pseudoscience – Page 3

Firstpost’s selfish journalism

I’m sure you’ve heard of the concept of false balance, which is based on the conviction that there are two sides to every story even when there aren’t or when it’s not clear to anyone what the other side is. I’m also sure you’re aware of how journalism based on false balance can legitimise fake news and pseudoscience, as we used to see so often with climate change until the mid-2010s.

The problem with believing there exists a balance between two viewpoints where there is actually none is rooted in the belief that both points are equally valid, which in turn is rooted in ignorance and/or prejudice. However, it would appear there is another form of false-balance reportage that is rooted in selfishness and/or apathy – one where a publication publishes an article that, at some point, acknowledges that A and B are not equally valid but whose headline and lede declare that they are. Here’s a fresh example from Firstpost:

The lede goes thus:

After months of delay in its launch, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said that the country’s second moon mission — the Rs 800 crore ‘Chandrayaan-2’ — is designed to hunt for deposits of Helium-3 — a waste-free nuclear energy that could answer many of Earth’s energy problems.

Chandrayaan 2 isn’t going to prospect the Moon for helium-3, or any other potential sources of clean energy for that matter, if only because we don’t have the wherewithal to use such materials to produce energy. Second, the problem with C2, as with many of ISRO’s space science missions at the moment, is that there is no roadmap. I don’t know what or who Firstpost‘s sources were for it to have pieced together this BS.

However, after talking about this as if any of it made sense, the article quotes my article in The Wire to say “even if we are successful in bringing back huge deposits of Helium-3 from the moon, we are far away from having the technology to harness it”.

So what has Firstpost done here? a) It reignited the pseudo-debate over ISRO’s non-existent plans to mine the Moon for helium-3; b) it re-legitimised Sivan’s, and others’, ridiculous point of view that India should lead the way in this endeavour; and, most importantly, c) it cashed in on the fallacy even as it suggested it may have recognised that the helium-3 story is erected entirely on speculation and daydreams.

In effect, this is nauseatingly selfish and, insofar as it is journalism, apathetic. It does not have the public interest in mind; in fact, it completely disregards it. And in case someone demands to know how I can claim to know better than K. Sivan, who claimed last year that it’s important for India to be at the forefront of helium-3 mining, only that anecdote about what Bertrand Russell – a staunch atheist – would say should he come face to face with god comes to mind: “Well, I would say that you did not provide much evidence.”

Myth of harmful cell phone radiation is good business for IndiGo

When I fly, I always fly IndiGo. They’re not perfect but they and their services have become familiar, from their website (where I book my tickets) to when I exit the airport at my destination. The efficiency with which the IndiGo staff works – rather the economy of processes they follow – has seemed well thought-out. (For example, the air hostesses are sweet but the pilot also chips in over the intercom, keeping passengers updated about how high and fast they’re flying, etc.).

On my most recently flight, however, this facade of sanity was disturbed when I saw the following advertisement in their in-flight magazine:

You can see how that’d have gotten my goat. Indio strives to offer a highly optimised journey for the domestic traveller – including a healthy dose of pseudoscience. The funny thing is that the handheld extension plugged into the mobile phone has an electrical and electronic architecture similar to the one working inside the phone; the only difference is the absence of a signal receiver and emitter. It then follows that whatever radiation one is alleging the phone is serving as a hub of is all around us: if your phone is not on a call right now, some other phone in your vicinity surely is.

Cell phone radiation is not harmful because it is not ionising radiation. It’s that simple. Only ionising radiation can harm the body. It’s okay to want to protect yourself from threats but to believe your mobile phone is giving your head or your genitals cancer is stupid. On top of this, the product being advertised – aptly called the Phoni3 – promises to cut out 95% of the nonexistent harmful radiation. *facepalm* This is consumerism at the peak of its sway.

In fact, I’m curious why neither the makers of Phoni3 nor IndiGo saw fit to speak about background radiation. Did you know that the radiation your body is exposed to in the course of a six-hour flight is 444-times higher than the dose it receives if you live within 80 km of a nuclear power plant for a year? The reason we don’t panic is because even this elevated dose poses no danger to the human body. And the reason we don’t see an advertisement for lead-lined jackets or portable Faraday cages to wear/carry during air travel in the in-flight magazine is because it will be bad for business.

But anything short of hurting IndiGo can pass go. To wit, the following message is at the bottom of the same page containing the phone Phoni ad:

The government should ban advertisements for such products if only because, in this specific case, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has been working to dispel beliefs that cell phone radiation is harmful to the body. Unless the civil aviation authority bans such ads, TRAI’s efforts will be in vain. The IndiGo in-flight magazine is available for 180 passengers per flight of an Airbus A320, and the airline flies 131 such flights across the country a day (as of April 10, 2017). That’s more visibility than the TRAI can manage without significant effort.

Featured image credit: Javier Cañada/Unsplash.

The March for Science, ed. 2018

K. VijayRaghavan, India’s new principal scientific advisor to the Government of India, has brought a lot of hope with him into the role as a result of his illustrious career as a biologist and former secretaryship with the Department of Biotechnology. Many stakeholders of the scientific establishment are already looking to him for positive changes in S&T policy, funding and administration in India under a government that, on matters of research and education, has focused on applications, translational research and actively ignored the spread of superstitious ideas in society.

In a recent interview, VijayRaghavan was asked about R&D funding in India. His response is worth noting against the backdrop of a ‘March for Science’ planned across India on April 14. As the interviewer reminds the reader, the 2018 Economic Survey bluntly acknowledged that India was underspending on research. This has also been one of the principal focus areas of the ‘March for Science’ organisers and participants: they have demanded that the Centre hike R&D spending to 3% and education spending to 10%, both as fractions of the GDP, apart from asking the government to stop the spread of superstitious beliefs.

Q: Getting funding for research is widely considered to be a prickly issue. The 2018 Economic Survey stated that India underspends on R&D. Is this a concern at the administration level?

A: These are wrongly posed questions, because it says that should magically the amount of funding go up, then science’s problems would be solved. Or that this is the key impediment. There’s no questions that there’s a correlation between increased R&D funding and innovation in many economies. South Korea is a striking example how high-tech R&D has resulted in transformation in their industries… Have we analysed, bottom-up, what Korea’s spending goes into and what we can learn from that and do afresh? Have we analysed our contest and learnt? …

Now interestingly, top-down this analysis has been done long ago. We as scientists, individuals and as journalists need to see that. The DST, and the DBT, the CSIR, the ICMR all have their plans should they get more resources. You can’t have a top-down articulation of how the resources can come and be used, unless that is also dynamically connected bottom-up.

When I look at 100 cases of why fund-flow is gridlocked, in about 70 cases, it’s poor institutional processes.

March for more than science

After the first Indian ‘March for Science’ happened in August 2017, the government showed no signs of having heard the participants’ claims, or even acknowledged the event. This was obviously jarring but it also prompted conversations about whether the march’s demands were entirely reasonable. Most news reports, include The Wire‘s, had focused on how this was the first outpouring of scientists, school-teachers and students, particularly at this scale. Scrutinising it deeply was taboo because there was some anxiety about jeopardising the need for such a march itself. However, ahead of the second march planned for April 14, it’s worth revisiting.

Sundar Sarukkai, the philosopher, had penned an oped the day after the 2017 march, asking scientists whether they had thought to climb down from their ivory towers and consider that the spread of superstitions in society under the Narendra Modi government may have been because of sociological and cultural reasons, and wasn’t simply a matter of spending more on R&D. Following a rebuttal from Rahul Siddharthan, Sarukkai clarified in The Wire:

Whenever ideal images are constructed (like ideal of woman, ideal of nation, etc.), one should be wary, since any such act is often driven by considerations of power. This ideal image of science too is used to establish science as a powerful agent within modern societies. The use of this ideal image to solve social problems related to caste, religion or hatred of any kind is a red herring. It is like using a hammer to fix a bulb. When we do that, it only means that we are not really interested in solving the problem (fixing the bulb) but more invested in using the method (the hammer) – irrespective of whether it is suitable for the task or not.

The terrible cases of lynching, hatred, oppression and misuse of religion must be unequivocally opposed. For those who are serious about that task, the solution is more important than the method used to achieve it. The categories of the ideal notion of science are applicable primarily to non-human systems. So even if they work well within such systems, there is no reason why they should do so within human systems.

A physicist said something similar to me around the time: that the old uncle preaching the benefits of homeopathy in his living room is doing so not because he doesn’t have access to scientific knowledge. That may be true but what’s more conspicuous by absence is someone in the same room challenging his views, communicating to him without being intimidating or patronising and having a discussion with him about what’s right, what’s wrong and the methods we use to tell the difference. Instead, focusing on making it easier for scientists to become and remain scientists alone will not take us closer to achieving the outcomes the ‘March for Science’ desires.

Sarukkai echoed this point in a comment to The Print: that scientists who march only for science are not doing anything useful, and that they must march against casteism and sexism as well (and social ills outside their labs). Without real change in these social contexts, it’s going to be near-impossible for those deemed less powerful by structures in place in these contexts to challenge the beliefs of those afforded more social authority. Ultimately, effecting such change is not going to be all about money – just as much as more money alone won’t solve anything, just as much as imploring the government to “fix” all these issues by itself will not work either.

This is where VijayRaghavan’s comments about R&D spending fit in. Before we throw more money in the general direction of supporting R&D, its Augean stables will have to be cleaned out and inefficiencies eliminated. One example, apropos VijayRaghavan’s comment about 70% of funds being gridlocked due to “poor institutional processes”, comes immediately to mind.

Sunil Mukhi, a theoretical physicist, wrote in 2008 that when he had been a member of the faculty at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, his station afford him a variety of privileges even as there was “no clear statement of our responsibility or duty to perform, and no consequences for failing to do so”. While he has since acknowledged a potential flaw in his suggested solution, the fact remains that many researchers often laze in prized research positions at well-funded institutes instead of also having to grapple with the teaching and mentorship load prevalent at state universities and colleges.

Additionally, though most people have directed their ire at the government for underfunding R&D, 55% of our R&D expenditure is from the public kitty. Among the ‘superpowers’, China is a distant second at less than 20%. So the marches for science should also ask the private sector to cough up more.

One for all

When the government pulled the financial carpet out from under the feet of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in 2014 and asked its 38 labs to “go fund themselves”, many scientists were aghast that the council was being handicapped even as more money was being funnelled into pseudo-research on cow urine. But there were also many other scientists who said that the CSIR had it coming, that – as a network of labs set up to facilitate applied and translational research – it was bloated, sluggish and ripe for a pruning. Perhaps similar audits, though with ample stakeholder consultations (not the RSS) and without drastic consequences, are due for the national scientific establishment as a whole.

As a corollary, it is also true that every march, protest or agitation undertaken against casteism, sexism, patriarchy, bigotry and zealotry can work in favour of the scientific establishment since what ‘they’ are fighting against is also what scientists, and science journalists, should be fighting against. Access to bonafide scientific ideas should not be solely through textbooks, news articles and freewheeling chats on Twitter. Instead, and irrespective of whether they become available, they should have the option to be availed through the many day-to-day interactions in which we confront structures of caste and class.

For example, there is no reason the person who cleans your toilet should not also cook your dinner. To institute this dumb restriction is to perpetuate caste/class divisions as well as to reject science in the form of hand-wash fluids. For another, there is no reason an employer shouldn’t let their domestic help use the toilet when they need to. However, the practice of expecting those who work in our homes to use separate toilets or be fired still persists, even in a society as ostensibly post-caste as West Bengal’s, demonstrating “the extent to which employer relations with domestic workers continue to be flavoured by caste” – as well as the extent to which we falsely attribute different human bodies with irrational biological threats.

These problems are also relevant to scientists, and must be solved before we can confront the bigger, and more nebulous, order of scientific temper in the country. However, such problems can’t be fixed by scientists and science alone.

It is worth reiterating that the ‘March for Science’ tomorrow is not a lost cause; far from it, in fact. The demand that 3% of GDP be spent on R&D is entirely valid – but it also needs to be accompanied by structural reforms to be completely meaningful. So the march, in effect, is an opportunity to examine the checks and balances of science’s administration in the country, the place of science in society, and introspect on our responsibility to confront a protean problem and not back down in the face of easy solutions. If the solution was as easy as ramping up spending on R&D and education, the problem would have been solved long ago.

The Wire, 13 April 2018.

The language and bullshitness of 'a nearly unreadable paper'

Earlier today, the Retraction Watch mailing list highlighted a strange paper written by a V.M. Das disputing the widely accepted fact that our body clocks are regulated by the gene-level circadian rhythm. The paper is utter bullshit. Sample its breathless title: ‘Nobel Prize Physiology 2017 (for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm) is On Fiction as There Is No Molecular Mechanisms of Biological Clock Controlling the Circadian Rhythm. Circadian Rhythm Is Triggered and Controlled By Divine Mechanism (CCP – Time Mindness (TM) Real Biological Clock) in Life Sciences’.

The use of language here is interesting. Retraction Watch called the paper ‘unreadable’ in the headline of its post because that’s obviously a standout feature of this paper. I’m not sure why Retraction Watch is highlighting nonsense papers on its pages – watched by thousands every day for intriguing retraction reports informed by the reporting of its staff – but I’m going to assume its editors want to help all their readers set up their own bullshit filters. And the best way to do this, as I’ve written before, is to invite readers to participate in understanding why something is bullshit.

However, to what extent do we think unreadability is a bullshit indicator? And from who’s perspective?

There’s no exonerating the ‘time mindness’ paper because those who get beyond the language are able to see that it’s simply not even wrong. But if you had judged it only by its language, you would’ve landed yourself in murky waters. In fact, no paper should be judged by how it exercises the grammar of the language its authors have decided to write it in. Two reasons:

1. English is not the first language for most of India. Those who’ve been able to afford an English-centred education growing up or hail from English-fluent families (or both) are fine with the language but I remember most of my college professors preferring Hindi in the classroom. And I assume that’s the picture in most universities, colleges and schools around the country. You only need access to English if you’ve also had the opportunity to afford a certain lifestyle (cosmopolitan, e.g.).

2. There are not enough good journals publishing in vernacular languages in India – at least not that I know of. The ‘best’ is automatically the one in English, among other factors. Even the government thinks so. Earlier this year, the University Grants Commission published a ‘preferred’ list of journals; only papers published herein were to be considered for career advancement evaluations. The list left out most major local-language publications.

Now, imagine the scientific vocabulary of a researcher who prefers Hindi over English, for example, because of her educational upbringing as well as to teach within the classroom. Wouldn’t it be composed of Latin and English jargon suspended from Hindi adjectives and verbs, a web of Hindi-speaking sensibilities straining to sound like a scientist? Oh, that recalls a third issue:

3. Scientific papers are becoming increasingly hard to read, with many scientists choosing to actively include words they wouldn’t use around the dinner table because they like how the ‘sciencese’ sounds. In time, to write like this becomes fashionable – and to not write like this becomes a sign of complacency, disinterest or disingenuousness.

… to the mounting detriment of those who are not familiar with even colloquial English in the first place. To sum up: if a paper shows other, more ‘proper’ signs of bullshit, then it is bullshit no matter how much its author struggled to write it. On the other hand, a paper can’t be suspected of badness if its language is off – nor can it be called bad as such if that’s all is off about it.

This post was composed entirely on a smartphone. Please excuse typos or minor formatting issues.

The language and bullshitness of ‘a nearly unreadable paper’

However, to what extent do we think unreadability is a bullshit indicator? And from whose perspective?

This post was composed entirely on a smartphone. Please excuse typos or minor formatting issues.

That astrology workshop at the IISc

Couple caveats:

I wrote this post on the night of October 28, before the workshop was cancelled on the morning of October 29. I haven’t bothered to change the tense because issuing this caveat at the top seemed simpler.
A highly edited version of this post was published on The Wire on the morning of October 29. It’s about half as long as the post below, so if you’re looking for a TL;DR version, check that out.

A friend of mine forwarded this to me on October 28:

The poster for IIScAA's astrology workshop

I’m sure you can see the story writing itself: “IISc, a bastion of rational thinking and among the last of its kind in India, has capitulated and is set to host a workshop on astrology – a subject Karl Popper considered the prime example of how pseudoscience should be defined – on November 25. The workshop is being organised by the IISc Alumni Association, and will be conducted by M.S. Rameshaiah, who holds a BE in mechanical engineering from IISc and a PG diploma in patents law from NALSAR. He retired as a scientist from the National Aerospace Laboratories.”

But this is an old point. As R. Prasad, the science editor of The Hindu, wrote on his blog, an astrology workshop popping up somewhere in the country was only a matter of time, not possibility. What’s more interesting is why there’s a hullabaloo and who’s raising it. As the friend who forwarded the poster said, “Hope you guys carry this or put some pressure.”

Prasad’s conversation with Rameshaiah moves along the line of why this workshop has been organised – and this is the line many of us (including myself) would assume at first. IISc is one of India’s oldest modern research institutions. It wields considerable clout as a research and academic body among students, researchers and policymakers alike, and it has thus far remained relatively free of political interference. Its own faculty members do good science and are communicative with the media.

So all together, people who regularly preach the scientific temper and who grapple with scientific knowledge as if it existed in a vacuum like to do so on the back of socially important institutions like the IISc. It’s an easy way out to establish dignity – like how part-time writers often use quotable quotes as if they carry some authority.

The problem is, they don’t. And in the same way, it’s not entirely fair to use the IISc as a champion of the idea of success-through-rationalism because it’s an academic and research institution engaged in teaching its students about the sciences, and it doesn’t teach them by exclusion. It doesn’t teach them by describing what is not science but by inculcating what is.

This, as far as I’m concerned, is the primary issue with Rameshaiah’s workshop: calling astrology a “scientific tool” from within an institution that teaches students, and the people at large, about what science is. If it had been called just a “tool”, there wouldn’t have been (much of) a problem. By attaching the prefix of “science”, Rameshaiah is misusing the name of the IISc to bring credibility to his personal beliefs. The secondary issue is whether IISc stands to lose any credibility by association: of course it does.

So there are two distinct issues to be addressed here:

Of an astrology workshop being hosted by the IISc AA, and
Of an astrology workshop in general

The second issue is arguably more interesting because the first issue seems concerned only with chasing an astrology workshop outside the premises of a research institution. And once it is chased out, can we be sure that the same people will be concerned, especially meaningfully, about quelling all astrology workshops everywhere? I’m not so sure.

Of an astrology workshop in general

While the readers of this blog will agree, as I do, that astrology is not a science, can we agree that it is a “tool”? Again, while the readers of this blog will claim that it is a pseudoscience that, in Popper’s (rephrased) words, “destroyed the testability of their theory in order to escape falsification”, it also bears asking why faith in astrology persists in the first place.

Is it because people have not been informed it’s a pseudoscience or is it because there is no record of their religious beliefs – in which one’s faith in astrology is also embedded – having let them down in the last many generations? To put it in Popper’s terms, astrology may not be falsifiable but how many people are concerned with its falsifiability to begin with?

Many people of the community to which I belong believe in astrology. They are Brahmins, quite well to do, ranging in affluence from the upper middle class to the upper class. Many of them have held positions of power and influence, and many of the same people believe that the alignment of the stars in the sky influences their fortunes. Falsifiability is, to them, an intellectual exercise that doesn’t add to their lives. Astrological beliefs and the actions thus inspired, on the other hand, get them through their days and leave them feeling better about themselves.

Where I see Rameshaiah’s workshop inflicting real damage is not among such people, who can afford to lose some of their money and not have to give a damn. Where the problem comes to be is with subaltern communities – from whom astrology has the potential to siphon limited resources and misappropriate their means to ‘status’ mobility (e.g., according to Prasad, Rameshaiah is charging Rs 2,000 per person for the two-day workshop). Additionally, how such beliefs infiltrate these communities is also worth inspecting. For example, astrology is the stranglehold of Brahmins – and to liberate Dalits from the idea that astrology is a valid method of anything is, in a sense, a fight against casteism.

In the Indian socio-economic system, it’s easier to sink to the bottom than to rise to the top. In such a system, rationalism, some principles from the Bhagavad Gita and hope alone won’t cut it if you’re trying to swim upstream simply because of the number of institutional barriers in your way (especially if you’re also of a lower caste). Consider the list of things to which your access is highly limited: education, credit, housing, sanitation, employment, good health, etc. In this scenario, is it any surprise that no one is concerned about falsification as long as it promises a short way out to the upper strata of society?

Ultimately, and in the same vein, what will be more effective in eliminating belief in astrology is not eliminating astrology itself as much as eliminating one’s vulnerability to it. To constantly talk about eradicating beliefs in pseudoscientific ideas from society is to constantly ignore why these ideas take root, to constantly ignore why scientific ideas don’t inspire confidence – or to constantly assume that they do. On the last count, I’m sure many reasons will spring to mind, among them our education, bureaucracy, politics, culture, etc; pseudoscience only exists in their complex overlap.

This is all the more reason to stop fixating on Rameshaiah’s conducting the workshop and divert our attention to who has decided to attend and why. This is not an IISc course; it’s a workshop organised by the institution’s alumni association and as such is not targeted at scientists (in case the question arose as to why would a layperson approach a scientist for astrological advice). In fact, we’re only questioning the presence of an astrology workshop in the midst of a scientific research institution. We’re not questioning why astrology workshops happen in the first place; we must.

Because if you push Rameshaiah down, then someone else like him is going to pop up in a difference place. This is a time when so many of us seem smart enough to ask questions like “What will air filters do when you’re not addressing the source of pollution” or “Why are you blaming women for putting up lists willy-nilly accusing men of sexual harassment when you realise that due process is a myth in many parts of India and reserved for the privileged where it isn’t”. In much the same way, why isn’t it sensible to ask why people believe in astrology instead of going hammer and tongs with falsification?

Featured image credit: geralt/pixabay.

Impoverishing science by its association with divisive social issues

Instead of insuring them against the vagaries of the seasons, the latest offering from the Ministry of Agriculture is a suggestion that farmers think their seeds into producing more. Agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh said on September 15 that the government was going to put its weight behind ‘Yogic farming’. “The idea behind Yogic farming is to empower the seeds with the help of positive thinking. We should enhance the potency of seeds by rays of parmatma shakti,” Indian Express quoted Singh as saying.

With that, the minister gives himself – as well as his cohort of administrators – a powerful excuse to hide behind when things go wrong: unfalsifiability (which defies testability). If Singh had said farmers ought to acquaint themselves with Yogic farming in order to make themselves feel better, it would’ve been different, and quite in line with the invasive ways in which the government wants to participate in personal self-help. However, in choosing to intervene with an instrument of human welfare, Singh and his ministry have crossed a line, and that in itself is an oddity.

Consider GMO regulation in the country and how it’s at odds with environmental regulations: there is not enough of the socio-political in the processes of the former and too much administrative interference in the latter, especially thanks torepeated subversions of technical expertise of late. Matters on which there is a semblance of scientific consensus are challenged with redundant consultative processes to deplete the science and replace it with public confusion. On the other hand, pseudoscience is used to distract from matters in which public participation is heaving but on which no administrative consensus exists. As a result science, and pseudoscience for its sake, is increasingly becoming associated with divisive social issues (either by its presence out of context or enforced absence).

And on a separate note, Singh’s uttering such a comment isn’t entirely surprising, either. Didn’t he say in July 2015 that 1,400 farmers had died not because of debt or crop failures but because of impotency and love failures?