social science – Close Read

What can science education do, and what can it not?

On September 29, 2021, The Third Eye published an interview with Milind Sohoni, a teacher at the Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas and at IIT Bombay. (Thanks to @labhopping for bringing it into my feed.) I found it very thought-provoking. I’m pasting below some excerpts from the interview together with my notes. I think what Prof. Sohoni says doesn’t build up to a coherent whole. He is at times simplistic and self-contradictory, and what he says is often descriptive instead of offering a way out. Of course I don’t know whether what I say builds up to a coherent whole either but perhaps you’ll realise details here that I’ve missed.

… I wish the textbooks had exercises like let’s visit a bus depot, or let’s visit a good farmer and find out what the yields are, or let’s visit the PHC sub-centre, talk to the nurse, talk to the compounder, talk to the two doctors, just getting familiar with the PHC as something which provides a critical health service would have helped a lot. Or spend time with an ASHA worker. She has a notepad with names of people in a village and the diseases they have, which family has what medical emergency. How is it X village has so much diabetes and Y village has none?

I’m sure you’ll agree this would be an excellent way to teach science — together with its social dependencies instead of introducing the latter as an add-on at the level of higher, specialised education.
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… science education is not just about big science, and should not be about big science. But if you look at the main central government departments populated by scientists, they are Space, Atomic Energy and Defence. Okay, so we have missile men and women, big people in science, but really, so much of science in most of the developed world is really sadak, bijli, pani.

I disagree on three counts. (i) Science education should include ‘big science’; if it doesn’t we lose access to a domain of knowledge and enterprise that plays an important role in future-proofing societies. We choose the materials with which we will build buildings, lay roads, and make cars and batteries and from which we will generate electric power based on ‘big science’. (ii) Then again, what is ‘big science’? I’m not clear what Sohoni means by that in this comment. But later in the interview he refers to Big Science as a source of “certainty” (vis-à-vis life today) delivered in the form of “scientific things … which we don’t understand”.

If by “Big Science” he means large scientific experiments that have received investments worth millions of dollars from multiple governments, and which are churning out results that don’t inform or enhance contemporary daily life, his statement seems all the more problematic. If a government invests some money in a Big Science project but then pulls out, it doesn’t necessarily or automatically redirect those funds to a project that a critic has deemed more worthwhile, like say multiple smaller science projects. Government support for Big Science has never operated that way. Further, Big Science frequently and almost by design inevitably leads to a lot of derivative ‘Smaller Science’, spinoff technologies, and advances in allied industries. Irrespective of whether these characteristics — accidental or otherwise — suffice to justify supporting a Big Science project, wanting to expel such science from science education is still reckless.

(iii) Re: “… so much of science in most of the developed world is really streets, electricity, water” — Forget proving/disproving this and ask yourself: how do we separate research in space, atomic energy, and defence from knowledge that gave rise to better roads, cheaper electricity, and cleaner water? We can’t. There is also a specific history that explains why each of these departments Sohoni has singled out were set up the way they were. And just because they are staffed with scientists doesn’t mean they are any good or worth emulating. (I’m also setting aside what Sohoni means by “much”. Time consumed in research? Money spent? Public value generated? Number of lives improved/saved?).

Our science education should definitely include Big Science: following up from the previous quote, teachers can take students to a radio observatory nearby and speak to the scientists about how the project acquired so much land, how it secured its water and power requirements, how administrators negotiated with the locals, etc. Then perhaps we can think about avoiding cases like the INO.
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The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers Act came along ago, and along with it came a list of 42 [pieces of] equipment, which every municipality should have: a mask, a jetting machine, pumps and so on. Now, even IIT campuses don’t have that equipment. Is there any lab that has a ‘test mask’ even? Our men are going into talks and dying because of [lethal] fumes. A ‘test mask’ is an investment. You need a face-like structure and an artificial lung exposed to various environments to test its efficacy. And this mask needs to be standard equipment in every state. But these are things we never asked IITs to do, right?

This comment strikes a big nail on the head. It also brings to mind an incident on the Anna University campus eight years ago. To quote from Thomas Manuel’s report in The Wire on the incident: “On June 21, 2016, two young men died. Their bodies were found in a tank at the Anna University campus in Chennai. They were employees of a subcontractor who had been hired to seal the tank with rubber to prevent any leakage of air. The tank was being constructed as a part of a project by the Ministry of Renewable Energy to explore the possibilities of using compressed air to store energy. The two workers, Ramesh Shankar and Deepan, had arrived at the site at around 11.30 am and begun work. By 3.30 pm, when they were pulled out of the tank, Deepan was dead and Ramesh Shankar, while still breathing at the time, died a few minutes later.”

This incident seemed, and still seems, to say that even within a university — a place where scientists and students are keenly aware of the rigours of science and the value it brings to society — no one thinks to ensure the people hired for what is casually called “menial” labour are given masks or other safety equipment. The gaps in science education Sohoni is talking about are evident in the way scientists think about how they can ensure society is more rational. A society rife with preventable deaths is not rational.
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I think what science does is that it claims to study reality. But most of reality is socially administered, and so we need to treat this kind of reality also as a part of science.

No, we don’t. We shouldn’t. Science offers a limited set of methods and analytical techniques with which people can probe and describe reality and organise the knowledge they generate. He’s right, most of reality is socially administered, but that shouldn’t be an invitation to forcibly bring what currently lies beyond science to within the purview of science. The scientific method can’t deal with them — but importantly it shouldn’t be expected to. Science is incapable of handling multiple, equally valid truths pertaining to the same set of facts. In fact a few paras later Sohoni ironically acknowledges that there are truths beyond science and that their existence shouldn’t trouble scientists or science itself:

… scientists have to accept that there are many things that we don’t know, and they still hold true. Scientists work empirically and sometimes we say okay, let’s park it, carry on, and maybe later on we will find out the ‘why’. The ‘why’ or the explanation is very cultural…

… whereas science needs that ‘why’, and needs it to be singular and specific. If these explanations for aspects of reality don’t exist in a form science can accommodate, yet we also insist as Sohoni did when he said “we need to treat this kind of reality also as a part of science”, then we will be forced to junk these explanations for no fault except that they don’t meet science’s acceptability criteria.

Perhaps there is a tendency here as if to say we need a universal theory of everything, but do we? We can continue to use different human intellectual and social enterprises to understand and take advantage of different parts of human experience. Science and for that matter the social sciences needn’t be, and aren’t, “everything”.
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Science has convinced us, and is delivering on its promise of making us live longer. Whether those extra five years are of higher quality is not under discussion. You know, this is the same as people coming from really nice places in the Konkan to a slum in Mumbai and staying there because they want certainty. Life in rural Maharashtra is very hard. There’s more certainty if I’m a peon or a security guard in the city. I think that science is really offering some ‘certainty’. And that is what we seem to have accepted.

This seems to me to be too simplistic. Sohoni says this in reply to being asked whether science education today leans towards “technologies that are serving Big Business and corporate profits, rather than this developmental model of really looking critically at society”. And he would have been fairer to say we have many more technological devices and products around us today, founded on what were once scientific ideas, that serve corporate profits more than anything else. The French philosopher Jacques Ellul elucidated this idea brilliantly in his book The Technological Society (1964).

It’s just that Sohoni’s example of ageing is off the mark, and in the process it is harder to know what he’s really getting at. Lifespan is calculated as the average number of years an individual in a particular population lives. It can be improved by promoting factors that help our bodies become more resilient and by dissuading factors that cause us to die sooner. If lifespan is increasing today, it’s because fewer babies are succumbing to vaccine-preventable diseases before they turn five, because there are fewer road accidents thanks to vehicle safety, and because novel treatments like immunotherapy are improving the treatment rates of various cancers. Any new scientific knowledge in the prevailing capitalist world-system is susceptible to being coopted by Big Business but I’m also glad the knowledge exists at all.

Sure, we can all live for five more years on average, but if those five years will be spent in, say, the humiliating conditions of palliative care, let’s fix that problem. Sohoni says science has strayed from that path and I’m not so sure — but I’m convinced there’s enough science to go around (and enough money for it, just not the political will): scientists can work on both increasing lifespan and improving the conditions of palliative care. We shouldn’t vilify one kind of science in order to encourage the other. Yet Sohoni persists with this juxtaposition as he says later:

… we are living longer, we are still shitting on the road or, you know, letting our sewage be cleaned by fellow humans at the risk of death, but we are living longer. And that is, I think, a big problem.

We are still shitting on the road and we are letting our sewage be cleaned by fellow humans at the risk of death. These are big problems. Us living longer is not a big problem.
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Big Technology has a knack of turning us all into consumers of science, by neutralising questions on ‘how’ and ‘why’ things work. We accept it and we enjoy the benefits. But see, if you know the benefits are divided very unevenly, why doesn’t it bother us? For example, if you buy an Apple iPhone for Rs. 75,000 how much does the actual makers of the phone (factory workers) get? I call it the Buddhufication Crisis: a lot of people are just hooked on to their smartphones, and live in a bubble of manufactured certainty; and the rest of society that can’t access smartphones, is left to deal with real-world problems.

By pushing us to get up, get out, and engage with science where it is practised, a better science education can inculcate a more inquisitive, critical-thinking population that applies the good sense that comes of a good education to more, or all, aspects of society and social living. This is why Big Technology in particular does not tempt us into becoming “consumers” of science rather than encouraging us to pick at its pieces. Practically everything does. Similarly Sohoni’s “Buddhufication” description is muddled. Of course it’s patronising towards the people who create value — especially if it is new and/or takes unexpected forms — out of smartphones and use it as a means of class mobility, and seems to suggest a person striving for any knowledge other than of the scientific variety is being a “buddhu”. And what such “buddhufication” has to do with the working conditions of Apple’s “factory workers” is unclear.
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Speaking of relationships:

Through our Public Health edition, we also seem to sit with the feeling that science is not serving rural areas, not serving the poor. In turn, there is also a lower expectation of science from the rural communities. Do you feel this is true?

Yes, I think that is true to a large extent. But it’s not to do with rural. You see, for example, if you look at western Maharashtra — the Pune-Nashik belt — some of the cleverest people live there. They are basically producing vegetables for the big urban markets: in Satara, Sangli, that entire irrigated area. And in fact, you will see that they are very careful about their future, and understand their place in society and the role of the state. And they expect many things from the state or the government; they want things to work, hospitals to work, have oxygen, etc. And so, it is really about the basic understanding of cause and effect of citizenship. They understand what is needed to make buses work, or hospitals function; they understand how the state works. This is not very different from knowing how gadgets work.

While the distinction to many others may be trivial, “science” and “scientists” are not the same thing. This equation is present throughout the interview. At first I assumed it was casual and harmless but at this point, given the links between science, science education, technology, and public welfare that Sohoni has tried to draw, the distinction is crucial here. Science is already serving rural areas — Sohoni says as much in the comment here and the one that follows. But many, or maybe most, scientists may not be serving rural areas, if only so we can also acknowledge that some scientists are also serving rural areas. “Science is not serving rural areas” would mean no researcher in the country — or anywhere, really — has brought the precepts of science to bear on the problems of rural India. This is just not true. On the other hand saying “most scientists are not serving rural areas” will tell us some useful scientific knowledge exists but (i) too few scientists are working on it (i.e. mindful of the local context) and (ii) there are problems with translating it from the lab bench to its application in the field, at ground zero.

This version of this post benefited from inputs from and feedback by Prathmesh Kher.

Ayurveda is not a science – but what does that mean?

This post has benefited immensely with inputs from Om Prasad.

Calling something ‘not a science’ has become a pejorative, an insult. You say Ayurveda is not a science and suddenly, its loudest supporters demand to know what the problem is, what your problem is, and that you can go fuck yourself.

But Ayurveda is not a science.

First, science itself didn’t exist when Ayurveda was first born (whenever that was but I’m assuming it was at least a millennium ago), and they were both outcomes of different perceived needs. So claiming ‘Ayurveda is a science’ makes little sense. You could counter that 5 didn’t stop being a number just because the number line came much later – but that wouldn’t make sense either because the relationship between 5 and the number line is nothing like the relationship between science and Ayurveda.

It’s more like claiming Carl Linnaeus’s choice of topics to study was normal: it wouldn’t at all be normal today but in his time and his particular circumstances, they were considered acceptable. Similarly, Ayurveda was the product of a different time, technologies and social needs. Transplanting it without ‘updating’ it in any way is obviously going to make it seem inchoate, stunted. At the same time, ‘updating’ it may not be so productive either.

Claiming ‘Ayurveda is a science’ is to assert two things: that science is a qualifier of systems, and that Ayurveda once qualified by science’s methods becomes a science. But neither is true for the same reason: if you want one of them to be like the other, it becomes the other. They are two distinct ways of organising knowledge and making predictions about natural processes, and which grew to assume their most mature forms along different historical trajectories. Part of science’s vaunted stature in society today is that it is an important qualifier of knowledge, but it isn’t of knowledge systems. This is ultimately why Ayurveda and science are simply incompatible.

One of them has become less effective and less popular over time – which should be expected because human technologies and geopolitical and social boundaries have changed dramatically – while the other is relatively more adolescent, more multidisciplinary (with the right opportunities) and more resource-intensive – which should be expected because science, engineering, capitalism and industrialism rapidly co-evolved in the last 150 years.

Second, ‘Ayurveda is a science’ is a curious statement because those who utter it typically wish to elevate it to the status science enjoys and at the same time wish to supplant answers that modern science has provided to some questions with answers by Ayurveda. Of course, I’m speaking about the average bhakt here – more specifically a Bharatiya Janata Party supporter seemingly sick of non-Indian, especially Western, influences on Indian industry, politics, culture (loosely defined) and the Indian identity itself, and who may be actively seeking homegrown substitutes. However, their desire to validate Ayurveda according to the practices of modern science is really an admission that modern science is superior to Ayurveda despite all their objections to it.

The bhakt‘s indignation when confronted with the line that ‘Ayurveda is not a science’ is possibly rooted in the impression that ‘science’ is a status signal – a label attached to a collection of precepts capable of together solving particular problems, irrespective of more fundamental philosophical requirements. However, the only science we know of is the modern one, and to the bhakt the ‘Western’ one – both in provenance and its ongoing administration – and the label and the thing to which it applies, i.e. the thing as well as the name of the thing, are convergent.

There is no other way of doing science; there is no science with a different set of methods that claims to arrive at the same or ‘better’ scientific truths. (I’m curious at this point if, assuming a Kuhnian view, science itself is unfalsifiable as it attributes inconsistencies in its constituent claims to extra-scientific causes than to flaws in its methods themselves – so as a result science as a system can reach wrong conclusions from time to time but still be valid at all times.)

It wouldn’t be remiss to say modern science, thus science itself, is to the nationalistic bhakt as Ayurveda is to the nationalistic far-right American: a foreign way of doing things that must be resisted, and substituted with the ‘native’ way, however that nativity is defined. It’s just that science, specifically allopathy, is more in favour today because, aside from its own efficacy (a necessary but not sufficient condition), all the things it needs to work – drug discovery processes, manufacturing, logistics and distribution, well-trained health workers, medical research, a profitable publishing industry, etc. – are modelled on institutions and political economies exported by the West and embedded around the world through colonial and imperial conquests.

Third: I suspect a part of why saying ‘Ayurveda is not a science’ is hurtful is that Indian society at large has come to privilege science over other disciplines, especially the social sciences. I know too many people who associate the work of many of India’s scientists with objectivity, a moral or political nowhereness*, intellectual prominence, pride and, perhaps most importantly, a willingness to play along with the state’s plans for economic growth. To be denied the ‘science’ tag is to be denied these attributes, desirable for their implicit value as much as for the opportunities they are seen to present in the state’s nationalist (and even authoritarian) project.

On the other hand, social scientists are regularly cast in opposition to these attributes – and more broadly by the BJP in opposition to normative – i.e. pro-Hindu, pro-rich – views of economic and cultural development, and dismissed as such. This ‘science v. fairness’ dichotomy is only a proxy battle in the contest between respecting and denying human rights – which in turn is also represented in the differences between allopathy and Ayurveda, especially when they are addressed as scientific as well as social systems.

Compared to allopathy and allopathy’s intended outcomes, Ayurveda is considerably flawed and very minimally desirable as an alternative. But on the flip side, uptake of alternative traditions is motivated not just by their desirability but also by the undesirable characteristics of allopathy itself. Modern allopathic methods are isolating (requiring care at a designated facility and time away from other tasks, irrespective of the extent to which that is epidemiologically warranted), care is disempowering and fraught with difficult contradictions (“We expect family members to make decisions about their loved ones after a ten-minute briefing that we’re agonising over even with years of medical experience”**), quality of care is cost-stratified, and treatments are condition-specific and so require repeated hospital visits in the course of a lifetime.

Many of those who seek alternatives in the first place do so for these reasons – and these reasons are not problems with the underlying science itself. They’re problems with how medical care is delivered, how medical knowledge is shared, how medical research is funded, how medical workers are trained – all subjects that social scientists deal with, not scientists. As such, any alternative to allopathy will become automatically preferred if it can solve these economic, political, social, welfare, etc. problems while delivering the same standard of care.

Such a system won’t be an entirely scientific enterprise, considering it would combine the suggestions of the sciences as well as the social sciences into a unified whole such that it treated individual ailments without incurring societal ones. Now, say you’ve developed such an alternative system, called PXQY. The care model at its heart isn’t allopathy but something else – and its efficacy is highest when it is practised and administered as part of the PXQY setup, instead of through standalone procedures. Would you still call this paradigm of medical care a science?

* Akin to the ‘view from nowhere’.
** House, S. 2, E 18.

Featured image credit: hue 12 photography/Unsplash.

A science for the non-1%

David Michaels, an epidemiologist and a former US assistant secretary of labour for occupational safety and health under Barack Obama, writes in the Boston Review:

[Product defence] operations have on their payrolls—or can bring in on a moment’s notice—toxicologists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, risk assessors, and any other professionally trained, media-savvy experts deemed necessary (economists too, especially for inflating the costs and deflating the benefits of proposed regulation, as well as for antitrust issues). Much of their work involves production of scientific materials that purport to show that a product a corporation makes or uses or even discharges as air or water pollution is just not very dangerous. These useful “experts” produce impressive-looking reports and publish the results of their studies in peer-reviewed scientific journals (reviewed, of course, by peers of the hired guns writing the articles). Simply put, the product defence machine cooks the books, and if the first recipe doesn’t pan out with the desired results, they commission a new effort and try again.

Members of the corporate class have played an instrumental role in undermining trust in science in the last century, and Michaels’s exposition provides an insightful glimpse of how they work, and why what they do works. However, the narrative Michaels employs, as illustrated above, treats scientists like minions – a group of people that will follow your instructions but will not endeavour to question how their research is going to be used as long as, presumably, their own goals are met – and also excuses them for it. This is silly: the corporate class couldn’t have done what it did without help from a sliver of the scientific class that sold its expertise to the highest bidder.

Even if such actions may have been more the result of incompetence than of malice, for too long have scientists claimed vincible ignorance in their quasi-traditional tendency to prize unattached scientific progress more than scientific progress in step with societal aspirations. They need to step up, step out and participate in political programmes that deploy scientific knowledge to solve messy real-world problems, which frequently fail and just as frequently serve misguided ends (such as – but sure as hell not limited to – laundering the soiled reputation of a pedophile and convicted sex offender).

But even so, even as the scientists’ conduct typifies the problem, the buck stops with the framework of incentives that guides them.

Despite its connections with technologies that powered colonialism and war, science has somehow accrued a reputation of being clean. To want to be a scientist today is to want to make sense of the natural universe – an aspiration both simple and respectable – and to make a break from the piddling problems of here and now to the more spiritually refined omnipresent and eternal. However, this image can’t afford to maintain itself by taking the deeply human world it is embedded in for granted.

Science has become the reason for state simply because the state is busy keeping science and politics separate. No academic programme in the world today considers scientific research to be at par with public engagement and political participation^a when exactly this is necessary to establish science as an exercise through which, fundamentally, people construct knowledge about the world and then ensure it is used responsibly (as well as to demote it from the lofty pedestal where it currently lords over the social sciences and humanities). Instead, we have a system that encourages only the production of knowledge, tying it up with metrics of professional success, career advancement and, most importantly, a culture of higher education^b and research that won’t brook dissent and tolerates activist-scientists as lesser creatures.

a. And it is to the government’s credit that political participation has become synonymous with electoral politics and the public expression of allegiance to political ideologies.

b. Indeed, the problem most commonly manifests as a jaundiced impression of the purpose of teaching.

The perpetuators of this structure are responsible for the formation and subsequent profitability of “the strategy of manufacturing doubt”, which Michaels writes “has worked wonders … as a public relations tool in the current debate over the use of scientific evidence in public policy. … [The] main motivation all along has been only to sow confusion and buy time, sometimes lots of time, allowing entire industries to thrive or individual companies to maintain market share while developing a new product.”

To fight the vision of these perpetuators, to at least rescue the fruits of the methods of science from inadvertent ignominy, we need publicly active scientists to be the rule, not the exceptions to the rule. We need structural incentives to change to accommodate the fact that, if they don’t, this group of people will definitely remain limited to members of the upper class and/or upper castes. We need a stronger, closer marriage of science, the social sciences, business administration and policymaking.

To be sure, I’m neither saying the mere presence of scientists in public debates will lead to swifter solutions nor that the absence of science alone in policymaking is responsible for so many of the crises of our times – but that their absence has left cracks so big, it’s quite difficult to consider if they can be sealed any other way^c. And yes, the world will slow down, the richer will become less rich and economic growth will become more halting, but these are all also excuses to maintain a status quo that has only exploited the non-1% for two centuries straight.

c. Michaels concludes his piece with a list of techniques the product-defence faction has used to sow doubt and, in the resulting moments of vulnerability, ‘sell science’ – i.e. techniques that represent the absence of guiding voices.

Of course, there’s only so much one can do if the political class isn’t receptive to one’s ideas – but we must begin somewhere, and what better place to begin than at the knowledgeable place?

Sci-fi past the science

There’s an interesting remark in the introductory portion of this article by Zeynep Tufekci (emphasis added):

At its best, though, science fiction is a brilliant vehicle for exploring not the far future or the scientifically implausible but the interactions among science, technology and society. The what-if scenarios it poses can allow us to understand our own societies better, and sometimes that’s best done by dispensing with scientific plausibility.

Given the context, such plausibility is likely predicated on the set of all pieces of knowledge minus the set of the unknown-unknown. This in turn indicates a significant divergence between scientific knowledge and knowledge of human society, philosophies and culture as we progress into the future, at least to the extent that there is a belief in the present that scientific knowledge already trails our knowledge of the sociological and political components required to build a more equitable society.

This is pithy and non-trivial at the same time: pithy because the statement reaffirms the truism that science in and of itself lacks the moral centrifuge to separate good from bad, and non-trivial because it refutes the technoptimism that guides Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, (the late) Paul Allen, etc.

If you superimposed this condition on sci-fi the genre, it becomes clear that Isaac Asimov’s and Arthur Clarke’s works – which the world’s tech billionaires claim to have been inspired by in their pursuit of interplanetary human spaceflight, as Tufekci writes – were less about strengthening the role of science and technology in our lives and more about rendering it transparent, so we can look past the gadgets and the gadgetry towards the social structures they’re embedded in.

In effect, Tufekci continues:

Science fiction is sometimes denigrated as escapist literature, but the best examples of it are exactly the opposite.

She argues in her short article, more of a long note, that this alternative reading of sci-fi and its purpose could encourage the billionaires to retool their ambitions and think about making life better on Earth. Food for thought, especially at the start of a new decade when there seems to be a blanket lien to hope – although I very much doubt the aspirations of Musk, Bezos and others were nurtured about such a simple fulcrum.

Retrospective: The Wire Science in 2019

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

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

Most popular articles of 2019

The Sciences

Health

Environment

Space

Education

Our choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wire
December 26, 2019

To understand #NotInMyName

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Shivam Vij published this on June 27. Excerpt:

[Liberals] still romanticise their days at the JNU campus in the ’80s – what an innocent time it was. The still think their marches and slogans will Bring Down Fascism. The people who will march today, feeling self-important about fighting the good fight, don’t understand they are actually helping Hindutva. The more you make a campaign out of Hindutva obsessions – cows, meat, Muslims – these keywords become the central agenda of politics.

Liberals think they can take on Hindutva on its turf and defeat it. That this is not possible should be obvious after the experience since Babri. The only way Hindutva could be defeated is to change the keywords of political discourse from the ones Hindutva wants – cows, meat, Muslims – to the ones it is more apologetic about, such as violence against Dalits, farmers’ agitations, the distress faced by small traders due to demonetisation and GST.

Ashley Tellis rebutted with this on June 28. Excerpt:

[Vij] contradicts himself right off the bat by pointing to the rise of attacks on Muslims since the BJP came to power and then spends the rest of the article telling us that we should not use the word Muslim at all as that is rising to the click-baiting of the BJP. He teaches us that we must give up the words ‘cows, meat and Muslims’ and replace them with ‘Dalit, farmer, small trader.’ It is the stupidest piece of advice ever given by a journalist to anyone. But then, journalists like Vij tend to be the stupidest people around. So perhaps he should take this advice himself and not write articles about protests that according to him have nothing to do with Dalits, farmers and small traders.

I’m coming into this issue as someone who’s not ignorant as much as has embarrassing trouble understanding the syntax and language of such issues. Earlier yesterday, I’d had my doubts about #NotInMyName and asked a friend about them. At first he seemed dismissive (calling my concerns “wooly”) but after some badgering, he answered them one by one (I had nine questions). By not attacking my observations and explaining to me where I was wrong, he has gained an ally (irrespective of how much that means to him or his causes). But how Tellis has replied to Vij I think will make it harder for anyone who is simply looking for answers to take a stronger position in public debates, and to approach him with their doubts.

I realise that Tellis is fully within his rights to call Vij ‘stupid’, as well as that the fight against Hindutva fascists is as sensitive as it is crucial and in which no one will spare anyone else any inches (either in newspaper columns or political estate). I also realise that Vij is an experienced journalist and whose views should have been debated as such (instead of by disparaging all journalistic commentary). For example, by discussing why he sees it fit to make an overly specialised point about strategies when #NotInMyName is really about concerned citizens speaking out against a particularly insidious motivation for murder, as well as the murders themselves, as a collective for the first time. However, a very important intra-communal unity is at stake here: the more vicious public debates we have, the more it will seem like a ‘conversation’ cordoned off to those masses for whom an awareness of social and political issues is only just budding. It places quite the cost on being uninformed (not being ignorant) that those who would like to be informed might not deserve (and it can’t be that everyone’s undeserving of it!). And when this cost is already so high, when the specialised language of the social sciences is already so hard to decipher for an outsider, Tellis’s – and Vij’s and others’ – level of incivility only makes things worse. This isn’t to say Vij wasn’t saying disagreeable things – but only that there’s a way to dismiss them, and how Tellis did it seemed less that and more… spectacle.

As my friend Akhil told me, “To me, the tone and argument of Shivam Vij’s article seems more problematic than Tellis’s response. Of course Tellis could have countered it better than firing off a rant, but who encourages Tellis’s style of writing and who benefits from it explains why such messy debates exist and there’s little we can do about it. Vij wrote a piece lacking substance, but controversial enough to generate traffic, saying things just for the sake of saying things. I’m not sure he wanted a meaningful debate in the first place.And I’m sure Tellis didn’t want a scholarly debate at all because he found the very premise of the arguments ridiculous.” All this also prompts the consideration: Tellis v. Vij, and Tellis v. Rajamani (salvo, return), both played out on the pages of journalism websites (Huffington Post, News Minute and Sify). Should these websites, or any others for that matter, have also been responsible for first introducing the issue (not just as a staid news report like Business Standard did but also in the form of a very important debate playing out between scholars – Vij may not have been one but Rajesh Rajamani and Tellis both are), through which readers could be appraised not just of the overarching narrative of fascists v. liberals but also that of how scholars are choosing to frame – or not frame – their relationship with #NotInMyName? I think so.

More Akhil: “Either we can enjoy lengthy theoretical debates on the internet or physically make our presence felt. A healthy cultural of debate is always desirable, but when the intent is malicious and counterproductive to actual efforts to make things better in such desperate times, it’s difficult to hold back angst in the interest of civility. The onus is of course on the editors of the websites to present the debate in such a manner that serves a more important purpose (to give the audience diverse perspectives) rather than to run clickbait rant that eventually leaves little space for critical engagement.”

My friend’s answers, in case anyone’s interested:

1. Who is the campaign for? Whose attention will the attendees be clamouring for?

For the bulk of Indians (or Hindus, more precisely), whose silence in the face of the BJP’s majoritarianism is providing space for the lynchers and killers.

2. How will (anyone) participating in #NotInMyName help the oppressed minorities?

Oppressed minorities will feel hugely relieved and reassured by a good turnout across the country. I would say the overall size is what will reassure them more than individual names or faces.

3. Doesn’t the name ‘#NotInMyName’ feel more like an abdication than a protest?

The crimes are being committed in the name of ‘nation’, ‘Hinduism’, ‘Bharat mata’, ‘Indian values’, etc., so it is important for people to say, “Sorry, you don’t have exclusive rights to define what is Indian, what is Hindu, what are Hindu values, etc.”

4. Saba Dewan, the filmmaker whose Facebook post snowballed into the #NotInMyName protests, told Business Standard, “We want to convey that whatever is happening in the society is not happening in our name; I do not approve of it.” Why do we presume those who are perpetrating the lynchings care what the urban, upper-class, upper-caste observers think?

Those who are perpetrating may not care but the puppet masters who have created a culture of impunity, who control the police and whose own statements have encouraged the lynch mentality, DO CARE – especially about what the urban, upper-class-upper-caste thinks.

5. Are the campaign’s organisers making any efforts to actively involve minorities in a meaningful way? And is there a way to do this without turning it into a spectacle?

I think the idea is really to ensure Hindus turn out in the largest possible numbers. I suspect people are sending the call to Muslim friends as a kind of solidarity message but to Hindu friends in order to ensure they turn up.

6. The protests are set to be held in 11 cities: New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Trivandrum, Kochi, Patna, Lucknow, London, Toronto. According to an IndiaSpend analysis, cows-related violence since 2014 hasn’t happened in any of these cities but in usually rural areas outside them.

This is a solidarity event so it doesn’t matter where cow-related violence took place.

7. What does the ‘name’ in #NotInMyName stand for? If it denotes religious orders and/or caste, then why does it appear to be an exclusively upper-caste mobilisation?

The Indian upper middle class is largely upper caste so it may appear that this is an upper caste mobilisation, in the same way rallies for LGBTQIA+, FoE, media freedom, etc. issues do.

8. Isn’t there a difference between Muslims using the phrase ‘Not In My Name’ to speak out against ISIS’s brand of Islam, or Americans using it to speak out against their government using their money to fund the War Against Terrorism, and privileged people marching under the banner to decry lynchings perpetrated in the name of preserving the same socio-religious order whose benefits they enjoy?

All of these cases are different. The anti-ISIS protests come from genuine Muslim revulsion against ISIS but also the pressure in Western society for the participants to dissociate from Islamic extremism.

Americans against War on Terror is similar to the Indian protest today, where people in whose name bad things are done (war on terror, attacks on minorities) tell the rulers to STFU. Sure, the rulers can say, “You STFU, you are enjoying the privileges of being American (cheap oil, etc.)” – or Hindu – but that is neither here nor there as an argument.

9. To the people saying “not in my name”: what do you usually lend your name to?

The answer is obvious: just look at the petitions we have carried on The Wire over the past two years by pretty much the same set of folks doing today’s mobilisation: justice for Rohith Vemula, Akhlaq, Pehlu Khan, support of FoE, etc. etc.

Featured image credit: OpenClipart-Vectors/pixabay.

Did Facebook cheat us?

'I don't want to live on this planet anymore' meme. Image: superbwallpapers.com — You might want to rethink that.

No.

There were some good arguments on this topic, swinging between aesthetic rebuttals to logical deconstructions. Here are four I liked:

1. Tal Yarkoni, Director of the Psychoinformatics Lab at University of Texas, Austin, writes on his blog,

“… it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s nothing intrinsically evil about the idea that large corporations might be trying to manipulate your experience and behavior. Everybody you interact with–including every one of your friends, family, and colleagues–is constantly trying to manipulate your behavior in various ways. Your mother wants you to eat more broccoli; your friends want you to come get smashed with them at a bar; your boss wants you to stay at work longer and take fewer breaks. We are always trying to get other people to feel, think, and do certain things that they would not otherwise have felt, thought, or done. So the meaningful question is not whether people are trying to manipulate your experience and behavior, but whether they’re trying to manipulate you in a way that aligns with or contradicts your own best interests. The mere fact that Facebook, Google, and Amazon run experiments intended to alter your emotional experience in a revenue-increasing way is not necessarily a bad thing if in the process of making more money off you, those companies also improve your quality of life. I’m not taking a stand one way or the other, mind you, but simply pointing out that without controlled experimentation, the user experience on Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. would probably be very, very different–and most likely less pleasant.”

2. Yarkoni’s argument brings us to these tweets.

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/483024580554932224

Didn’t get it? Chris Dixon explains.

If you a/b test to make more money that's fine, but if you a/b test to advance science that's bad? I don't get it.

— cdixon.eth (@cdixon) June 29, 2014

I didn’t spot these tweets. TechCrunch did, and it brings up the relevant comparison with A/B testing. A/B testing is a technique whereby web-designers optimize user experience engineers by showing different layouts to different user groups, then decide on the best layout depending how which users responded to which layouts. Like Dixon asks, is it okay if it’s done all the time on sites that want to make money by giving you a good time?

You’d argue that we’ve signed up to be manipulated like that, not like this – see #4. Or you’d argue this was different because Facebook was just being Facebook – but the social scientists weren’t being ethical. This is true. To quote from the TechCrunch piece,

A source tells Forbes’ Kashmir Hill it was not submitted for pre-approval by the Institutional Review Board, an independent ethics committee that requires scientific experiments to meet stern safety and consent standards to ensure the welfare of their subjects. I was IRB certified for an experiment I developed in college, and can attest that the study would likely fail to meet many of the pre-requisites.

3. The study that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which it appears not many have read. It reports a statistically significant result that emotions are contagious over Facebook. But as Yarkoni demonstrates, its practical significance is minuscule:

… the manipulation had a negligible real-world impact on users’ behavior. To put it in intuitive terms, the effect of condition in the Facebook study is roughly comparable to a hypothetical treatment that increased the average height of the male population in the United States by about one twentieth of an inch (given a standard deviation of ~2.8 inches).

4. Facebook’s Terms of Service – to quote:

We use the information we receive about you in connection with the services and features we provide to you and other users like your friends, our partners, the advertisers that purchase ads on the site, and the developers that build the games, applications, and websites you use. For example, in addition to helping people see and find things that you do and share, we may use the information we receive about you:

… for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.

IMO, the problems appear to be:

The social scientists didn’t get informed consent from the subjects of their experiments.
What a scientific experiment is is not clearly defined in Facebook’s ToS – and defining such a thing will prove very difficult and is likely never to be implemented.

To-do: Find out more about the IRB and its opinions on this experiment.