations we – rather, experts like health policymakers, heads of institutions, epidemiologists, healthcare workers, etc. – have from the beginning, instead of ruing the inevitable influence of politics later, so that we may anticipate it and take advantage of it.

For example, consider the conversation surrounding academic publishing. Academics perform most of the work that goes into publishing an academic paper (research, writing and reviewing). Publishing houses add only marginal value to journals – yet publishers charge exorbitant fees to access the results of publicly funded research once it is published. This is unfair, and many academics have said so.

However, the fact that publishing conglomerates are publicly traded companies whose primary responsibility is to generate profits for their shareholders finds little mention in conversations. In this case, the publishers’ profit-seeking motives are fundamental to the problem at hand – but are often disregarded in the first analysis (what should be) and subsequently bemoaned (what will be). For this to happen once is tragic; for it to repeat itself every few months is wasteful.

Similarly, the nationwide lockdown from March to July 2020 served a political purpose: it was a grand gesture, decisive, appealing to ‘Middle Indians’, in addition to supplying the government a pretext to disband protests against the CAA and the NRC. Just before the lockdown, the public conversation had been centred on what the government should be doing. However, most scientists and economists didn’t engage with the political dimension of this decision.

If we had, we may not have been side-tracked into conversations about weekend curfew versus night curfew, or cash transfers versus vouchers, etc. We would perhaps have recognised that our responsibility is not to operate within the parameters set by the government (“How effective was the lockdown?”) but instead recognise that the government’s decisions are politically motivated – so we can ask “Why lock down in the first place?”

“Enough science.”

Edit, 6.04 pm, December 15, 2020: A reader pointed out to me that The Guardian may in fact have been joking, and it has been known to be flippant on occasion. If this is really the case, I pronounce myself half-embarrassed for having been unable to spot a joke. But only half because it seems like a terrible joke, considering how proximate the real and the surreal having increasingly been, and because I still suspect it isn’t a joke. The astrologer in question is real, so to speak, and I doubt The Guardian wishes to ridicule her so.

From ‘How to watch the Jupiter and Saturn ‘great conjunction’ of 2020′, The Guardian, December 15, 2020:

I don’t know why The Guardian would print something like this. Beyond the shock of finding astrology – especially non-self-deprecating astrology – in the science section, it is outright bizarre for a question in an FAQ in this section to begin with the words ‘Enough science’.

To my mind The Guardian seems guilty of indulging the false balance that science and astrology are equally relevant and useful the same way the New York Times deemed that Democrats and Republicans in the US made equal amounts of sense in 2020 – by failing to find the courage to recognise that one side just wants to be stupid and/or reckless.

But while the New York Times did it for some principle it later discovered might have been wrong, what might The Guardian‘s excuse be? Revenue? I mean, not only has the astrologer taken the great opportunity she has to claim that there are bound to be astrological implications for everything, the astrology being quoted has also been accommodated under a question that suggests science and astrology are on equally legitimate footing.

This view harms science in the well-known way by empowering astrologists and in turn disempowering the tenets of reason and falsifiability – and in a less-known way by casting science in opposition to astrology instead of broaching the idea that science in fact complements the arts and the humanities. Put differently, the question also consigns science to being an oppositional, confrontational, negatory entity instead of allowing it a more amicable identity, as a human enterprise capable of coexisting with many other human enterprises.

For example, why couldn’t the question have been: “With the science, what opportunities might I have as a photographer?”, “With the science, what opportunities might I have as a poet seeking inspiration?” or even “Enough science. Break out the history.” In fact, if with its dogmatism astrology discourages deliberative decision-making and with its determinism suppresses any motivation one might have to remake one’s fate, it stands truly apart from the other things humans do that might serve to uplift them, and make them a better people. It is hard to imagine there is a reason here to celebrate astrology – except capital.

If revenue was really the reason The Guardian printed the astrology question, I admit none of these alternatives would make sense because there is no money in the arts and the humanities. I hope the newspaper will explain as to why this happened, and in the meantime, I think we could consider this a teaching moment on the fleeting yet consequential ways in which capital can shape the public understanding of science.

The ignoble president and the Nobel Prize

What is the collective noun for a group of Nobel laureates? I’m considering ballast. A ballast of Nobel laureates is appealing because these people, especially if they are all white and male, often tend to take themselves too seriously and are taken so by others as well. I’m not saying they tend to say meaningless things but only that they – and we, speaking generally – overestimate the import of their words, mistaking them for substance when more often than not they are just air (often as a result of being dragged into, or being compelled to comment on, matters in which they may not have been involved if they hadn’t received Nobel Prizes).

On September 7, Physics World reported that 81 Nobel laureates had “voiced their support” for Joe Biden ahead of the impending presidential elections in the US. This move, so to speak, echoed a letter authored by a group of 150 or so well-known Indian scientists ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in India. The Indian group had asked that the people “vote wisely”, principally in order to protect constitutional safeguards and against those who violated or would abrogate them. This was sage advice – even though the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose actions and policies in its first term in power from 2014 to 2019 had dismissed just this wisdom, won a thumping majority – but it was jarring on one count.

The letter’s authors taken together constituted an important subset of the national community of scientists – a community that had stayed largely silent through a spate of horrific incidents of violence, harassment and subversion of institutions and people alike for five years or so. Though it was courageous to have spoken up at a crucial moment (even if the letter didn’t directly name the party or those political candidates whose ideologies were evidently opposed to the ethos the letter’s authors advocated), there was a nagging feeling that perhaps it was too little too late. And in a way, it was.

In addition, the advantages of scientists grouping together as such wasn’t clear – if only to me. Scientists are members of society just as much as most other people are. While it makes sense to come together as scientists, especially as scientists in the same field, to oppose or support an idea that defies or benefits that field, to accumulate as scientists to offer advice on a matter that they haven’t spoken up about before and on which they have as much authority as non-scientists sounds like a plea – apart from broadcasting their support for Biden or saying “vote wisely” or whatever – to defer to their especial authority as scientists, in particular as ‘leading scientists’, as they say, or as Nobel laureates, with emphases on the ‘leading’ and ‘Nobel’.

Otherwise, what does a group of scientists really mean? The Nobel laureates who have spoken up now in favour of Biden offer a similarly confusing proposition. The citizens of a democratic country coming together to vote means they are governing themselves. They are engaging in a specifically defined activity part of a suite of processes the traversal of which gives rise to effective, politically legitimate governments. The employees of a factory coming together to protest their wages (while forsaking them) means they are striving to uphold their rights as labourers. Twenty-two people coming onto a large, grassy field to kick one ball around according to a prefixed and predetermined rule-set means they are playing football. What does a group of Nobel laureates coming together to endorse a presidential candidate mean – other than the moment being crafted to attract the press’s attention?

The fact of their being Nobel laureates does not qualify their endorsement for any different or higher recognition than, say, the endorsement of a businessperson, a badminton champion or a poet, or in fact the many, many scientists who are being good in ways that no award can measure. (Whether the laureates themselves aspire to such relevance is moot.) And this is true from both the electoral and civilian perspectives: neither Trump nor Modi are going to rue the lack of scientists’ support if only because, ironically, the scientists would rather wait to organise among themselves on rare occasions instead of speaking up as often as is necessary or even diffuse into the superseding community of ‘protestors’ to oppose injustice. Just as much as a biologist needs to have studied evolution as well as have successfully demonstrated their proficiency in order to be acknowledged as an expert on evolution – so that they may then dispense thoughts and ideas on the topic that could be taken seriously – good political guidance needs to emerge from a similar enterprise, grounded in knowledge of public affairs and civic engagement.

This also means speaking up once in a while can only influence one’s audience so much. Generic appeals to “vote wisely” are well-taken but, considered in context, their potential to change minds is bound to be awfully finite, or even patronising, depending on the context. For example, Physics World quoted Bill Foster, the Democratic representative from Illinois, reportedly the “only physicist in Congress” and the person who canvassed the laureates, saying:

[Asking the laureates to back Biden] was like pushing at an open door. … there was a lot of enthusiasm because of the difference [the laureates] perceive in the scientific understanding [between Biden and Trump]. … They recognise the harm being done by ignoring science in public policy. And it’s not only science; it’s logic and integrity. The scientific community wants to get to a situation in which they trust people’s word. … The only reason we’re in a position to develop vaccines rapidly is decades of scientific research. This may be an opportunity for the scientific community to remind everyone about long-term investment in science.

Foster’s effort is clearly aimed at hitting the limelight – which it did; getting 81 Nobel laureates is more glamorous than getting 81 well-regarded principal investigators, scientist-communicators, lecturers or postdocs. However, the extent to which such an exercise will be able to sway public opinion is hard to say. I personally can’t imagine, assuming for a moment that we are all Americans as well, that I, my father (a libertarian of sorts), my mother (a devout Hindu), one of her brothers (a staunch BJP supporter) or my father’s brother-in-law (a seemingly committed centrist) would ever think, “Oh, a Nobel laureate has vouched for Biden (or a group of scientists have recommended against Narendra Modi). I should think about whether or not I wish to vote for him (or not for the other).”

And while I don’t presume to know why each of these laureates endorsed Biden’s candidature, their combined support – as compiled on Foster’s initiative – together with Foster’s words indicate that the community of laureates is simply looking out for itself, just as much as every other community is, but in its case wielding the COVID-19 pandemic and its ‘pre-approval’ of anything scientific to press its point that Trump, in its view, is not fit to be president. It is easy to agree that Trump should go but impossible to agree that he must go because science is not in charge! Science is not supposed to be in charge; this – whether the US or India – is a democracy, not a scientocracy, and the government constituted by the performance of democratic rights and responsibilities must not function to the exclusion of disciplines, considerations or even knowledge other than those with a scientific basis. The Physics World article also quotes Carol Greider, a 2009 medicine laureate, thus:

[She] asserted that elected leaders “should be making decisions based on facts and science,” adding that she “strongly endorses” Biden, in particular because of his “commitment to putting public health professionals, not politicians, back in charge”.

This is a dangerously sweeping statement. The pandemic has temporarily legitimised a heightened alertness to the prescriptions of science, at pain of death in many cases, but it can be no excuse – even if pandemics are expected to become more common and/or more dangerous – to substitute broad-based decision-making to that based only on “facts and science”, nor to substitute politicians with public health professionals as the people in charge. In fact, and ultimately, if the laureates’ endorsement this year parallels Greider’s thoughts, it would seem there is an opinion among some of these scientists that “facts and science” ought to constitute the foundations of all political decision-making. Many Indian scientists are already of this view.

The social scientist Prakash Kashwan discussed a similar issue in the context of climate geoengineering in The Wire in December 2018; his conclusions, outlined in the short excerpt below, apply just as well to the pandemic:

Decisions about which unresolved questions of geoengineering deserve public investment can’t be left only to the scientists and policymakers. The community of climate engineering scientists tends to frame geoengineering in certain ways over other equally valid alternatives. This includes considering the global average surface temperature as the central climate impact indicator and ignoring vested interests linked to capital-intensive geoengineering infrastructure. This could bias future R&D trajectories in this area. And these priorities, together with the assessments produced by eminent scientific bodies, have contributed to the rise of a de facto form of governance. In other words, some ‘high-level’ scientific pronouncements have assumed stewardship of climate geoengineering in the absence of other agents. Such technocratic modes of governance don’t enjoy broad-based social or political legitimacy.

Yes, pseudoscience during the pandemic is bad; denying the reality of climate change is bad. But speaking out solely against these ills – in much the same way the ‘Marches for Science’ in India have seemed to do, by drawing scientists out onto streets to (rightfully) demand better pay for scientists and more respect for scientific prescriptions even as the community of scientists has not featured prominently in protests against other excesses by the Government of India, especially the persecution of Muslims and Dalits – suggests a refusal to see oneself as citizen first, as being committed to the accomplishment of one’s goals as a scientist ahead of being concerned with direr issues that predominantly affect the minority or, more worryingly, to see in science alone the solutions to all of our social ills. (Young scientists have been the exception by far.)

Disabusing those who cling to this view and persuading them of the reality that their authority is a dream-state maintained by science’s privileged relationship with the modern state and capitalism’s exploitative relationship with the scientific enterprise is a monumental task, requiring decades of sustained interrogation, dialogue and reflection. Thankfully, we have a cheap and very-short-term substitute in our midst for now: on September 9, news reports emerged that a Norwegian politician named Christian Tybring-Gjedde had nominated Trump for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, allegedly for brokering the peace agreement between Israel and the UAE. I really hope the prize-awarding committee takes the nomination seriously and that Trump receives the prize. Irrespective of what consequences such an event will have on American politics, it will be a golden opportunity for the world – and especially India – to see that the Nobel Prizes are a deeply human and therefore uniquely flawed enterprise, as much as any other award or recognition, that they are capable of being wrong or even just plain stupid.

The Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam did the Nobel Prizes a big favour when he received the physics prize in 1979. But by and large, motivated by Henry Kissinger winning the peace prize six years earlier and Barack Obama doing so in 2009, the popular perception of these prizes has only become increasingly irredeemable since. I have full confidence in His Laureateship Donald J. Trump being able to tear down this false edifice – by winning it, and then endorsing himself.

Retrospective: The Wire Science in 2019

At the start of 2019, The Wire Science decided to focus more on issues of science and society, and this is reflected in the year-end list of our best stories (in terms of traffic and engagement; listed below). Most of our hits don’t belong to this genre, but quite a few do – enough for us to believe that these issues aren’t as esoteric as they appear to be in day-to-day conversations.

Science communication is becoming more important in India and more people are taking to it as a career. As a result, the visibility of science stories in the press has increased. Scientists are also using Facebook and Twitter to voice their views, whether on the news of the day or to engage in debates about their field of work. If you are an English-speaker with access to the internet and a smartphone, you are quite unlikely to have missed these conversations.

Most popular articles of 2019

The Sciences

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The state has become more involved with the R&D establishment, although these engagements have been frequently controversial. In such a time, with so many public institutions teetering on the brink, it is important we ensure science doesn’t become passively pressed into legitimising actions of the state but rather maintains a mutually beneficial relationship that also strengthens the democracy. It is not the prerogative of scientists alone to do this; we must all get involved because the outcomes of science belong to all of us.

To this end, we must critique science, scientists, their practices, our teachers and research administrators, forest officers, conservationists and environmental activists, doctors, nurses, surgeons and other staff, members of the medical industry, spaceflight engineers and space lawyers, rules that control prices and access, examinations and examiners, and so forth. We must question the actions and policies of everyone involved in this knowledge economy. Ultimately, we must ask if our own aspirations are in line with what we as a people expect of the world around us, and science is a part of that.

It would be remiss to not mention the commendable job some other publications have been doing vis-à-vis covering science in India, including The Hindu, The Telegraph, The Print, Mongabay, Indian Express, Dinamalar, etc. Their efforts have given us the opportunity to disengage once in a while from the more important events of the day to focus on stories that might otherwise have never been read.

This year, The Wire Science published stories that interrogated what duties academic and research institutions have towards the people whose tax-money funds them, that discussed more inclusivity and transparency because only a more diverse group of practitioners can ask more diverse questions, and that examined how, though science offers a useful way to make sense of the natural order, it doesn’t automatically justify itself nor is it entitled to the moral higher-ground.

The overarching idea was to ask questions about the natural universe without forgetting that the process of answering those questions is embedded in a wider social context that both supports and informs scientists’ practices and beliefs. There is no science without the scientists that practice it – yet most of us are not prepared to consider that science is as messy as every other human endeavour and isn’t the single-minded pursuit of truth its exponents often say it is.

In these fraught times, we shouldn’t forget that science guided only by the light of logic produces many of the reasons of state. The simplest way science communication can participate in this exercise, and not just be a mute spectator, is by injecting the scientist back into the science. This isn’t an abdication of the ideal of objectivity, even though objectivity itself has been outmoded by the advent of the irrational, majoritarian and xenophobic politics of nationalism. Instead, it is a reaffirmation that you can take science out of politics but that you can’t take politics out of science.

At the same time, the stories that emerge from this premise aren’t entirely immune to the incremental nature of scientific progress. We often have to march in step with the gentle rate at which scientists invent and/or discover things, and the similar pace at which the improvements among them are available to everyone everywhere. This fact offers one downside and one up: it is harder for our output to be noticed in the din of the news, but by staying alert to how little pieces of information from diverse lines of inquiry – both scientific and otherwise, especially from social science – can team up with significant consequence, we are better able to anticipate how stories will evolve and affect the world around them.

We hope you will continue to read, share and comment on the content published by The Wire Science. We have also been publicising articles from other publications and by bloggers we found interesting and have been reproducing (if available) on our website and on our social media platforms in an effort to create an appreciation of science stories beyond the ones we have been able to afford.

On this note: please also donate a sum comfortable to you to support our work. Even an amount as little as Rs 200 will go a long way.

The Wire
December 26, 2019

My country is burning. Why should I work?

A few days ago, I found asking myself the following question: My country is burning, why should I work? I ended up with some (admittedly inchoate) thoughts, delineated below.

I’m trying to fight off this abject helplessness I’m feeling and edit some science articles, and failing. I’m not able to justify to myself why I shouldn’t drop everything and rush to Delhi (at this time, the violence at Jamia Milia Islamia is about to peak). At the same time, deep in my heart and mind, I know there must be some reason to persevere with what one likes to do and is interested in doing instead of rushing to the frontlines at every sign of trouble.

Somewhere in this maze of thoughts, there is sure to be an illustrative story about duty and country – about the insidious diminishment of one endeavour in favour of another. Yes, we must resist the forces of tyranny and fascism, but there is less and less freedom to choose any forms of resistance other than pouring out on the streets, raising your hands and shouting slogans.

I have nothing against peaceful protest but I have everything against how other forms of protest have been rendered less useful, or entirely meaningless, largely by the same entity whose institutional violence instigated these protests in the first place. This isn’t a question of convenience but of effectiveness: If many of us are out protesting on the street, how many among us are there because other forms of resistance no longer work?

With notable exceptions, the press these days comprises organisations ranging from supine to malicious. Democratic institutions, like many lower courts, various government bodies and even the executive, have been press-ganged into the national government’s majoritarian agenda. The polarisation in many spaces has become so sharp and the political opposition so negligible that it seems nearly impossible to counter India’s extreme-right politics with anything but politics of other extremes.

In such a time, what does it mean to focus on science communication? To be clear: I don’t mean focusing on science communication (or any endeavour not apparently connected to the maintenance of a democracy) instead of protesting. I mean joining a protest in the morning and editing science articles in the evening. That is, where in your work lies the justification to do what you’re doing, simply because you’ve always liked doing it, and which empowers you the same way a resistance movement empowers its participants (at least if you believe you shouldn’t have to protest in order to express your participation and involvement in the country’s wellbeing)?

There is a terribly clichéd example from a previous era: that of starving children in Africa. But in that case, resolution was very easy to access. More recently and closer home, every time ISRO launches satellites to the Moon and Mars, some people in India complain that the country should focus on fixing smaller problems first. Here, too, the road to clarity is evident, if somewhat meandering, taking recourse through economic principles, technological opportunities and a bit of common sense.

However, going from science communication to resisting fascism seems more difficult than usual, although I refuse to admit it’s impossible. There must be a way.

A friend recently told me, “The onslaught on science and reason is part of the fascist agenda, too, and that must be resisted.” Indeed, this is an important perspective… but somehow it also seems insufficient because – again – the tunnel from ‘critical thinking’ to ‘healthy democracy’ has caved in. The one from ‘curious about the world’ to ‘healthy democracy’ is not even on the map, as if we are forgetting that the right to information is one of the foundational principles of a functional democracy, and that science since the early 20th century at least has been one of the dominant ways to obtain such information.

Sharing the ways in which science astonishes us as much as interrogating its practice well would in many ways allow us to explore modern society, its organisational principles, and our relationship(s) with reality.

At a colloquium in August last year, Raghavendra Gadagkar, the noted ecologist at IISc, Bengaluru, described two periods that background the practice of science communication: wartime, when it is deployed with uncommon urgency and specificity of purpose, often to beat back a troublesome claim or belief, and peacetime, when it narrates various kinds of stories united only broadly in theme and often in pedagogic form.

The issue a ‘burning country’, or the world for that matter, brings to the fore is with peacetime science communication and its perceived relevance. In India at least, the simplistic notions that the fascist narrative often reduces more nuanced arguments to present themselves to the typical reader in too many ways for scientists and its communicators to grapple by themselves. When they do, it’s most likely during wartime, and their – our – heightened effectiveness during these episodes of engagement, such as it is, could mislead us into believing science communication is effective and necessary, an impression bolstered by quantitative metrics.

Our effectiveness depends on two things: the circumstances and the culture. The circumstances of communication are in our hands, such as the language, topic, presentation, etc. Subversive, small-minded politics erodes the culture, reducing the extent to which good science journalism is in demand and pushing its place in the public conversation to the margins. Science communication in this scenario becomes an esoteric specialisation treated with special gloves in the newsroom and as an optional extra by the readership.

This in turn is why if science journalism, or journalism of any sort, is to be effective during wartime, it must be kept up during peacetime as well. All science writers, reporters, editors and communicators should help in the fight against rhetoric that would reduce a multifaceted issue into a unidimensional one, that would flatten the necessary features of scientific progress into technological questions.

We need to preserve the value of good science journalism in peacetime as well, but thanks to the unfortunate sensationalist tendencies of journalism, often (but not always) motivated by commerce, such resistance will require more strength and imagination than is apparent.

One battle at a time.

Irrespective of whether you have joined the protests, you must at all other times – through your work, actions and words – keep authoritarian and/or reductive narratives at bay. It’s because this and other similar modes of resistance have been annulled that a physical protest, one of whose strengths lies in numbers, has become the most viable and thus the dominant display of opposition. It needn’t be.

Standing in this moment and looking back at the last few years, some of us (depending on where our ideological, political and moral axes intersect) see a landscape mutilated by the slow violence of right-wing nationalism, and the Citizenship Amendment Act as the absolute last straw. I, a science journalist, am protesting every day – beyond the protests themselves – by reviving the formerly straightforward connections from curiosity and critical thinking to a plural, equitable, just and secular democracy.

False equivalency

Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post on August 16:

Does finding these powerful ways to frame the [Charlottesville] situation amount to abandoning journalistic impartiality?

“The whole doctrine of objectivity in journalism has become part of the [media’s] problem,” Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, said this week in a talk at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York. He believes that journalists must state their biases up front and not pretend to be magically free of the beliefs or assumptions that everyone has.

If objectivity is a “view from nowhere,” it may be out of date. What’s never out of date, though, is clear truth-telling.

Journalists should indeed stand for some things. They should stand for factual reality. For insistence on what actually happened, not revisionism. For getting answers to questions that politicians don’t want to answer.

On point.

On the “view from nowhere”, a coinage of the philosopher Thomas Nagel, from Rosen’s blog:

In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position “impartial.” Second, it’s a means of defense against a style of criticism that is fully anticipated: charges of bias originating in partisan politics and the two-party system. Third: it’s an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view.

The traditional sides that reporters have been used to for many decades have, in these fractious times, been destabilised. One side – usually framed in the context of partisan politics – has been increasingly coming off as unhinged, almost depraved. In the US, this side is epitomised by its president, Donald Trump. In India, this side is that of the political right, the one occupied by the incumbent national government and in particular the politico-religious organisations backing it: the VHP, the RSS, etc.

Sullivan writes that Trump’s tacit support for the neo-Nazis and pro-Confederate forces at Charlottesville should put an end to false equivalency in journalism once and for all. She’s absolutely correct – just as we must put an end to ‘striving for objectivity’ within all of journalism itself. This said, one of her statements struck me as odd:

Journalists should indeed stand for some things. They should stand for factual reality. For insistence on what actually happened, not revisionism. For getting answers to questions that politicians don’t want to answer.

There are four sentences in this statement, and they progressively segue from being applicable to all of journalism to being applicable in a particular context, that of politics. And through this progression, I think some of the power of what she’s asking for, hoping for, is being lost. ‘Getting answers to questions politicians don’t want to answer’ is not so much a tenet of journalism (although arguably it is for adversarial journalism) as much as a narrative arc, and it doesn’t always conflict with equivalency, false or otherwise. Sullivan’s framing as a result seems to be a proxy for the belief that false equivalency is a problem only in national-level political coverage.

It is not.

At least not in the Indian context, where politics of one kind or other permeates our lives all the time. Even my writing on this blog is political in a sense because it is a display of social and economic privilege, no matter how subtle or unprovocative, and what advice I have to dispense out of this blog has to be – and will be – viewed through that lens. This is because there is more than just economic or even racial inequality in India: there are class- and caste-conflicts, linguistic chauvinism, a tacit north-south divide, and even an urban-rural split (typified by most mainstream media coverage).

A big problem in Indian journalism is the lack of representation of Dalits: there are no Dalits covering the news, at least not in any of the major media houses that publish content in English. Yet Dalits around the country are being mistreated by the government, the violence against them passively condoned. How this affects what we write might be apparent when covering politics or issues like agricultural distress and labour – but there is danger in assuming that it doesn’t affect how we cover science, for example (I’m a science writer).

Scientific facts could be ‘hard’ facts and writing/reporting about them is easier by a degree for this reason. When covering phenomenological developments – such as in physics and chemistry – you’re often either completely right or completely wrong. But the moment you step away from (at least classical) phenomena and turn your gaze onto human beings, you also give way for multiple truths to prevail, depending on the contexts in which you’re framing your narrative.

A popular example is in education. Well-staffed English-medium schools are less affordable than schools of other kinds in the country, and this creates a distortion in the demographic of scientists who eventually graduate from such a system. And if some of these scientists eventually argue against the quota system in Indian universities because it is limiting the number of ‘talented-enough’ students who graduate and work in their labs, they are both right and wrong – more likely neither and floating in the pea soup that is affirmative action.

Another example, and one of my pet peeves, is the representation of institutions in science journalism. When covering topics like stem-cell or molecular biology, political ecology, etc., many journalists quote scientists from one of three institutions (to establish authority in their stories): NCBS, IISc and ATREE. While researchers from these institutions might be doing good work and, more importantly, willing to speak to journalists, increasingly speaking only to them and playing up only their ideas may or may not create an imbalance of importance – but the journalist’s abdication of her responsibility to seek out scientists from other parts of the country definitely creates the impression that nobody else is doing good work in X area.

… and I could go on.

Circling back to Rosen’s and Sullivan’s comments: journalists should surely stand for factual reality. But it need not – and should not – be under the banner of objectivity. Similarly, the ‘view from nowhere’ does not exist because ‘nowhere’ does not exist. Where monopolar facts do prevail and feed into, say, sociological issues, their truth-value could remain at 1 but their relationship with social realities could simultaneously be in flux. In other words, right/wrong cannot be the sole axis on which journalists navigate reality; there is also the more-correct/less-correct axis (and possibly many others). And together, they can and do give rise to complex stories.

Recommended reading: To stop superstition, we need viable ethical perspectives, not more science, The Wire

Bitcoins and the landscape of internet commerce

In a previous post, I’d laid out the technical details of what goes into mining and transacting with bitcoins (BTC). My original idea was to talk about why they are an important invention, but also felt that the technology mattered enough to merit a post of its own.

BTCs are not a fiat currency. That means they’re a kind of money that has not acquired its value from a government, a government-backed organization or a law. Instead, BTCs acquire their value by assuring security, anonymity and translatability, and are most suited for performing transactions that could do without incompetent interference from banks and public bodies. In short, BTCs are not government-backed.

They’re ‘produced’ by users who have a piece of open source code using which they perform multiple encryptions to ‘mine’ a coin. The rest of the network then checks the validity of the coin using similar encryptions. There’s a mediating regulatory system that’s purely algorithmic, and it automatically and continuously adjusts the difficulty of mining a coin until all 21 million have been mined.

The technical intricacies behind the currency have built up to provide the virtual currency with some critical features that have, in the recent months, made BTCs both a currency and a commodity.

Bitcoins are different because they’re made differently

The commodity value rests in its currency value (and some speculative value), which isn’t just a number but a number and some implications. The number, of course, is somewhere around $124 for 1 BTC today (June 2, 2013). The implications are that you don’t have to reveal your identity if you’re an owner of BTCs. This is partly because the currency has no central issuing authority that’s regulating its flow, therefore no body that wants to know how the coins are being used and by whom.

Think World of Warcraft and in-game money: You play the game, you make some, you hoard and safeguard it. Now, imagine if you could use this money in the real world. That’s what BTCs are.

As a collateral, you also get to transfer coins anonymously. You do this between what are called wallets, each of which contains ‘addresses’ to locations on the web; each address contains some bitcoins.

The technical architecture is such that once coins are sent, they stay sent; there’s no way to reverse the transaction other than by initiating a new one. There are also far fewer security concerns than those tagging along with offline currencies, such as forgery and material damage. BTCs simply exist as a string of numbers and characters on the internet. Their veracity is established by the mining network.

They are also invisible to banks and taxmen. Why are they invisible to banks? Because the implied authority of BTCs arises from its ‘democratically’ secured birth and distribution, and doesn’t need an institution like the bank to verify its validity, nor, as a result, will it be subject to a processing fee (the ‘democracy’ is ironic because there’s no one to take the blame when something about the coins goes wrong). Why are they invisible to taxmen? Because they are not issued by a government.

Thus, on the upside, there is no authority that can debase the currency, mishandle it out of greed or just plain incompetence, nor lend it out in waves with no thought spared for the reserves. As Warren Buffet wrote in 2012: “Governments determine the ultimate value of money, and systemic forces will sometimes cause them to gravitate to policies that produce inflation. From time to time such policies spin out of control.”

The threat of deflation

On the downside, because of the anonymity and irreversibility of transactions, and if your system is left vulnerable to a hack while you take a nap, your BTCs can be stolen from your wallet forever, with no way to find out who took them. However, this is only a minor glitch in the bitcoins system; an even larger one is the threat of deflation.

At the moment, there are some 11 million BTCs already mined, with the remaining 10 million to be mined by 2025. Even by about 2020-2022, the supply of BTCs as regulated by the network will become so low as to be, for all practical purposes, considered constant. By then, price discovery would’ve matured, and speculations diminished, so that each coin will then have an almost fixed, instead of constantly increasing, price-tag. This process will also be aided by scale.

Unfortunately, if, by then, millions use BTCs, the absence of anyone to issue new units would lead to spiking demand and, thus, value, resulting in an enormous deflation of commodities. And in a deflationary environment, economies don’t grow; this is where a primitive crypto-currency differs from government-issued notations of currency (this is also what happened in 1636). So, a widespread adoption of BTCs is not a good thing, but it’s a good place to start thinking what about currencies needs to be fixed.

An ideal currency, for example, might be able to transcend borders and appeal to things other than nationality to be held valuable, like BTCs can be converted into a host of other currencies, and even be used to denote value in different countries simultaneously.

For instance, a service titled Mt. Gox operates out of the US that lets you convert dollars into BTCs. However, ever since the FBI decided to crack down on the system because it was a violation of federal law for individuals to create private currency systems, Mt. Gox has necessitated photographic identities of its users since May 30, which defeats the central purpose. Of course, Gox’s faulty policies that made it harder to obtain coins were also to blame. The moral’s that they’re attracting the wrong kind of attention and that makes them even less attractive an asset.

Lighting the way ahead

At the end of the day, BTCs offer a lot of promise about refining future payments. Extensions to it likeZerocoin assist in the preservation of anonymity even if it has been violated by government interference. In the future, BTCs might even tear down paywalls and boost trade. Even fight spam (by making you pay a thousandth of a BTC to a receiver every time you sent out a mail. If you sent out a billion, you’d have paid up – all without the hassle of using a credit card)!

At the moment, though, bitcoins are assailed by important flaws as well as heady speculation that’s driving their mining, but they’re showing the way ahead well enough.

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This post first appeared, as written by me, on The Copernican science blog on June 2, 2013.