Tag: Reddit

Why not increase ISRO’s budget?

This post is in response to a question on Reddit about why the Indian government won’t increase ISRO’s space budget.

There’s a good analogy in India’s research budget. As a share of the GDP, the national expenditure on R&D has fallen significantly since 1996, to the current value of around 0.65%. The world’s other ‘science superpowers’ – including the US, China, Germany, and South Korea – spend at least 2% of their GDP on R&D. Many experts have also said publicly that earmarking this fraction of the GDP for R&D may be a prerequisite for India’s desire to become an economically developed national by 2047. But this is one half of the story. The other half is that the Ministry of Science & Technology has consistently underspent the amount the Ministry of Finance has been allocating it.

One established reason for underspending is that there are too few avenues for uptake, meaning the ministry needs to setup those opportunities as well. In 2018, the then principal scientific advisor to the government, K. VijayRaghavan, had articulated something similar in an interview – two days ahead of India’s ‘March for Science’, an event that philosopher Sundar Sarukkai had criticised earlier for pushing the notion that more funding for science (participants wanted the government to spend 3% of the GDP on R&D) could halt the spread of pseudoscientific ideas in society.

It’s the same with ISRO. While there’s a reasonable case to be made to increase spending on space-related activities, we also need the right industries and research opportunities to exist and which demand that money. It’s possible to contend that this is really a chicken-and-egg problem and that by increasing spending, institutions and activities can, say, become more efficient and allow members of the extant workforce to ‘look’ for new opportunities to begin with. But the cycle needs to be broken somewhere, and as things stand, it’s not unreasonable for funds to be released as and when the right opportunities arise.

ISRO’s lack of effective PR or media outreach offers a good illustration: many observers and commentators have pointed at NASA’s higher budget (in absolute numbers) and then at its admirable outreach policies and programme as if to say the two are related. However, throwing more money at ISRO and asking it to set up an outreach unit will still only produce a less-than-mediocre effort because we’ll be attempting to improve outreach without enhancing the culture in which the need for such outreach is rooted.

A similar argument goes for claims about ISRO employees being ‘underpaid’: who decides their salaries and why are they what they are? I doubt the salaries haven’t been increased for want of funds – speaking to a recurring motif in India’s research administration. Setting aside the concerns about underspending and utilisation efficiency, India’s spending on R&D is low not because the government doesn’t have the money. It certainly does, and in the last decade alone has repeatedly allocated very large sums for certain technologically intensive enterprises (and puff projects to inflate the ruling party’s reputation) when they present the right, even if short-sighted, appeal.

As publicly funded R&D institutions go, ISRO is among the most efficiently organised and run in India, even if it isn’t perfect. This backdrop merits examining the cases to increase its capital expenses (for missions, etc.) and revenue expenses (for salaries, etc.) separately. In this post I’m skipping the latter.

The practice of funding mission proposals on a case-by-case basis rather than hiking overall allocation makes more sense because such a thing would force ISRO, and the Department of Space (DoS) ecosystem more broadly, into a culture of pitching ideas to the government and awaiting deliberation and approval. In fact, currently, the DoS is overseen by the prime minister and missions have to be approved by the Union Cabinet, which is also an iffy setup. If this individual and/or their party puts politics before country, we are liable to have politically advantageous missions funded even when they lack proportionate scientific and/or societal value.

Instead, there needs to be an expert committee in between ISRO and the Cabinet whose members vote on proposals before forwarding the winning ones to the Cabinet. This committee needs to be beyond the DoS’s remit as well as be empowered to resist political capture. Such a setup is the way to go now that ISRO is starting on very expensive and sophisticated missions like human spaceflight, space stations, reusable launch vehicles, and lunar sample-return.

(* In a previous version of this post, I also suspected the Indian and the US governments have allocated comparable fractions of their GDP for their respective space departments. I subsequently stood corrected.)

The Wolfram singularity

I got to this article about Stephen Wolfram’s most recent attempt to “revolutionise” fundamental physics quite late, and sorry for it because I had no idea Wolfram was the kind of guy who could be a windbag. I haven’t ever had cause to interact with his work or his software company (which produced Wolfram Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha), so I didn’t know really know much about him to begin with. But I expected him, for reasons I can’t explain, to be more modest than he comes across as in the article.

The article was prompted in the first place by a preprint paper Wolfram and a colleague published earlier this year in which they claimed they had plotted a route to a fundamental theory of everything. Physics currently explains the universe with a combination of multiple theories that don’t really fit together. A ‘theory of everything’ is the colloquial name of a universal theory that many physicists argue exist and which could explain everything about the universe in a self-consistent manner.

Wolfram’s preprint paper was startling as things go not because of its substance but because a) he made no attempts to engage with the wider community of physicists that has been working on the same problem for decades, and b) for Wolfram’s insistence that those dismissing its conclusions are simply out to dismiss him. Consider the following portions:

“I do fault myself for not having done this 20 years ago,” the physicist turned software entrepreneur says. “To be fair, I also fault some people in the physics community for trying to prevent it happening 20 years ago. They were successful” [emphasis added].

“The experimental predictions of [quantum physics and general relativity] have been confirmed to many decimal places—in some cases, to a precision of one part in [10 billion],” says Daniel Harlow, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “So far I see no indication that this could be done using the simple kinds of [computational rules] advocated by Wolfram. The successes he claims are, at best, qualitative.” …

“Certainly there’s no reason that Wolfram and his colleagues should be able to bypass formal peer review,” Katie Mack says. “And they definitely have a much better chance of getting useful feedback from the physics community if they publish their results in a format we actually have the tools to deal with.”

Reading of this attitude brought to mind an episode from six or seven weeks ago, after a pair of physicists had published a preprint paper modelling the evolution of the COVID-19 epidemic in India and predicting that multiple lockdowns instead of just one would work better. The paper was one of many that began to show up around that time, each set of authors fiddling with different parameters according to their sense of the world to reach markedly different conclusions (a bit of ambulance-chasing if you ask me).

The one by the two physicists was singled out for bristling criticism by other physicists because – quite like the complaints against Wolfram – their paper allegedly described a model that seemed to be able to reach any conclusion if you tweaked its parameters enough, and because the duo hadn’t clarified this and other important caveats in their interviews to journalists.

Aside 1 – In physics at least, it’s important for theories to be provable in some domains and falsifiable in others; if a theory of the world is non-falsifiable, it’s not considered legitimate. In Wolfgang Pauli’s famous words, it becomes ‘not even wrong’.

Aside 2 – Incidentally, Harlow – quoted above from the article – was one of the physicists defending physicists’ freedom to model what they will but agreed with the objection that they also need to be honest with journalists about their assumptions and caveats.

In a lengthy Facebook discussion that followed this brouhaha, someone referred to a Reddit post created three days earlier in which a physicist appealed to his peers to stop trying to model the pandemic – in his words, to “cut that shit out” – because a) no physicist could hope to do a better job than any other trained epidemiologist, and b) every model a physicist attempted could actually harm lives if it wasn’t done right (and there was a good chance it was at least incomplete).

Wolfram is guilty of the same thing: his preprint paper won’t harm lives, but the mortal threat is the only thing missing from his story; it’s otherwise rife with the same problems. His hubristic remark in the article’s denouement – that he deserves “better” questions than the ones other physicists were asking him in response to his “revolutionary” paper – indicates Wolfram thinks he’s done a great job but it’s impossible to see people like him as anything more than windbags convinced of their intellectual superiority and ability to singlehandedly wrestle hideously intractable problems to the ground. I, and likely other editors as well, have glimpsed this attitude on the part of some authors who dismiss criticism of their pieces as criticism of anything but their unclear writing, and some others who refuse to be disabused of a conviction that their conclusion is particularly fascinating.

I’d like to ask Wolfram what I’d like to ask these people as well: What have you hit on that you think others haven’t in all this time, and why do you think all of them missed it? Granted, everyone is allowed their ‘eureka’ moment, but anyone who claims it on the condition that he not be criticised is not likely to be taken seriously. More importantly, he may not even deserve to be taken seriously if only because, to adapt Mack’s line of reasoning, he undermines the very thing on which modern science is founded, the science he claims to be improving: processes, not outcomes; involving communities, not individuals.

Featured image credit: Anna Shvets/Pexels.