Tag: science communication

A Q&A about philosophy in journalism

Earlier this year, Varun Bhatta, assistant professor of philosophy at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, reached out to ask me some questions for something he was writing about the representation of philosophical ideas in journalism. He interviewed others as well and subsequently wrote and published his article with The Wire on March 2, 2024.

I’m pasting the conversation the two of us had in full below, with Varun’s permission. Varun also wrote the introductory note, as a preface to the questions. His questions are in bold; my responses are in normal type.

Preface

Newspaper journalists, while writing on a topic, use theories and ideas from history, sociology, economics, sciences and other disciplines to establish the relevance of the topic and analyse the pertinent questions. However, rarely do they draw from philosophical theories that are equally relevant to the topic. Why is it that, for instance, we do not see social/moral/political philosophers’ views also being presented in articles on social topics? Similarly, while presenting a scientific topic, it is not common to find insights from the philosophy of science. Why is that philosophy glaringly absent in newspaper journalism that otherwise seamlessly synthesises views from numerous domains while presenting on a topic?

The non-engagement with philosophy is a characteristic of journalism across the world. There have been a few initiatives – both from journalists and philosophers – to bridge this gap in the Global North. One of the well-known projects in this regard was the column The Stone at the New York Times. Irish Times still runs a philosophy column Unthinkable. There have been very few journalists who have expressed their fruitful engagement with philosophy. (See here and here.) Also, the new kind of journalism brought by Aeon and The Conversation has provided the much-required niche space for philosophy. 

The situation in India, however, is abysmal. Indeed, this is largely due to the poor state of philosophy in India and this is not a new point. However, what is not known is the story from the other side. What is Indian journalists’ perception of philosophy and why is that they do not use philosophy? Regarding this, I want to interview a few print/online newspaper journalists and editors. I am also planning to converse with a few journalism faculty as the non-engagement with philosophy might be a symptom of the journalism curriculum that is largely taught in India.

Understanding the perspectives of journalists, I think, is the first step towards remedying the gap in the Indian context. This can open up the conversation between journalists and philosophers to create meaningful journalism projects to make philosophy relevant to the Indian public.

Q&A

1. Why do you think journalists do not draw from philosophical theories/ideas while analysing a topic and writing articles? I am asking this because online/print newspaper journalists draw from theories/ideas of other disciplines (social sciences, history, sciences) in spite of these being nuanced and complex (for both writers and readers).

It depends what exactly you mean by ‘philosophy’ because from where I’m sitting I disagree with the assertion in your question that Indian journalists don’t use philosophical ideas or theories in their work. They use it both directly and indirectly. They use it directly when making decisions about what kind of events, stories, and phenomena they’d rather cover and why. When I say I’m a journalist biased towards principles encoded in the Indian Constitution, there’s a philosophy of journalism at work there. I’m mindful of the philosophical position of falsifiability when I conclude there’s no point trying to fact-check or rebut a claim like “Sanskrit is a good language for AI”. Journalists use philosophy indirectly when drawing on all those other fields, which have been informed and honed by philosophical deliberations unique to them. For example, a philosophy of history determines how we narrativise the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation in addition to archaeological, genetic, and climatological data.

If your question is why journalists don’t write articles containing ideas from philosophy and the views of philosophers, there are two answers.

First, all journalism needs to be in the public interest, and I’ve no idea a) what a philosophy in the public interest sounds like, which is because I don’t know what constitutes philosophy news, that could lend itself to news reports, news analyses, and news features. Is there a community, collective or organisation of philosophers in India that’s trying to reach out to more people? Where can I engage with an articulation of what I’m missing out on when I skip a comment from a philosopher for a news article? On a related note, many of us in journalism have studied journalism, which is its own field – just like philosophy – with its own tools to develop ways to frame the world, to make sense of it. I have no idea where philosophy is situated here, if at all.

b) Even if I was familiar with what philosophers are experts on, I’d imagine philosophy as a field of study faces the same resistance to being represented in the news as exotic fields (from the PoV of the publics) like high-energy physics or mathematics. When I’m trying to write on the latter, I’m banking on some sort of numerical literacy on the readers’ part. It’s impossible to explain the Langlands programme to someone who doesn’t know (or care) what functions or sets are. I haven’t had the chance to consider the level of philosophical literacy in India but I don’t think it’s very good. So broaching that kind of thinking and reasoning in an article – especially in a news article – requires the author to lay the groundwork first, which is precarious. The more words there are, the more careful you need to be about holding a reader’s attention.

There also need to be concrete developments and they need to be in the public interest, and unless a writer and/or an editor comes along who can extract these nuggets from a paper or in conversation with an expert – and in interesting ways – it’s going to have no engagement. Worse, it’s going to impose a disproportionately high opportunity cost on news-producers’ time and labour by expecting them to be able to separate philosophical wheat from chaff. I believe this goes for both whole articles about philosophy and articles that include philosophical considerations in the mix. The Hindu is trying to step around this ‘concrete developments’ requirement with two daily pages called ‘Text & Context’ and one online-only (for now) science page every weekday. These are both fairly recent developments, which is to say securing such space in a newspaper or any news-focused outlet is difficult and needs the underlying organisation to be ‘healthy’ as well as a sound editorial justification of its own.

We also need to be clear there are differences between newspapers and magazines, their sizes, remits, and frequencies of publication. Publications that take it slower and with more pages than a newspaper – or, more generally, articles that are composed over a longer time (much longer than news reports, of course) and are also lengthier (more than a few hundred words at least) are also likelier to have the time and the room to include philosophical deliberations. This is the sort of room we need (in space and time) to lay the groundwork first. Otherwise, such ideas just vanish under the unforgiving demands of the inverted pyramid.

Now the second answer: If I have to pay a writer Rs 5,000 to write a 1,000-word article about some idea or event that’s of interest in philosophical circles, and I expect (based on historical data) that 10,000 people will engage sincerely with the article, I need each one of those people to be able to readily contribute 50 paise to the publication for me to break even – and this is hard. The size of the engaged audience will actually be more like 1,000, requiring each one of those people to contribute Rs 5. And this is extraordinarily difficult given the prevailing ratios of the sizes of the overall audience, the engaged audience, and the paying audience. Similarly, if I add another page in the newspaper so I can accommodate more philosophy-centred material and charge readers Re 1 extra to pay for it (assuming here that advertisers won’t be interested in advertising on this page), will I have enough new readers to offset those who will stop buying the paper because of the higher cover price? I doubt it.

2. I think the previous question needs to be invoked at the editorial level as well. Given that editors do request the writers to make changes (like including some data on the topic or getting a comment from a particular expert), the absence of philosophy in articles might largely be due to editorial decisions and policies: what is considered as “pertinent”, “readable”, “good” etc. For instance, one of the unsaid editorial policies seems to be that philosophical discussions are best suited for op-ed columns. This kind of presumption has resulted in the ghettoisation of philosophy to certain zones in newspaper journalism.

2a. As an editor, what are your thoughts on the points? What might be the actual, pragmatic challenges journalism faces in this context?

2b. Since editors play an equally important role in “setting the agenda” and changing the reading styles of the public, what might be the ways to overcome these challenges? How to break the wall around philosophy in journalism, so that it can be accommodated/incorporated in mainstream journalism?

Imagine the industry of journalism to be like a wave propagating through a medium. Let’s divide this wave into two parts: the wavefront and the wake. Newsrooms operating at the wavefront are distinguished by the resources to experiment and innovate, take risks, and pay more than competitively for the best exponents of particular skills in the market. Newsrooms in the wake are just about staying profitable (or even breaking even), innovating in incremental fashion, avoiding risks, and trying to pay competitively. Of course neither group is monolithic – most sufficiently large news organisations have some departments that are doing well and some that are fighting to stay alive – but this is a simplification to illustrate a point. I believe your questions are about newsrooms in the wake; they’re definitely more interesting in this context. With this in mind:

2a) Newsrooms need to make money to pay their journalists without compromising editorial independence and editorial standards. This is the single largest challenge right now. In the face of this challenge, especially since the rise of news aggregators and social media platforms as sites of news consumption, so many publications have shut shop, downsized or relinquished independence, or some combination of all three. Once a newsroom’s finances are sufficiently in the green and they can graduate from the wake to the wavefront, pertinence, readability, etc. can and do become the first questions an editor asks. Of course, I may not be saying any of this if the times weren’t what they are.

2b) I’m not sure there’s a wall around journalism that blocks philosophy. In fact journalists don’t have the freedom to choose (or decline, for that matter) what they consider to be ‘news’. But the flip side of this is no particular enterprise can be said to be entitled to a journalist’s attention. The reason this is so is because of how public interest is constructed.

For example, there’s a contest – very simply speaking – these days between a journalism that holds we’re doing the country a disservice by turning our heads away from everything that’s going wrong and another that’s particular about pointing its head in the opposite direction. Another example of a similar contest is centred on whether journalists should make plain their biases – because everyone is biased in some way – or if they should cover the news without losing (a reasonable) equipoise.

In these or any other scenarios, whatever constitutes the public interest is built jointly by journalists and the consumers of the knowledge they produce, and will vary from one publication to the next. The Hindu, The Wire, and The New York Times have different covenants with their readers about what public interest looks like, or ought to look like. The construction of the public interest is a shared and complicated enterprise that takes time.

As a result, most journalism, in the present era at least, follows some publics; journalism doesn’t lead them. This also means – taking all of these business, economic, and social forces together – that when people aren’t interested in philosophy-related matters, there’s not much an editor (in a newsroom-in-the-wake) can do to change that.

3. I need your comment on another editorial decision about the op-ed columns that have a specific implication for the Indian context. One of the ways academic journalism scales up the dissemination is by publishing the articles with Creative Commons licence. For instance, The Conversation and Aeon are using this method. The idea seems to be working very well. Create a niche space for academic journalism that usually does not have space in mainstream journalism and make up for the readership through free or paid syndication. This approach seems to be working well, and has provided a good working model.

However, in an uneven world, this does not favour everyone equally. Given its international scale/level/reach, this works well for the Global North academicians who have access to these platforms. Indian scholars do not have easy access to Aeon or The Conversation. And Indian online platforms have easy access to quality articles without having to deal with Indian scholars.

These issues are pertinent for most of the academicians in India. But I want to articulate the problem from the perspective of philosophy. This method of republishing further widens the gap between philosophers and journalism in India. This way of operating does not provide enough motivation for Indian newspaper editors to work with Indian scholars. In spite of publishing philosophy articles, Indian editors do not seem to be interested/invested in working/collaborating with Indian philosophers and commissioning articles. (Republishing international articles has a further implication: it deepens the imbalance between Western and Eastern philosophical systems.)

Would like to know your comments/thoughts on the above note.

I’m uncomfortable with providing a general comment. Please let me know if you have specific questions.

Free/paid syndication option of articles in international platforms indeed provides straightforward access to quality content for Indian platforms. And given the restriction of resources like time and finances, and largely the dearth of good Indian academicians who can write for the public, it is understandable what the Indian platforms are doing. Having said that, do you agree that there are implications of this shortcut approach? The first implication is about the politics of knowledge and representation, whose views are represented, etc. The second implication is the perpetuation of Indian journalism’s impatience to work with local scholars. If it does not invest and work with, say Indian philosophers, even for op-eds, the problem persists.

I agree wholeheartedly with the first implication. To republish from publications in the US, Europe and the UK that syndicate their articles on a Creative Commons licence is effectively to represent the views of the scholars quoted in those articles – mostly from Global North countries – instead of the views of others, especially those from India (from the PoV of Indian newsrooms and readers). However, it’s important to ask whether this really imposes the sort of opportunity cost that prevents Indian journalists from still trying to work with and represent the views of Indian scholars in other articles. My answer is ‘no’ simply because of the difference in the amount of effort expended in republishing an article and reporting on a scholar’s work, views, etc. Put another way, it takes me a few minutes to identify an article on, say, The Conversation that will work ‘well’ on my site and a few more minutes to republish it. Doing so won’t subtract from the responsibilities of or resources available to a reporter on my team. So if/when a publication says it is making do with stories from The Conversation, the problem arises with people in the newsroom who are choosing not to engage with Indian scholars – irrespective of whether it can or does republish articles from other outlets.

I also want to clarify something about the “dearth of good Indian academicians who can write for the public” in your question: there isn’t so much a dearth of good academicians who can write, there’s a dearth of academicians who believe communication at large is important at all. I’ve been fortunate enough to find more than a few scientists who are eager to write, and to be frank their numbers are increasing, but my experience is that the vast majority of scientists working in India distrust the media too much and/or don’t believe that the scientific work they undertake needs to be communicated to non-scientists – much less that they need to be the ones doing it. (I’m also setting aside the fact that many of the better scientists working in the country also shoulder many responsibilities beyond teaching and research, especially important administrative tasks, and communication – especially of the form that their employers may not recognise when considering people for promotions, etc. – only adds to this burden.) My point here is that the task of finding scientists to write is a lot more arduous than might seem at first glance.

I feel the same way about the second implication you’ve set out in your question: journalists are not impatient per se; what you may perceive as impatience is likelier than not the effect of newsroom mechanics that expect journalists to be productive to a degree that precludes prolonged engagement with scholars. Also, the distinction I pointed out in my first set of replies matters greatly. If you’re writing for a magazine or if you’re writing a news feature, you’ll have the time and the word limit for such engagement. But if you’re writing a news report for a newspaper, you will have neither the time and the word limit for nor – importantly – any expectation from your readers of slow-cooked material in the article. Finally, while I’ve tried to describe what is, I don’t think I’m prepared to call it justification. I think large newsrooms, especially those departments of such newsrooms that are closer to the wavefront than others, should try (honestly) to establish opportunities for slow-cooked material in their products.

Waters and bridges between science journalism and scicomm

On November 24-25, the Science Journalists’ Association of India (SJAI) conducted its inaugural conference at the National Institute of Immunology (NII), New Delhi. I attended it as a delegate.

A persistent internal monologue of mine at the event was the lack of an explicit distinction between science communicators and science journalists. One of my peers there said (among other things) that we need to start somewhere, and with that I readily agree. Subhra Priyadarshini, a core member of SJAI and the leader de facto of the team that put the conference together, also said in a different context that SJAI plans to “upskill and upscale science journalism in India”, alluding to the group’s plans to facilitate a gateway into science journalism. But a distinction may be worthwhile because the two groups seem to have different needs, especially in today’s charged political climate.

Think of political or business journalism, where journalists critique politics or business. They don’t generally consider part of their jobs to be improving political or business literacy or engagement with the processes of these enterprise. On the other hand, science journalists are regularly expected – including by many editors, scientists, and political leaders – to improve scientific literacy or to push back on pseudoscience. (For what it’s worth, pseudoscience isn’t a simple topic, especially against the backdrop of its social origins as well as questions about what counts as knowledge, how it’s created, who creates it, etc.).

When science institutions believe that X is science journalism when it’s in fact Y, then whenever they encounter Y, they’re taken aback, if not just offended. We have seen this with many research institutes whose leaders are friendly with the media when the latter is reporting on the former’s work, but become hostile when journalists start to ask questions about any wrongdoing or controversy. (One talking point supported by people insice NCBS, when the Arati Ramesh incident played out in 2021, was whether the publics are entitled to details of the inner workings of a publicly funded institute.) Scientists should know what science journalism really is, lest they believe it’s a new kind of PR, and change their expectations about the terms on which journalists engage with them.

This recalibration is important now when journalists are expected to bend over or not report on some topics, ideas or people. Are communicators expected to bend over also? I’m not so sure. Journalism is communication plus the added responsibility of abiding by the public interest (which transforms the way the communication happens as well), and the latter imposes demands that often give science journalism its thorn-in-the-side quality.

Understanding what journalism really is could improve relationships between scientists and science journalists, let scientists know why a (critical) journalism of science is as important as the communication of science, and the ways in which both institutions – of science and of journalism – are publicly answerable.

[After a few hours] So does that mean the difference between science journalism and science communication is what scientists understand them to be?

I think accounting for the peculiarities of both space (in India) and time (today) could produce a fairer picture of the places and roles of science journalism and communication. Specifically, that science journalism in India is coming of age at this particular time in history is important, especially because it will obviously evolve to respond to the forces that matter today. Most of all, unlike any other time before, today is distinguished by trivial access to the internet, which gives explainers and communicative writing more weight than before for their ability to be used against misinformation and to temper people’s readiness to consume information on the internet with the (editorial and scientific) expertise and wisdom of communicators and journalists.

The distinction of today also births the possibility of defining Indian science journalism separately from Indian science communication using the matter of their labels, expectations, purposes, and problems.

Labels – ‘Journalism’ and ‘communication’ are fundamentally labels used to describe specific kinds of activities. They probably originated in different contexts, to isolate and identify tasks that, in their respective settings, were unlike other tasks, but that wouldn’t have to mean that once they were transplanted to the science communication/journalism enterprise, they couldn’t have a significant – maybe even self-effacing – overlap. So it may be worthwhile to explore the history of these terms, in India, as it pertains to science journalists.

Expectations – The line between journalism and communication is slender. Many products of science-journalism work are texts that are concerned, to a not-insignificant extent, with communicating science first, with explaining a relevant concept, idea, etc. in its proper technical, historical, social, etc. context. Journalism peels away from communication with the added requirement of being in the public interest, but good communication can be in the public interest as well. (Economics seemed to pose a counter-argument but with a self-undermining component: did science communication in India have such a successful ‘scene’ before science journalism in India became a thing? I have my doubts although I’m not exactly well-informed – but a bigger issue is what editors in and product managers of newsrooms considered ‘science journalism’ to be in the first place. If they conflated it with communication, this counter-example is moot.)

Purposes – What is political journalism a journalism of? (To my mind, the answer to this question needs to be some activity that, when it is performed, would sufficiently qualify the performer as a practitioner of political journalism.) Is it a journalism of political processes, political thought, political outcomes or political leaders? Considering politics is a social enterprise, I think it’s a journalism of our political leaders: stories about these people are the stories about everything else that constitutes politics. Similarly, science journalism can be a journalism of the people of science – and it’s ease to see that, this way, it opens doors to everything from clever science to issues of science and society.

Problems – Journalism and communication may also be distinguished by their specific problems. For journalists, for example, quotes from scientists are more crucial than they are for communicators. Indian science journalism is thus complicated differently by the fact that many scientists don’t wish to speak to members of the press, for fear of being misquoted, of antagonising their bosses (who may have political preferences of their own), of lacking incentives to do so (e.g. “my chances of being promoted don’t increase if I speak to reporters”), and/or of falling afoul of the law (which prohibits scientists at government institutes from criticising government policies in the press). By extension, an association like SJAI that pools journalists (and communicators) together should also be expected to help alleviate journalists’ specific needs.

To its credit, SJAI 2023 did to the extent that it could, and I think will continue to do so; the point is that any other (science-)journalistic body in the country should do so as well and also ensure it doesn’t lose sight of the issues specific to each community.

On Somanath withdrawing his autobiography

Excerpt from The Hindu, November 4, 2023:

S. Somanath, Chairman, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), told The Hindu that he’s withdrawing the publication of his memoir, Nilavu Kudicha Simhangal, penned in Malayalam. The decision followed a report in the Malayala Manorama on Saturday that quoted excerpts from the book suggesting K. Sivan, former ISRO chairman and Mr. Somanath’s immediate predecessor, may have hindered key promotions that Mr. Somanath thought were due.

“There has been some misinterpretation. At no point have I said that Dr. Sivan tried to prevent me from becoming the chairman. All I said was that being made a member of the Space Commission is generally seen as a stepping stone to (ISRO’s chairmanship). However a director from another (ISRO centre) was placed, so naturally that trimmed my chances (at chairmanship),” he told The Hindu, “Secondly the book isn’t officially released. My publisher may have released a few copies … but after all this controversy I have decided to withhold publication.”

I haven’t yet read this book nor do I know more than what’s already been reported about this new controversy. It has been simmering all evening but I assumed that it would simply blow over, as these things usually do, and that the book would be released with the customary pomp. But the book has indeed been withdrawn, which was less surprising than it should have been.

Earlier today, I was reading a paper uploaded on the Current Science website about Gold OA publishing. It was run-of-the-mill in many ways, but one of my peers sent me a strongly worded email decrying the fact that the paper wasn’t explicitly opposed to Gold OA. When I read the paper, I found that the authors’ statements earlier in the paper were quite tepid, seemingly unconcerned about Gold OA’s deleterious effects on the research publishing ecosystem, but later on, the paper threw up many of the more familiar lines, that Gold OA is expensive, discriminatory, etc.

Both Somanath’s withdrawn book and this paper have one thing in common: (potentially) literary laziness, which often speaks to a sense that one is entitled to the benefit of the doubt rather than being compelled to earn it.

Somanath told The Hindu and some other outlets that he didn’t intend to criticise Sivan, his predecessor as ISRO chairman, but that he was withholding the book’s release because some news outlets had interpreted the book in a way that his statements did come across as criticism.

Some important background: Since 2014, ISRO’s character has changed. Earlier journalists used to be able to more easily access various ISRO officials and visit sites of historic importance. These are no longer possible. The national government has also tried to stage-manage ISRO missions in the public domain, especially the more prominent ones like Chandrayaan-2 and -3, the Mars Orbiter Mission, and the South Asia Satellite.

Similarly, there have been signs that both Sivan and Somanath had and have the government’s favour on grounds that go beyond their qualifications and experiences. With Somanath, of course, we have seen that with his pronouncements about the feats of ancient India, etc., and now we have that with Sivan as well, as Somanath says that ISRO knew the Chandrayaan-2 lander had suffered a software glitch ahead of its crash, and didn’t simply lose contact with the ground as Sivan had said at the time. Recall that in 2019, when the mishap occurred, ISRO also stopped sharing non-trivial information about the incident and even refused to confirm that the lander had crashed until a week later.

In this milieu, Sivan and Somanath are two peas in a pod, and it seems quite unlikely to me that Somanath set out to criticise Sivan in public. The fact that he would much rather withhold the book than take his chances is another sign that criticising Sivan wasn’t his goal. Yet as my colleague Jacob Koshy reported for The Hindu:

Excerpts from the book, that The Hindu has viewed, do bring out Mr. Somanath’s discomfort with the “Chairman (Dr. Sivan’s)” decision to not be explicit about the reasons for the failure of the Chandrayaan 2 mission (which was expected to land a rover). The issue was a software glitch but was publicly communicated as an ‘inability to communicate with the lander.’

There is a third possibility: that Somanath did wish to criticise Sivan but underestimated how much of an issue it would become in the media.

Conveying something in writing has always been a tricky thing. Conveying something while simultaneously downplaying its asperity and accentuating its substance or its spirit is something else, requiring quite a bit of practice, a capacity for words, and of course clarity of thought. Without these things, writing can easily miscommunicate. (This is why reading is crucial to writing better: others’ work can alert you to meaning-making possibilities that you yourself may never have considered.) The Current Science paper is similar, with its awkward placement of important statements at the end and banal statements at the beginning, and neither worded to drive home a specific feeling.

(In case you haven’t, please read Edward Tufte’s analysis of the Challenger disaster and the failure of written communication that preceded it. Many of the principles he sets out would apply for a lot of non-fiction writing.)

Somanath wrote his book in Malayalam, his native tongue, rather than in English, with which, going by media interviews of him, he is not fluent. So he may have sidestepped the pitfalls of writing in an unfamiliar language, yet his being unable to avoid being misinterpreted – or so he says – still suggests that he didn’t pay too much attention to what he was putting down. In the same vein, I’m also surprised that his editors at the publisher, Lipi Books in Kozhikode, didn’t pick up on these issues earlier.

Understanding this is important because Somanath writing something and then complaining that it was taken in a way it wasn’t supposed to be taken lends itself to another inference that I still suspect the ruling party’s supporters will reach for: that the press twisted his words in its relentless quest to stoke tensions and that Somanath was as clear as he needed to be. As I said, I haven’t yet read the book, but as an editor (see Q3) – and also as someone for whom checking for incompetence before malfeasance has paid rich dividends – I would look for an intention-skill mismatch first.

Featured image: ISRO chairman S. Somanath in 2019. Credit: NASA.

Neuromorphic hype

We all know there’s a difference between operating an Indica Diesel car and a WDP 4 diesel locomotive. The former has two cylinders and the latter 16. But that doesn’t mean the WDP 4 simply has eight times more components as the Indica. This is what comes to my mind when I come across articles that trumpet an achievement without paying any attention to its context.

In an example from yesterday, IEEE Spectrum published an article with the headline ‘Nanowire Synapses 30,000x Faster Than Nature’s’. An artificial neural network is a network of small data-processing components called neurons. Once the neurons are fed data, they work together to analyse it and solve problems (like spotting the light from one star in a picture of a galaxy). The network also iteratively adjusts the connections between neurons, called synapses, so that the neurons cooperate more efficiently. The architecture and the process broadly mimic the way the human brain works, so they’re also collected under the label ‘neuromorphic computing’.

Now consider this excerpt:

“… a new superconducting photonic circuit … mimics the links between brain cells—burning just 0.3 percent of the energy of its human counterparts while operating some 30,000 times as fast. … the synapses are capable of [producing output signals at a rate] exceeding 10 million hertz while consuming roughly 33 attojoules of power per synaptic event (an attojoule is 10-18 of a joule). In contrast, human neurons have a maximum average [output] rate of about 340 hertz and consume roughly 10 femtojoules per synaptic event (a femtojoule is 10-15 of a joule).”

The article, however, skips the fact that the researchers operated only four circuit blocks in their experiment – while there are 86 billion neurons on average in the human brain working at the ‘lower’ efficiency. When such a large assemblage functions together, there are emergent problems that aren’t present when a smaller assemblage is at work, like removing heat and clearing cellular waste. (The human brain also contains “85 billion non-neuronal cells”, including the glial cells that support neurons.) The energy efficiency of the neurons must be seen in this context, instead of being directly compared to a bespoke laboratory setup.

Philip W. Anderson’s ‘more is different’ argument provides a more insightful argument against such reductive thinking. In a 1972 essay, Anderson, a theoretical physicist, wrote:

“The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. In fact, the more the elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of science, much less to those of society.”

He contended that the constructionist hypothesis – that you can start from the first principles and arrive straightforwardly at a cutting-edge discovery in that field – “breaks down” because it can’t explain “the twin difficulties scale and complexity”. That is, things that operate on larger scale and with more individual parts are physically greater than the sum of those parts. (I like to think Anderson’s insight to be the spatial analogue of L.P. Hartley’s time-related statement of the same nature: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”)

So let’s not celebrate something because it’s “30,000x faster than” the same thing in nature – as the Spectrum article’s headline goes – but because it represents good innovation in and of itself. Indeed, the researchers who conducted the new study and are quoted in the article don’t make the comparison themselves but focus on the leap forward their innovation portends in the field of neuromorphic computing.

Faulty comparisons on the other hand could inflate readers’ expectations about what the outcomes of future innovation could be, and when it (almost) inevitably starts to fall behind nature’s achievements, those unmet expectations could seed disillusionment. We’ve already had this happen with quantum computing. Spectrum‘s choice could have been motivated by wanting to pique readers’ interest, which is a fair thing to aspire to, but it remains that the headline employed a clichéd comparison, with nature, instead of expending more effort and framing the idea right.

The passive voice is political

Eric Martinez, Francis Mollica and Edward Gibson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Edinburgh won an Ig Nobel Prize for literature this year for their work on what makes legal documents so hard to read. Ironically, the abstract of their paper, published in July 2022, is also very hard to read, coming in at 165 words in just five sentences:

Despite their ever-increasing presence in everyday life, contracts remain notoriously inaccessible to laypeople. Why? Here, a corpus analysis (n ≈10 million words) revealed that contracts contain startlingly high proportions of certain difficult-to-process features–including low-frequency jargon, center-embedded clauses (leading to long-distance syntactic dependencies), passive voice structures, and non-standard capitalization–relative to nine other baseline genres of written and spoken English. Two experiments (N=184) further revealed that excerpts containing these features were recalled and comprehended at lower rates than excerpts without these features, even for experienced readers, and that center-embedded clauses inhibited recall more-so than other features. These findings (a) undermine the specialized concepts account of legal theory, according to which law is a system built upon expert knowledge of technical concepts; (b) suggest such processing difficulties result largely from working-memory limitations imposed by long-distance syntactic dependencies (i.e., poor writing) as opposed to a mere lack of specialized legal knowledge; and (c) suggest editing out problematic features of legal texts would be tractable and beneficial for society at-large.

But nitpicks aside, I hope the award will bring more attention to why writing in the passive voice is problematic.

  1. It makes for duller reading.
  2. It glosses over actors who are performing an action and focuses on those on whom the action is being performed.

The first problem is not an opinion: readers like to be able to visualise what they’re reading. It makes reading a more interesting and immersive experience. This is why “show, don’t tell” is always good advice. But when the writer leaves out the performers of an action – everything from day-dreaming to a heist – a part of the picture disappears. The second problem is obviously dangerous but it can also impart the narrative with political overtones that the writer might like to do without. For example, writing “B was hit” instead of writing “A hit B” keeps the focus on the nature of the violence and recipient. A, the perpetrator, stays out of the picture, out of the narrative and out of readers’ conception of what really happened. If a writer intends to keep the focus on B as a way to humanise them, it doesn’t have to come at the cost of forgetting A. The way to construct the identities of A and B is with narrative – and not with grammatical techniques like the passive voice. If all the sentences in a given piece are in the passive voice, it will still be possible to build a narrative that is fair to B and suitably consternated towards A. The inverse is also true: you can write a piece using the active voice in all sentences and still build up to a narrative that’s unfair to B. The passive voice may not compromise your ability to faithfully describe reality but it will get in the way of what the reader takes away. Reading is a psychological experience and every little adjustment matters to whether your attempt to persuade succeeds.

Unfortunately, many science writers in India – especially those who have trained as scientists – employ the passive voice in a way that reveals the clear influence of scientific writing on their brand of English. In scientific writing – i.e. the labour that produces the text in research papers – both narrative and grammatical technique converge on the desirability of removing the scientist, as the performer of an experiment, from the picture. I dislike this sort of writing because a) it’s founded on the premise that the scientist’s identity or choices don’t matter to the experiment’s outcomes, whereas there are several examples in history of researchers’ identities influencing the questions they choose to ask, and answer, and b) as the Ig Nobel Prize has acknowledged, it makes for needlessly difficult reading. And not just me: even scientists have spoken up about how they’re having a harder time making sense of scientific papers. I’ve written before as to why science communication is not an add-on to science itself but a separate enterprise animated by its own skills and goals. Switching from the narrative-grammatical coincidence associated with ‘good science’ to the narrative-grammatical separation is one of the dividing lines. When scientists don’t make this switch, they’re at risk of participating in a communication exercise that’s liable to overlook the relationships between scientists’ identities and their ideas.

Note that, in India, a non-trivial number of people come into sophisticated forms of English use by engaging with the scientific enterprise. When The Wire Science first published its ‘submission guidelines’, some readers told us that our decision to enforce them was unfair because different people write in different ways. I agreed – but didn’t edit them because something someone told me at ACJ still rings true: before you attempt poetry, you must understand grammar so you know how exactly to break it.

Being introduced to English in the walled garden of science habituates people to using English in a certain way – a way that they consider to be good and effective but which is so only in the limited context of scientific work. It fails significantly and repeatedly when writers use it to engage with non-experts from the problems I noted above. It also doesn’t help that the bulk of scientists conducting research in India at the moment are (cis)male and Brahmin, thus not likely to perceive discrimination along these axes, and thus not likely to perceive the need to acknowledge it in the way they use their language. If you had “writing about particle physics” in mind and have been using it to contextualise my arguments, you may not have much luck; instead, I suggest considering “agriculture”, “psychology”, “biomedicine”, “pedagogy” or “astronomy”. (It’s not a coincidence that India’s lower-tech scientific enterprises have been more assailed by such discrepancies.) Irrespective of whether it is good/bad English, the passive voice doesn’t make for good communication. It may not, and never, affect readers’ ability to understand what you alone are communicating, but ditching it for the active voice could a) engender a habit among readers to expect it, and b) encourage other writers to adopt it when they’re writing on topics where the difference is crucial.

On anticipation and the history of science

In mid-2012, shortly after physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe had announced the discovery of a particle that looked a lot like the Higgs boson, there was some clamour in India over news reports not paying enough attention or homage to the work of Satyendra Nath Bose. Bose and Albert Einstein together developed Bose-Einstein statistics, a framework of rules and principles that describe how fundamental particles called bosons behave. (Paul A.M. Dirac named these particles in Bose’s honour.) The director-general of CERN, the institute that hosts the LHC, had visited India shortly after the announcement and said in a speech in Kolkata that in honour of Bose, he and other physicists had decided to capitalise the ‘b’ in ‘boson’.

It was a petty victory of a petty demand, but few realised that it was also misguided. Bose made the first known (or at least published) attempts to understand the particles that would come to be called bosons – but neither he nor Einstein anticipated the existence of the Higgs boson. There have also been some arguments (justified, I think) that Bose wasn’t awarded a Nobel Prize for his ideas because he didn’t make testable predictions; Einstein received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1915 for anticipating the photoelectric effect. The point is that it was unreasonable to expect Bose’s work to be highlighted, much less attributed, as some had demanded at the time, every time we find a new boson particle.

What such demands only did was to signal an expectation that the reflection of every important contribution by an Indian scientist ought to be found in every major discovery or invention. Such calls detrimentally affect the public perception of science because they are essentially contextless.

Let’s imagine that discovery of the Higgs boson was the result of series of successes, depicted thus:

O—o—o—o—o—O—O—o—o—O—o—o—o—O

An ‘O’ shows a major success and an ‘o’ shows a minor success, where major/minor could mean the relative significance within particle physics communities, the extent to which physicists anticipated it or simply the amount of journal/media coverage it received. In this sequence, Bose’s paper on a certain class of subatomic particles could be the first ‘O’ and the discovery of the Higgs boson the last ‘O’. And looking at this sequence, one could say Bose’s work led to a lot of the work that came after and ultimately led to the Higgs boson. However, doing that would diminish the amount of study, creativity and persistence that went into each subsequent finding – and would also ignore the fact that we have identified only one branch of endeavour, leading from Bose’s work to the Higgs boson, whereas in reality there are hundreds of branches crisscrossing each other at every o, big or small – and then there are countless epiphanies, ideas and flashes, each one less the product of following the scientific method and more of a mysterious combination of science and intuition.

By reducing the opportunity to celebrate Bose’s work by pointing to just the Higgs boson point on the branch, we lose the opportunities to know and celebrate the importance of Bose’s work for all the points in between, but especially the points that we still haven’t taken the trouble to understand.

Recently, a couple people forwarded to me a video on WhatsApp of an Indian-American electrical engineer named Nisar Ahmed. I learnt when in college (studying engineering) that Nisar Ahmed was the co-inventor, along with K. Ramamohan Rao, of the direct cosine transform, a technique to transmit a given amount of information using fewer bits than those contained in the information itself. The video introduced Ahmed’s work as the basis for our being able to take video-conferencing for granted; direct cosine transform allows audiovisual data to be compressed by two, maybe three orders of magnitude, making its transmission across the internet much less resource-intensive than if it had to be transmitted without compression.

However, the video did little to address the immediate aftermath of Ahmed’s and Rao’s paper, the other work by other scientists that built on it, as well as its use in other settings, and rested on the drawing just one connection between two fairly unrelated events (direct cosine transform and their derivatives, many of them created in the same decade, heralded signal compression, but they didn’t particularly anticipate different forms of communication).

This flattening of the history of science, and technology as the case may be, may be entertaining but it offers no insights into the processes at work behind these inventions, and certainly doesn’t admit any other achivements before each development. In the video, Ahmed reads out tweets by people reacting to his work as depicted on the show This Is Us. One of them says that it’s because of him, and because of This Is Us, that people are now able to exchange photos and videos of each other around the world, without worrying about distance. But… no; Ahmed himself says in the video, “I couldn’t predict how fast the technology would move” (based on his work).

Put it simply, I find such forms of communication – and thereunto the way we are prompted to think about science – objectionable because they are content with ‘what’, and aren’t interested in ‘when’, ‘why’ or ‘how’. And simply enumerating the ‘what’ is practically non-scientific, more so when they’re a few particularly sensational whats over others that encourage us to ignore the inconvenient details. Other similar recent examples were G.N. Ramachandran, whose work on protein structure, especially Ramachandran plots, have been connected to pharmaceutical companies’ quest for new drugs and vaccines, and Har Gobind Khorana, whose work on synthesising RNA has been connected to mRNA vaccines.

The problem with rooting for science

The idea that trusting in science involves a lot of faith, instead of reason, is lost on most people. More often than not, as a science journalist, I encounter faith through extreme examples – such as the Bloch sphere (used to represent the state of a qubit) or wave functions (‘mathematical objects’ used to understand the evolution of certain simple quantum systems). These and other similar concepts require years of training in physics and mathematics to understand. At the same time, science writers are often confronted with the challenge of making these concepts sensible to an audience that seldom has this training.

More importantly, how are science writers to understand them? They don’t. Instead, they implicitly trust scientists they’re talking to to make sense. If I know that a black hole curves spacetime to such an extent that pairs of virtual particles created near its surface are torn apart – one particle entering the black hole never to exit and the other sent off into space – it’s not because I’m familiar with the work of Stephen Hawking. It’s because I read his books, read some blogs and scientific papers, spoke to physicists, and decided to trust them all. Every science journalist, in fact, has a set of sources they’re likely to trust over others. I even place my faith in some people over others, based on factors like personal character, past record, transparency, reflexivity, etc., so that what they produce I take only with the smallest pinch of salt, and build on their findings to develop my own. And this way, I’m already creating an interface between science and society – by matching scientific knowledge with the socially developed markers of reliability.

I choose to trust those people, processes and institutions that display these markers. I call this an act of faith for two reasons: 1) it’s an empirical method, so to speak; there is no proof in theory that such ‘matching’ will always work; and 2) I believe it’s instructive to think of this relationship as being mediated by faith if only to amplify its anti-polarity with reason. Most of us understand science through faith, not reason. Even scientists who are experts on one thing take the word of scientists on completely different things, instead of trying to study those things themselves (see ad verecundiam fallacy).

Sometimes, such faith is (mostly) harmless, such as in the ‘extreme’ cases of the Bloch sphere and the wave function. It is both inexact and incomplete to think that quantum superposition means an object is in two states at once. The human brain hasn’t evolved to cognate superposition exactly; this is why physicists use the language of mathematics to make sense of this strange existential phenomenon. The problem – i.e. the inexactitude and the incompleteness – arises when a communicator translates the mathematics to a metaphor. Equally importantly, physicists are describing whereas the rest of us are thinking. There is a crucial difference between these activities that illustrates, among other things, the fundamental incompatibility between scientific research and science communication that communicators must first surmount.

As physicists over the past three or four centuries have relied increasingly on mathematics rather than the word to describe the world, physics, like mathematics itself, has made a “retreat from the word,” as literary scholar George Steiner put it. In a 1961 Kenyon Review article, Steiner wrote, “It is, on the whole, true to say that until the seventeenth century the predominant bias and content of the natural sciences were descriptive.” Mathematics used to be “anchored to the material conditions of experience,” and so was largely susceptible to being expressed in ordinary language. But this changed with the advances of modern mathematicians such as Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz, whose work in geometry, algebra, and calculus helped to distance mathematical notation from ordinary language, such that the history of how mathematics is expressed has become “one of progressive untranslatability.” It is easier to translate between Chinese and English — both express human experience, the vast majority of which is shared — than it is to translate advanced mathematics into a spoken language, because the world that mathematics expresses is theoretical and for the most part not available to our lived experience.

Samuel Matlack, ‘Quantum Poetics’, The New Atlantic, 2017

However, the faith becomes more harmful the further we move away from the ‘extreme’ examples – of things we’re unlikely to stumble on in our daily lives – and towards more commonplace ideas, such as ‘how vaccines work’ or ‘why GM foods are not inherently bad’. The harm emerges from the assumption that we think we know something when in fact we’re in denial about how it is that we know that thing. Many of us think it’s reason; most of the time it’s faith. Remember when, in Friends, Monica Geller and Chandler Bing ask David the Scientist Guy how airplanes fly, and David says it has to do with Bernoulli’s principle and Newton’s third law? Monica then turns to Chandler with a knowing look and says, “See?!” To which Chandler says, “Yeah, that’s the same as ‘it has something to do with wind’!”

The harm is to root for science, to endorse the scientific enterprise and vest our faith in its fruits, without really understanding how these fruits are produced. Such understanding is important for two reasons.

First, if we trust scientists, instead of presuming to know or actually knowing that we can vouch for their work. It would be vacuous to claim science is superior in any way to another enterprise that demands our faith when science itself also receives our faith. Perhaps more fundamentally, we like to believe that science is trustworthy because it is evidence-based and it is tested – but the COVID-19 pandemic should have clarified, if it hasn’t already, the continuous (as opposed to discrete) nature of scientific evidence, especially if we also acknowledge that scientific progress is almost always incremental. Evidence can be singular and thus clear – like a new avian species, graphene layers superconducting electrons or tuned lasers cooling down atoms – or it can be necessary but insufficient, and therefore on a slippery slope – such as repeated genetic components in viral RNA, a cigar-shaped asteroid or water shortage in the time of climate change.

Physicists working with giant machines to spot new particles and reactions – all of which are detected indirectly, through their imprints on other well-understood phenomena – have two important thresholds for the reliability of their findings: if the chance of X (say, “spotting a particle of energy 100 GeV”) being false is 0.27%, it’s good enough to be evidence; if the chance of X being false is 0.00006%, then it’s a discovery (i.e., “we have found the particle”). But at what point can we be sure that we’ve indeed found the particle we were looking for if the chance of being false will never reach 0%? One way, for physicists specifically, is to combine the experiment’s results with what they expect to happen according to theory; if the two match, it’s okay to think that even a less reliable result will likely be borne out. Another possibility (in the line of Karl Popper’s philosophy) is that a result expected to be true, and is subsequently found to be true, is true until we have evidence to the contrary. But as suitable as this answer may be, it still doesn’t neatly fit the binary ‘yes’/’no’ we’re used to, and which we often expect from scientific endeavours as well (see experience v. reality).

(Minor detour: While rational solutions are ideally refutable, faith-based solutions are not. Instead, the simplest way to reject their validity is to use extra-scientific methods, and more broadly deny them power. For example, if two people were offering me drugs to suppress the pain of a headache, I would trust the one who has a state-sanctioned license to practice medicine and is likely to lose that license, even temporarily, if his prescription is found to have been mistaken – that is, by asserting the doctor as the subject of democratic power. Axiomatically, if I know that Crocin helps manage headaches, it’s because, first, I trusted the doctor who prescribed it and, second, Crocin has helped me multiple times before, so empirical experience is on my side.)

Second, if we don’t know how science works, we become vulnerable to believing pseudoscience to be science as long as the two share some superficial characteristics, like, say, the presence and frequency of jargon or a claim’s originator being affiliated with a ‘top’ institute. The authors of a scientific paper to be published in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology write:

We identify two critical determinants of vulnerability to pseudoscience. First, participants who trust science are more likely to believe and disseminate false claims that contain scientific references than false claims that do not. Second, reminding participants of the value of critical evaluation reduces belief in false claims, whereas reminders of the value of trusting science do not.

(Caveats: 1. We could apply the point of this post to this study itself; 2. I haven’t checked the study’s methods and results with an independent expert, and I’m also mindful that this is psychology research and that its conclusions should be taken with salt until independent scientists have successfully replicated them.)

Later from the same paper:

Our four experiments and meta-analysis demonstrated that people, and in particular people with higher trust in science (Experiments 1-3), are vulnerable to misinformation that contains pseudoscientific content. Among participants who reported high trust in science, the mere presence of scientific labels in the article facilitated belief in the misinformation and increased the probability of dissemination. Thus, this research highlights that trust in science ironically increases vulnerability to pseudoscience, a finding that conflicts with campaigns that promote broad trust in science as an antidote to misinformation but does not conflict with efforts to install trust in conclusions about the specific science about COVID-19 or climate change.

In terms of the process, the findings of Experiments 1-3 may reflect a form of heuristic processing. Complex topics such as the origins of a virus or potential harms of GMOs to human health include information that is difficult for a lay audience to comprehend, and requires acquiring background knowledge when reading news. For most participants, seeing scientists as the source of the information may act as an expertise cue in some conditions, although source cues are well known to also be processed systematically. However, when participants have higher levels of methodological literacy, they may be more able to bring relevant knowledge to bear and scrutinise the misinformation. The consistent negative association between methodological literacy and both belief and dissemination across Experiments 1-3 suggests that one antidote to the influence of pseudoscience is methodological literacy. The meta-analysis supports this.

So rooting for science per se is not just not enough, it could be harmful vis-à-vis the public support for science itself. For example (and without taking names), in response to right-wing propaganda related to India’s COVID-19 epidemic, quite a few videos produced by YouTube ‘stars’ have advanced dubious claims. They’re not dubious at first glance, if also because they purport to counter pseudoscientific claims with scientific knowledge, but they are – either for insisting a measure of certainty in the results that neither exist nor are achievable, or for making pseudoscientific claims of their own, just wrapped up in technical lingo so they’re more palatable to those supporting science over critical thinking. Some of these YouTubers, and in fact writers, podcasters, etc., are even blissfully unaware of how wrong they often are. (At least one of them was also reluctant to edit a ‘finished’ video to make it less sensational despite repeated requests.)

Now, where do these ideas leave (other) science communicators? In attempting to bridge a nearly unbridgeable gap, are we doomed to swing only between most and least unsuccessful? I personally think that this problem, such as it is, is comparable to Zeno’s arrow paradox. To use Wikipedia’s words:

He states that in any one (duration-less) instant of time, the arrow is neither moving to where it is, nor to where it is not. It cannot move to where it is not, because no time elapses for it to move there; it cannot move to where it is, because it is already there. In other words, at every instant of time there is no motion occurring. If everything is motionless at every instant, and time is entirely composed of instants, then motion is impossible.

To ‘break’ the paradox, we need to identify and discard one or more primitive assumptions. In the arrow paradox, for example, one could argue that time is not composed of a stream of “duration-less” instants, that each instant – no matter how small – encompasses a vanishingly short but not nonexistent passage of time. With popular science communication (in the limited context of translating something that is untranslatable sans inexactitude and/or incompleteness), I’d contend the following:

  • Awareness: ‘Knowing’ and ‘knowing of’ are significantly different and, I hope, self-explanatory also. Example: I’m not fluent with the physics of cryogenic engines but I’m aware that they’re desirable because liquefied hydrogen has the highest specific impulse of all rocket fuels.
  • Context: As I’ve written before, a unit of scientific knowledge that exists in relation to other units of scientific knowledge is a different object from the same unit of scientific knowledge existing in relation to society.
  • Abstraction: 1. perfect can be the enemy of the good, and imperfect knowledge of an object – especially a complicated compound one – can still be useful; 2. when multiple components come together to form a larger entity, the entity can exhibit some emergent properties that one can’t derive entirely from the properties of the individual components. Example: one doesn’t have to understand semiconductor physics to understand what a computer does.

An introduction to physics that contains no equations is like an introduction to French that contains no French words, but tries instead to capture the essence of the language by discussing it in English. Of course, popular writers on physics must abide by that constraint because they are writing for mathematical illiterates, like me, who wouldn’t be able to understand the equations. (Sometimes I browse math articles in Wikipedia simply to immerse myself in their majestic incomprehensibility, like visiting a foreign planet.)

Such books don’t teach physical truths; what they teach is that physical truth is knowable in principle, because physicists know it. Ironically, this means that a layperson in science is in basically the same position as a layperson in religion.

Adam Kirsch, ‘The Ontology of Pop Physics’, Tablet Magazine, 2020

But by offering these reasons, I don’t intend to over-qualify science communication – i.e. claim that, given enough time and/or other resources, a suitably skilled science communicator will be able to produce a non-mathematical description of, say, quantum superposition that is comprehensible, exact and complete. Instead, it may be useful for communicators to acknowledge that there is an immutable gap between common English (the language of modern science) and mathematics, beyond which scientific expertise is unavoidable – in much the same way communicators must insist that the farther the expert strays into the realm of communication, the closer they’re bound to get to a boundary beyond which they must defer to the communicator.

Scicommers as knowledge producers

Reading the latest edition of Raghavendra Gadagkar’s column in The Wire Science, ‘More Fun Than Fun’, about how scientists should become communicators and communicators should be treated as knowledge-producers, I began wondering if the knowledge produced by the latter is in fact not the same knowledge but something entirely new. The idea that communicators simply make the scientists’ Promethean fire more palatable to a wider audience has led, among other things, to a belief widespread among scientists that science communicators are adjacent to science and aren’t part of the enterprise producing ‘scientific knowledge’ itself. And this perceived adjacency often belittles communicators by trivialising the work that they do and hiding the knowledge that only they produce.

Explanatory writing that “enters into the mental world of uninitiated readers and helps them understand complex scientific concepts”, to use Gadagkar’s words, takes copious and focused work. (And if it doesn’t result in papers, citations and h-indices, just as well: no one should become trapped in bibliometrics the way so many scientists have.) In fact, describing the work of communicators in this way dismisses a specific kind of proof of work that is present in the final product – in much the same way scientists’ proofs of work are implicit in new solutions to old problems, development of new technologies, etc. The knowledge that people writing about science for a wider audience produce is, in my view, entirely distinct, even if the nature of the task at hand is explanatory.

In his article, Gadagkar writes:

Science writers should do more than just reporting, more than translating the gibberish of scientists into English or whatever language they may choose to write in. … Science writers are in a much better position to make lateral comparisons, understand the process of science, and detect possible biases and conflicts of interest, something that scientists, being insiders, cannot do very well. So rather than just expect them to clean up our messy prose, we should elevate science writers to the role of knowledge producers.

My point is about knowledge arising from a more limited enterprise – i.e. explanation – but which I think can be generalised to all of journalism as well (and to other expository enterprises). And in making this point, I hope my two-pronged deviation from Gadagkar’s view is clear. First, science journalists should be treated as knowledge producers, but not in the limited confines of the scientific enterprise and certainly not just to expose biases; instead, communicators as knowledge producers exist in a wider arena – that of society, including its messy traditions and politics, itself. Here, knowledge is composed of much more than scientific facts. Second, science journalists are already knowledge producers, even when they’re ‘just’ “translating the gibberish of scientists”.

Specifically, the knowledge that science journalists produce differs from the knowledge that scientists produce in at least two ways: it is accessible and it makes knowledge socially relevant. What scientists find is not what people know. Society broadly synthesises knowledge from information that it weights together with extra-scientific considerations, including biases like “which university is the scientist affiliated with” and concerns like “will the finding affect my quality of life”. Journalists are influential synthesisers who work with or around these and other psychosocial stressors to contextualise scientific findings, and thus science itself. Even when they write drab stories about obscure phenomena, they make an important choice: “this is what the reader gets to read, instead of something else”.

These properties taken together encompass the journalist’s proof of work, which is knowledge accessible to a much larger audience. The scientific enterprise is not designed to produce this particular knowledge. Scientists may find that “leaves use chlorophyll to photosynthesise sunlight”; a skilled communicator will find that more people know this, know why it matters and know how they can put such knowledge to use, thus fostering a more empowered society. And the latter is entirely new knowledge – akin to an emergent object that is greater than the sum of its scientific bits.

On the lab-leak hypothesis

One problem with the debate over the novel coronavirus’s “lab leak” origin hypothesis is a problem I’m starting to see in quite a few other areas of pandemic-related analysis and discussion. It’s that no one will say why others are wrong, even as they insist others are, and go on about why they are right.

Shortly after I read Nicholas Wade’s 10,000-word article on Medium, I pitched a summary to a medical researcher, whose first, and for a long time only, response was one word: “rubbish”. Much later, he told me about how the virus could have evolved and spread naturally. Even if I couldn’t be sure if he was right, having no way to verify the information except to bounce it off a bunch of other experts, I was sure he thought he was right. But how was Wade wrong? I suspect for many people the communication failures surrounding this (or a similar) question may be a sticking point.

(‘Wade’, after the first mention, is shorthand for an author of a detailed, non-trivial article that considers the lab-leak hypothesis, irrespective of what conclusion it reaches. I’m cursorily aware of Wade’s support for ‘scientific racism’, and by using his name, I don’t condone any of his views on these and other matters. Other articles to read on the lab-leak topic include Nicholson Baker’s in Intelligencer and Katherine Eban’s in Vanity Fair.)

We don’t know how the novel coronavirus originated, nor are we able to find out easily. There are apparently two possibilities: zoonotic spillover and lab-leak (both hypotheses even though the qualification has been more prominently attached to the latter).

Quoting two researchers writing in The Conversation:

In March 2020, another article published in Nature Medicine provided a series of scientific arguments in favour of a natural origin. The authors argued: The natural hypothesis is plausible, as it is the usual mechanism of emergence of coronaviruses; the sequence of SARS-CoV-2 is too distantly related from other known coronaviruses to envisage the manufacture of a new virus from available sequences; and its sequence does not show evidence of genetic manipulation in the laboratory.

Proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis (minus the outright-conspiratorial) – rather more broadly the opponents of the ‘zoonotic-spillover’-evangelism – have argued that lab leaks are more common than we think, the novel coronavirus has some features that suggest the presence of a human hand, and a glut of extra-scientific events that point towards suspicious research and communication by members of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

However, too many counterarguments to Wade’s and others’ articles along similar lines have been to brush the allegations aside, as if they were so easily dismissed – like my interlocutor’s “rubbish”. And it’s an infuriating response. To me at least (as someone who’s been at the receiving end of many such replies), it smacks of an attitude that seems to say (a) “you’re foolish to take this stuff seriously,” (b) “you’re being a bad journalist,” (c) “I doubt you’ll understand the answer,” and (d) “I think you should just trust me”.

I try not to generalise (c) and (d) to maintain my editorial equipoise, so to speak – but it’s been hard. There’s too much of too many scientists going around insisting we should simply listen to them, while making no efforts to ensure non-experts can understand what they’re saying, much less admitting the possibility that they’re kidding themselves (although I do think “science is self-correcting” is a false adage). In fact, proponents of the zoonotic-spillover hypothesis and others like to claim that their idea is more likely, but this is often a crude display of scientism: “it’s more scientific, therefore it must be true”. The arguments in favour of this hypothesis are also being increasingly underrepresented outside the scientific literature, which isn’t a trivial consideration because the disparity could exacerbate the patronising tone of (c) and (d), and render scientists less trustworthy.

Science communication and/or journalism are conspicuous by absence here, but I also think the problem with the scientists’ attitude is broader than that. Short of engaging directly in the activities of groups like DRASTIC, journalists take a hit when scientists behave like pedagogic communication is a waste of time. More scientists should make more of an effort to articulate themselves better. It isn’t wise to dismiss something that so many take seriously – although this is also a slippery slope: apply it as a general rule, and soon you may find yourself having to debunk in great detail a dozen ridiculous claims a day. Perhaps we can make an exception for the zoonotic-spillover v. lab-leak hypotheses contest? Or is there a better heuristic? I certainly think there should be one instead of having none at all.

Proving the absence is harder than proving the presence of something, and that’s why everyone might be talking about why they’re right. However, in the process, many of these people seem to forget that what they haven’t denied is still firmly in the realm of the possible. Actually, they don’t just forget it but entirely shut down the idea. This is why I agree with Dr Vinay Prasad’s words in MedPage Today:

If it escaped due to a wet market, I would strongly suggest we clean up wet markets and improve safety in BSL laboratories because a future virus could come from either. And, if it was a lab leak, I would strongly suggest we clean up wet markets and improve safety in BSL 3 and 4 … you get the idea. Both vulnerabilities must be fixed, no matter which was the culprit in this case, because either could be the culprit next time.

His words provide an important counterweight of sorts to a tendency from the zoonotic-spillover quarter to treat articles about the lab-leak possibility as a monolithic allegation instead of as a collection of independent allegations that aren’t equally unlikely. For example, the Vanity Fair, Newsweek and Wade’s articles have all also called into question safety levels at BSL 3 and 4 labs, whether their pathogen-handling protocols sufficiently justify the sort of research we think is okay to conduct, and allegations that various parties have sought to suppress information about the activities at such facilities housed in the Wuhan Institute.

I don’t buy the lab-leak hypothesis and I don’t buy the zoonotic-spillover hypothesis; in fact, I don’t personally care for the answer because I have other things to worry about, but I do buy that the “scientific illiberalism” that Dr Prasad talks about is real. And it’s tied to other issues doing the rounds now as well. For example, Newsweek‘s profile of DRASTIC’s work has been a hit in India thanks to the work of ‘The Seeker’, the pseudonym for a person in their 20s living in “Eastern India”, who uncovered some key documents that cast suspicion on Wuhan Institute’s Shi Zhengli’s claims vis-à-vis SARS-CoV-2. And two common responses to the profile (on Twitter) have been:

  1. “In 2020, when people told me about the lab-leak hypothesis, I dismissed them and argued that they shouldn’t take WhatsApp forwards seriously.”
  2. “Journalism is redundant.”

(1) is said as if it’s no longer true – but it is. The difference between the WhatsApp forwards of February-April 2020 and the articles and papers of 2021 is the body of evidence each set of claims was based on. Luc Montagnier was wrong when he spoke against the zoonotic-spillover hypothesis last year simply because his reasoning was wrong. The reasons and the evidence matter; otherwise, you’re no better than a broken clock. Facile WhatsApp forwards and right-wingers’ ramblings continue to deserve to be treated with extreme scepticism.

Just because a conspiracy theory is later proven to have merit doesn’t make it not a conspiracy theory; their defining trait is belief in the absence of evidence. The most useful response, here, is not to get sucked into the right-wing fever swamps, but to isolate legitimate questions, and try and report out the answers.

Columbia Journalism Review, April 15, 2020

The second point is obviously harder to fight back, considering it doesn’t stake a new position as much as reinforces one that certain groups of people have harboured for many years now. It’s one star aligning out of many, so its falling out of place won’t change believers’ minds, and because the believers’ minds will be unchanged, it will promptly fall back in place. This said, apart from the numerous other considerations, I’ll say investigations aren’t the preserve of journalists, and one story that was investigated to a greater extent by non-journalists – especially towards a conclusion that you probably wish to be true – has little necessarily to do with journalism.

In addition, the picture is complicated by the fact that when people find that they’re wrong, they almost never admit it – especially if other valuable things, like their academic or political careers, are tied up with their reputation. On occasion, some turn to increasingly more technical arguments, or close ranks and advertise a false ‘scientific consensus’ (insofar as such consensus can exist as the result of any exercise less laborious than the one vis-à-vis anthropogenic global warming), or both. ‘Isolating the legitimate questions’ here apart – from both sides, mind you – needs painstaking work that only journalists can and will do.

Featured image credit: Ethan Medrano/Pexels.

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