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Root Privileges

  • Hype from Fermilab

    February 9th, 2023

    Where do you think the following bit of text is from?

    A wormhole, also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, is a hypothetical tunnel connecting remote points in spacetime. While wormholes are allowed by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, wormholes have never been found in the universe. In late 2022, the journal Nature featured a paper co-written by Joe Lykken, leader of the Fermilab Quantum Institute, that describes observable phenomenon produced by a quantum processor that “are consistent with the dynamics of a transversable wormhole.” Working with a Sycamore quantum computer at Google, a team of physicists was able to transfer information from one area of the computer to another through a quantum system utilizing artificial intelligence hardware.

    If you’ve been following the hoopla surrounding this paper, esp. over the way it was reported by Quanta and many other outlets, your first guess might be that this is yet another news outlet that ignored the difference between an actual, physical wormhole and a simulation of a mathematical version of an actual, physical wormhole (the paper’s authors, a group to which Lykken belongs, accomplished the latter). But no: this text is from Fermilab itself! It appears on a page announcing a forthcoming lecture by Lykken on February 17. (Hat-tip to Peter Woit for discovering and flagging this on his blog.)

    What I’d like to point out here, for the hundredth time I’m sure, is that hype originates more often than you think from university and institute press offices rather than in the minds and hearts of science journalists. Insufficiently critical reportage (awareness of which is sometimes only possible in hindsight) often fails to stop hype from reaching a larger audience but it seldom creates hype in the first place. This may seem like a fine point but it matters when there is a tendency to overlook the role of press officers, and some scientists themselves (including Lykken), in building the narratives around their and their colleagues’ work.

  • On that anti-mRNA vaccines video

    February 1st, 2023

    The Times of India has published an irresponsible article today on a video by a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claiming with dubious evidence that all mRNA vaccines are harmful. The article quotes from the video at length, effectively offering less-sceptical readers a transcript and encouraging the uncritical absorption of the video’s contents.

    Irrespective of the quality of data that is available vis-à-vis the adverse effects of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, the Times of India article is an offence to good sense, responsible journalism and public healthcare. It amounts to a major news outlet misusing its status to normalise the low quality of arguments and discussion surrounding the public discussion on COVID-19 vaccines.

    1. The headline is “Coronavirus vaccine: MIT Professor calls for immediate suspension of COVID mRNA vaccine”. It doesn’t say that the individual, Retsef Levi, is a professor of operations management at the Sloan School of Management, giving rise to the ad verecundiam fallacy. Expertise is not the (partial) name of the institute where a person is employed, the prefixes or suffixes to their name, or even their claims. Expertise is exactly what they have received specialised training to do and/or have been doing at a professional level for a long time. Times of India should have included Prof. Levi’s actual expertise in the headline – although I may be asking for too much here because it appears as though the author was aware of it but didn’t think it mattered. That Prof. Levi works at MIT also appears to have impressed the author, and may well have prompted the article in its current form.

    2. The article neither facilitates nor encourages independent verification of Prof. Levi’s claims. Even if – and that’s a big if – Prof. Levi’s claims hold up, allowing readers to check for themselves the claims an article is platforming is an important expression of trust and, in a manner of speaking, the right thing to do when one is participating in a discourse of reason and facts. But the article doesn’t contain any links to the papers that Prof. Levi invokes in his defence. The only ‘independent’ expert it has chosen to quote is Aseem Malhotra, the British cardiologist who has made controversial claims about warding off COVID-19 with a diet he devised and who has become known for opposing the use of the mRNA vaccines.

    (By the way, this isn’t whataboutery per se: that a scientist has made other dubious claims shouldn’t mean that they’re current claim should be dubious as well – nor that their legitimate and brave championing of one cause means that all their causes are legitimate. As a journalist, I’d be wary of the extent to which their willingness to swim against the current has benumbed their ability to recognise and respond to valid criticism.)

    3. The article neglects to mention the potential dangers of allowing people to interpret the findings of their own studies. For example, google “Retsef Levi” and one of the top five results is a link to his Google Scholar profile. Click on it, and on the landing page, sort Prof. Levi’s papers by year (instead of by number of citations). The ninth article should be a paper published by Scientific Reports – a Nature journal – and coauthored by Prof. Lefi, Christopher Sun, and Eli Jaffe. The numbers and names you must have seen in the course of this clickthrough should tell you three things:

    a) A note atop the paper’s page, dated May 2022, says the journal’s editors are reviewing criticisms that the paper’s conclusions are problematic.;

    b) Scientific Reports is a peer-reviewed journal, but peer-review didn’t prevent it from publishing this paper (and then flagging problems about it, rather than before it enters the scientific literature). This is because peer-review has several limitations.;

    c) According to Google Scholar, this paper has been cited 19 times – but it doesn’t say anything about the contexts of citation. If I write a paper criticising studies of poor design or quality and cite Prof. Levi’s Scientific Reports paper as an example, the citation count of the paper increases by one, but beyond this one-dimensional number, the reputation of the paper has actually declined (or ought to have).

    4. How can we be sure that Prof. Levi is interpreting, to his audience at large, all the other studies he cites in his video in a fair manner? The way the Times of India article its written, we can’t. We need to find (without any links) and follow-up on each one (without access to expertise) separately.

    For example, consider the “Harvard Medical School” study that purportedly found unattached spike proteins in the blood of young people with post-vaccination myocarditis. In this study, researchers worked with 16 people with post-vaccination myocarditis and 45 people without post-vaccination myocarditis, and found that those with the condition had unattached spike proteins in their bloodsteams.

    Conclusions: a) post-vaccination myocarditis is rare, which both Prof. Levi and Times of India leave out; b) the results are indicative because the cohort sizes are too small to reliably elucidate rare side-effects and the real extent of their rarity; c) per the paper itself, “the mRNA vaccine-induced immune responses did not differ between individuals who developed myocarditis and individuals who did not”; and d) spike-protein overproduction could be implicated in the mechanism connecting mRNA vaccination and myocarditis.

    This is just one study that Prof. Levi has invoked.

    Again, irrespective of the legitimacy (or not) of Prof. Levi’s various claims in his video, Times of India was duty-bound to raise these issues – or at least flag their relevance. The newspaper may believe it is ‘simply reporting’ something that someone somewhere said and is therefore free of blame, but that’s like saying you’re simply erecting a billboard reproducing Nick Naylor’s comments on smoking and are expecting to be free of blame. At least in the realm of reason and facts.

  • Books – 2022

    January 26th, 2023

    Even as I whined about losing my reading habit, I managed to read a surprising (to me) number of books through 2022. One reason I think I didn’t notice is because very few of them started out being books I actually wanted to read. Looking back, there’s a clear fiction-nonfiction divide and a marked preference for monographs. The full list follows; each recommender’s name is in square brackets and a thumbs-up denotes how much I personally enjoyed it.

    1. The Dark Side of the Hive (NF), Robin Moritz and Robin Crewe [Raghavendra Gadagkar] 👍🏾
    2. Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (NF), John Drury Clark 👍🏾
    3. The Technological Society (NF), Jacques Ellul
    4. The Complete Cosmicomics (F), Italo Calvino [Jahnavi Sen] 👍🏾
    5. Reread: Coup de Grace (F), Marguerite Yourcenar 👍🏾
    6. Straw Man Arguments: A Study in Fallacy Theory (NF), Scott Aikin and John Casey 👍🏾👍🏾
    7. Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (F), Bruce Sterling [Shruti Muralidhar]
    8. The Vortex: A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation (NF), Scott Carney and Jason Miclian
    9. From Space to Sea: My ISRO Journey and Beyond (NF), Albert Muthunayagam 👍🏾 (largely because the Nambi Narayanan biopic had just come out and the book contradicted many claims in the film)
    10. Real-World Cryptography (NF), David Wong
    11. Spillover (NF), David Quammen 👍🏾👍🏾
    12. Modi’s India (NF), Christophe Jaffrelot
    13. Letters to a Young Poet (NF), Rainer Maria Rilke 👍🏾
    14. Ninefox Gambit (F), Yoon Ha Lee
    15. The Dawn of Analysis (NF), Scott Soames
    16. At the Feet of Living Things (NF), Aparajita Datta, Rohan Arthur and T.R. Shankar Raman 👍🏾
    17. The Collected Stories (F), Arthur C. Clarke
    18. Parallel Lives (NF), Phyllis Rose [Jahnavi Sen] 👍🏾

    Now reading: Viriconium (F), M. John Harrison [Thomas Manuel] so far 👍🏾👍🏾

    Up next: The God Is Not Willing (F), Steven Erikson

  • Should journos pay scientists for their expertise?

    January 21st, 2023

    I recently came across a question posed on Twitter, asking if experts whom journalists consult to write articles should be compensated for their labour, especially since, in the tweeter’s words, “it’s quite a bit of effort”. The tweeter clarified their position further in some of the conversations that sprang up in response. I felt compelled to have a go at a reply, so here goes.

    To begin with, it’d be worth splitting the answer according to the size of the publication that is expected to pay this fee.

    Smaller v. larger organisations

    Based on my experience at The Wire, I don’t believe experts can be paid for their labour as long as 1) the newsroom covers the news through news reports, and is therefore required to maintain a certain minimum scale of operations, instead of sticking to publishing analyses and features; 2) the labour is to clarify a concept, an idea, a point, whatever or is to supply comments; and 3) the money goes straight from readers’ pockets to the pockets of reporters, editors and freelancers in quantities that would mean the journalists are paid competitively.

    We could expand (3) to include erecting soft/hard paywalls, organising ticketed events, raising funds for predefined reporting campaigns, publishing sponsored content, etc., but a) doing any of these things tends to break the economics of scale at which a small newsroom (that covers the news) can operate in India; b) paywalls work well either for large organisations or for organisations that occupy a specific niche, and less so for any other kind of organisation; c) it’s hard to find additional revenue streams that don’t compromise editorial independence in the absolute sense; and d) income security becomes iffy if the organisation is registered as a nonprofit (for-profit outfits, of course, will have to deal with investor pressure, including on editorial decisions).

    Taken together, smaller organisations don’t have the liberty of considering the principles because they need to figure out much more germane issues first. Larger organisations could on the other hand make it work – but should they? Let’s consider the principles in a specific scenario, the only one with which I’m any kind of familiar.

    Science journalism: Principles

    How do we determine the value of labour? Does all labour need to be paid for? Is money the sole acceptable form of value? A lot of labour certainly needs to be paid for but which and to what extent depends on the context in which it operates.

    A couple years ago, a physicist asked me to contribute regularly to a good but not quite popular physics magazine after reading some of my blog posts. I said I would love to but that I was constrained severely by time. However, I added, whenever I do write, I would like to waive my fee. The physicist was quick to reply that I shouldn’t have expected to be paid because if magazines like the one she was part of had any chance of becoming more popular (this one deserved to be), it couldn’t afford to pay all writers until it became wealthier.

    The physicist and I spoke for half a day and at no point did I get the impression that she was taking my work for granted; in fact, it was clear she placed a flattering amount of value on it. Her point was instead centred on the notion of service, and I agreed fully. When I ask scientists to help me understand a concept or to comment on a study after reading a highly technical paper, I don’t take them or their expertise for granted, but when I refuse to pay them for it (although none have asked thus far), it is because a) I simply can’t: science journalism just doesn’t make much money; and b) I don’t expect but will sincerely appreciate a measure of service-mindedness.

    A metaphor that another scientist used comes to mind: first, we need to haul the big rock out of the ditch in which it is stuck; once it is out, we can figure out how to roll it around in different directions. Service is a form of value also – and right now science journalism in India needs both money and service. Money alone won’t fix it. And I take neither for granted as much as I emphasise the difference between expectation and requirement.

    When I edited The Wire Science, I informed prospective writers beforehand of how much I could afford to pay and I didn’t force them to accept it. Similarly, a scientist is free to decline writing or commenting requests. But for the nascent stage in which science journalism in India is today, paying scientists for help making sense of an idea or to comment on a paper is a bridge too far.

    Science journalism: Mechanics

    So much for the principles; now to the mechanics. My friend M.J. had this to say:

    “How do you decide who is an expert? You have a science degree and you are an expert, so you need to be paid. But what about a farmer with 40 years of agricultural experience? Does this mean we conclude that we pay everyone? Business-wise this is impossible in journalism.”

    In continuation: What is expertise? Is an opinion on a research paper an expression of one’s expertise and thus to be paid for? On the one hand, we have things like open access in science, but if on the other I had to pay scientists for expressions of their expertise, science journalism will be buried alive, in much the same way subscription journals have threatened the integrity and relevance of science.

    In fact, the truths, especially the social truths that are distinct from scientific truths, are things that experts and journalists must construct together, instead of – cynically – the task being left to journalists and journalists being expected to pay the experts. M.J. again:

    Incentives would disrupt the very foundation of the journalist-source relationship, which is based on trust and a shared commitment to communicate a story. If you were to pay someone, would they speak their mind or would they tell you what you want to hear? That is, will they be objective?

    Say it’s not for a quote but to clarify a concept or certain technicalities. Many things in science are objective but many other things aren’t – such as the lab-leak theory of the origin of the novel coronavirus.


    Many more arguments wait in the wings – but they will all be fairly pointless because journalism at large is too far from perfect to ask what journalism can do for you instead of… you get the drift. Again, I take neither experts nor expertise for granted. I just deeply doubt journalism’s ability to simultaneously fulfil its own purpose, be gainful for its practitioners and reward expertise and its proper expression at this time, in this country.

    Finally, the original question may highlight the danger of principles that are isolated from material considerations, contrary to our popular experience of journalism in practice deviating from its foundational principles.

    The idea that all labour must be paid for has been engendered by a culture that seldom pays, or pays enough – a culture fond of exploitation, of corporatisation, contractualisation and commodification. Journalism-in-practice, rather than the newsroom in which it happens, isn’t a part of that culture; understanding it to be is what flattens public service in the specific cases where that is applicable and where it is voluntarily on offer into the lower-dimensional notion of exploitation. If an expert feels exploited by a journalist interacting with them, money isn’t going to fix it. Instead, as M.J. said:

    What would be more ideal is, say, if a news organisation knows it needs technical inputs for science or health reporting, then it should have someone on contract, on a consulting basis. This is apart from its sources. And it can use these contracted individuals’ help to understand some technicalities and also for fact-checking.

    Does this narrative hold beyond science journalism? 🤷🏾‍♂️.

  • Notes on covering QM

    January 19th, 2023
    1. I learnt last year that quantum systems are essentially linear because the mathematics that physicists have found can describe quantum-mechanical phenomena contain only linear terms. Effects add to each other like 1 + 1 = 2; nothing gets out of control in exponential fashion, at least not usually. I learnt this by mistake in an article published in 1998 when I was trying to learn more about the connection between the Riemann zeta function and ‘quantum chaos’. This is to say that physicists take for granted several concepts – many of which might even be too ‘basic’ for them to have to clarify to a science reporter – that the reporter may only accidentally discover.
    2. “Classical systems are, roughly speaking, defined by well-bounded theories and equations, most of which were invented to describe them. But the description of quantum systems often invokes concepts and mathematical tools that can be found strewn around many other fields of physics.” This impression was unexpectedly disorienting when it first struck. After many years, I realised that the problem lies in my (our?) schooling: I learnt concepts in classical physics in a way that closely tied them to other things I was learning at the same time. Could that be why complicated forms of Euclidean geometry come up at the same time as optics, and vector algebra at the same time as calculus? But it also strikes me that quantum systems lend themselves more readily to be described by more than one theory because of the significant diversity of effects on offer.
    3. The edge of physics is a more wonderful place than the middle because there’s a lot of creativity at work at the edge. This statement is very true for classical physics but vaguely at best for quantum physics. One reason is the diversity of effects: a system that is intractable in statistical mechanics might suddenly offer glimpses of order and predictability when viewed through the lens of quantum field theory. More than a few problems require ‘goat solutions’ – a personal term for an assumption thrown in to make a problem amenable to solving in such a way that the solution doesn’t retain any effects of the assumption (reason for the choice of words here). In some instances, physicists’ assumptions have brought the Iron Man films to mind: the assumptions are in the realm of the fantastic, but are still bound by a discipline that prevents runaway imagination.
    4. Researchers who use the tools of mathematical physics seem to take mathematical notation for granted. Statements of the following form may seem simple but actually pack a lot of information: “Consider a function f(x, y) of the form Σ xip where p is equal to dy/dt in some domain…” (an obviously made up example). I’m all the more spooked when I encounter symbols whose names themselves are beyond me, like ζ or Π, or when the logarithms make an appearance. We need to acknowledge the importance of being habituated to these terms. To a physicist who has spent many years dealing with that operation, a summation might mean a straightforward accumulation of certain effects, but in my mind it always invokes a series of complex sums. I don’t know what else to visualise.
    5. Only a small minority of physicists in India can talk in interesting ways about their work. They use interesting turns of phrase, metaphors borrowed from a book or a play, and sometimes contemplate what their and/or others’ work is telling them about the universe and our place in it. I don’t know why this is rare.
  • Whose fault is a retraction?

    January 8th, 2023

    A journal called Advances in Materials Science and Engineering retracted a paper it published and issued the following notice, excerpted from Retraction Watch, December 22, 2022:

    Advances in Materials Science and Engineering has retracted the article titled “Monitoring of Sports Health Indicators Based on Wearable Nanobiosensors” [1]. Since publication, readers have raised concerns that the error bars in Figure 9 appear to be the letter “T.” Moreover, it has been noted that the authors state that “no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study” which is contradictory to the study described. This therefore raises questions about the reliability of the underlying data and the article’s conclusions.

    … and about the journal, surely? This is a good example of a disingenuous retraction notice: it puts all the blame on a paper and its authors instead of admitting that the journal’s peer-review process is a sham.

    Assume, strictly for the sake of argument, that the authors weren’t aware of what they were doing, and now they have a retraction to their name. Retractions of this nature don’t look good, either on the authors or on the journal. Yet the journal was willing to let this happen, probably because it admits bad papers into its pages presuming (fairly) that the chances of their being detected are very small. As a result, the papers’ authors have technically published many papers and, if the journal has a publishing fee, it has made a good amount of money. However, the retraction becomes a black mark on the scientist’s résumé. The incentives are lopsided and the journal doesn’t seem to be interested in fixing that.

    In the present case, of course, the authors had to have known they were being dishonest in composing their paper the way they did. But when journals retract a paper because it was found, after publication, to contain plagiarised text – but which is legitimate in every other way – the authors don’t at all deserve all the blame (even less if English isn’t their first language) because the journal should have caught it before publication.

    The website of Advances in Materials Science and Engineering, a Hindawi title, sports a diagram of an elaborate workflow that specifies at least four opportunities for unsuitable papers to be rejected. Yet a paper so ridiculous as to paste the letter ‘T’ on graphs to make them look like error plots sailed through and was accepted for publication.

    Two inferences: 1) The paper didn’t encounter a single honest reviewer on its way to publication. It’s also probable that it landed on the desk of a reviewer who could have been sympathetic – to anything from the paper’s authors (because they were friends?) to an aspiration by the institute or the relevant community to increase its publication count. 2) Journals exist that wish to appear respectable but aren’t careful about meeting the requisite expectations fundamentally because they don’t care about that stuff. Many such journals complicate the desire to draw a definitive line between the visible symptoms of a legitimate journal and a journal that will publish any paper for money. Their habits are brought to light only when they publish a paper that catches the public attention; until then, they operate quietly in the background.

    For these reasons, it’s useful to not think of the scientific literature as a large, monolithic chunk of knowledge. It’s more like a river with some water coming in, some water going out, with some stretches polluted and others clean. Similarly, the literature is fragmented by dishonest journals, practices that enhance their prestige at the cost of the quality of published results, habits like ambulance-chasing and inflation bias, activities like paper mills, etc.

  • Something more foolish than completing phase 3 trials in 1.5 months?

    December 29th, 2022

    That the Union government and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had entered into a more intimate, but not necessarily more beneficial, relationship became evident in 2019 when then ISRO chairman K. Sivan trotted out a series of dubious claims to massage the fate of the Chandrayaan 2 mission, whose lunar surface component had obviously failed. Anyone who follows Indian spaceflight news is familiar with the adage ‘space is hard’ and all of them abide by it (there’s an argument that we shouldn’t extend the same courtesy to more mature space programmes). Yet Sivan was determined to salvage even more, going so far at one point to call the whole mission (orbiter + lander) a “98% success”.

    Shortly after news of the lander’s fate became clear to ground control, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was present as the chief guest, consoled Sivan with his customary hug even as ISRO at large withdrew into a shell of silence, offering only the occasional scrap of what it knew had happened to the lander. The vacuum of information allowed a trickle of speculation, but which was soon overwhelmed by a swell of conspiracies and, as is inevitable these days, a virtual barrier erected by right-wing commentators and bots that suppressed all questions asking for more information in the public domain. This ISRO, and the attendant public experience of India’s spaceflight programme, was markedly different from the ISRO of before – a feeling that Sivan deepened with other claims about the amount of time ISRO would need to realise its ‘Gaganyaan’ human spaceflight mission, which has already been delayed by three years. Sivan had unknowingly underestimated the amount, had deliberately communicated a shorter duration, had communicated the actual time but to which government officials couldn’t agree, or something else happened. The first possibility would’ve been unlikely were it not for the COVID-19 pandemic – but then it would seem that even if Sivan’s successor, S. Somanath, were to push back and ask for more time, the government has made up its mind: New Indian Express reported on December 8 that ISRO had received “instructions from the government” to send Indian astronauts to space on its GSLV Mk III rocket before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections! This has to be the second most unintelligent decision the government has made in the limited context of large-scale undertakings involving science and the lives of people, after Balram Bhargava’s subsequently rescinded threat in mid-2020 for researchers to complete the Covaxin phase 3 clinical trial in time for Prime Minister Modi’s Independence Day address less than two months away. It’s not clear if the government will rescind its demand of ISRO; the report itself is brief and doesn’t mention any resistance from the spaceflight mission team. But how this squares with minister Jitendra Singh’s statement in parliament last week, that the first crewed mission will only liftoff in late 2024 and that “crew safety is paramount”, is unclear. Assuming that the government will continue to push ISRO to launch in the first half of 2024, a flight based on a schedule modified to accommodate the demand may surpass the foolishness of Bhargava’s ask.

    Every human spaceflight mission is inordinately complex. ISRO will have to design and test every component of the launch vehicle, crew capsule, mission profile, ground systems and crew management beforehand, in different conditions. It has to anticipate all possible failure scenarios and arrange for both failure-avoidance systems and failsafes. The timeline may have been more flexible in the early days of the undertaking, when the systems being tested were less composite, but not so today. When the government “instructs” ISRO to launch the ‘Gaganyaan’ crewed flight before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections (which are around 18 months away), it’s practically asking ISRO to devise a testing schedule that will be completed – irrespective of the tests’ outcomes – in this period all so it can use the mission’s outcomes (developed with government funds) as part of its election campaign. It’s effectively asking ISRO to sideline science, safety standards and good sense. Imagine one safety test going awry, and which ISRO might in other circumstances have liked to fix and redo. With “instructions” like those of the government, it won’t be able to – jeopardising the mission itself as well as the lives of the astronauts and the reputation of the Indian space programme in the international arena. The government simply shouldn’t make such a frighteningly asinine demand, and instead allow ISRO to take all the time it needs (within reasonable limits) to successfully complete its first human spaceflight mission.

    ISRO has of late also embarked on programmes to increase its commercial revenue, even though it’s a “space research organisation”. If a crewed mission fails because the organisation let itself be cowed by the national government into trimming its testing process, all so a political party could use the launch as part of its poll propaganda, all of the organisation’s other rockets will confront doubts about their safety and whether they won’t threaten satellites worth hundreds of millions of dollars. A lot of ISRO’s work on ‘Gaganyaan’ has also happened to the exclusion of other launch vehicles and scientific missions, including (but not limited to) the reusable launch vehicle, the semi-cryogenic engine and the Aditya L1 space-probe. Its low rate of production of new rockets recently forced it to postpone the Chandrayaan 3 mission to accommodate the OneWeb satellites (in a commercial contract) in its launch manifest. Setting aside questions of ISRO’s relatively low funding and internal priorities, even if ‘Gaganyaan’ succeeds out of luck, the prospects of all of these adversely affected projects will suffer at least further reputational consequences. If ‘Gaganyaan’ fails, the future will be a lot worse.

    Just as the Covaxin incident opened a window into how the Indian government was thinking about the COVID-19 vaccination drive and the role of science in shaping it, a demand of ISRO to launch realise its human spaceflight mission with a hard deadline opens a window into the Indian government’s considerations on ‘Gaganyaan’. The BJP government revived ISRO’s proposal for a human spaceflight mission in 2014, approved it in 2017 and allocated Rs 10,000 crore in 2018. Did it do so only because of how the mission’s success, should it come to pass, would help the party win elections? It’s desirable for a party’s goals and the country’s goals to be aligned – until the former crimps the latter. But more importantly, should we be concerned about the government’s heuristic for selecting and rejecting which spaceflight missions to fund? And should we be concerned about which publicly funded projects it will seek more accountability on?

    There have been standing committee and audit reports calling ISRO out for slow work on this or that matter but the government at large, especially the incumbent one since 2019, has taken pains to maintain a front of amicability. It might be mildly amusing if a political party promises in its pre-poll manifesto to get ISRO in shape, and then in line, by readying a reusable launch vehicle for commercial missions by 2025 or launching five scientific missions in the next four years – but standing in the way of that is more than a knack to translate between public sentiment and technological achievement. It requires breaking a longstanding tradition of cosying up to ISRO as much as granting it autonomy while simultaneously underfunding it. We need the national government, most of all, to pay more attention to all ISRO projects on which there is evidence of dilly-dallying, and grapple honestly with the underlying issues, rather than poke its nose in the necessarily arduous safety-rating process of a crewed mission.

    Featured image: A GSLV Mk III rocket lifts off on its first orbital flight, July 2017. Credit: ISRO.

  • 2022 in retrospect

    December 28th, 2022

    2022 has been my worst on the record on several fronts. I had COVID-19 in the first month, which did a freaky number on my heart. My unexplained weight loss from 2021 continued its run into six months of 2022 before stopping suddenly, although all test reports came back normal and doctors were stumped. Bharat Biotech sued me and many others for defamation in a Telangana court. Stress and humiliation scaled new heights. Efforts to get a grip on my depression came to naught. Two long-term relationships came to an unexpected end. The blog was infiltrated once, possibly once more. I lost access to a a decade-old email account and, for some time, to my blog’s domain. I didn’t write as much as I would have liked, leading to the fewest words published in a year since 2016 (see the customary annual numbers below). On the bright side, I have many new beginnings to which I’m looking forward. I have officially blogged a million words (point #8 here is why this matters). It has been four years since I quit The Thing. I’ll be starting at The Hindu on January 2. I’ll be in Chennai again after five years and closer to some friends I have missed very much. (I’ll be speaking Tamil on a daily basis!) My health is getting better. I have room for new relationships and habits. I’m quite looking forward to 2023, and looking forward to looking back on 2022. I hope you have a wonderful year, too. Mask up, be good, and thanks for reading. 🙂

    Made with Datawrapper.
  • The identity of scientific papers

    December 28th, 2022

    This prompt arose in response to Stuart Ritchie’s response to a suggestion in an editorial “first published last year but currently getting some attention on Twitter” – that scientists should write their scientific papers as if they were telling a story, with a beginning, middle and end. The act of storytelling produces something entertaining by definition, but it isn’t the same as when people build stories around what they know. That is, people build stories around what they know but that knowledge, when it is first produced, isn’t and in fact can’t be reliably produced through acts of storytelling. This is Ritchie’s point, and it’s clearly true. As Ash Jogalekar commented on Twitter on Ritchie’s post

    Science does tell stories, but not by design. Einstein did not set out to tell the story of the universe when he invented general relativity. Darwin did not set out to tell the story of life on earth when he invented natural selection. https://t.co/xxE6PBoguY

    — Ash Jogalekar (@curiouswavefn) December 28, 2022

    (This is different from saying scientific knowledge shouldn’t be associated with stories – or that only it should be, a preference that philosopher of science Robert P. Crease calls “scientific gaslighting”.)

    Ritchie’s objection arises from a problematic recommendation in the 2021 editorial, that when writing their papers, scientists present the “take-home messages” first, then “select” the methods and results that produced those messages, and then conclude with an introduction-discussion hybrid. To Ritchie, scientists don’t face much resistance, as they’re writing their papers, other than their own integrity that keeps them from cherry-picking from their data to support predetermined conclusions. This is perfectly reasonable, especially considering the absence of such resistance manifested in science’s sensational replication crisis.

    But are scientific papers congruent with science itself?

    The 2021 editorial’s authors don’t do themselves any favours in their piece, writing:

    “The scientific story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. These three components can, and should, map onto the typical IMRaD structure. However, as editors we see many manuscripts that follow the IMRaD structure but do not tell a good scientific story, even when the underlying data clearly can provide one. For example, many studies present the findings without any synthesis or an effort to place them into a wider context. This limits the reader’s ability to gain knowledge and understanding, hence reducing the papers impact.”

    Encouraging scientists to do such things as build tension and release it with a punchline, say, could be a recipe for disaster. The case of Brian Wansink in fact fits Ritchie’s concerns to a T. In the most common mode of scientific publishing today, narrative control is expected to lie beyond scientists – and (coming from a science journalist) lies with science journalists. Or at least: the opportunities to shape science-related narratives are available in large quantities to us.

    A charitable interpretation of the editorial is that its authors would like scientists to take a step that they believe to be marginal (“right there,” as they say) in terms of the papers’ narratives but which has extraordinary benefits – but I’m disinclined. Their words hew frustratingly but unsurprisingly close to suggesting that scientists’ work isn’t properly represented in the public imagination. The most common suggestions I’ve encountered in my experience are that science journalists don’t amplify the “right” points and that they dwell on otherwise trivial shortcomings. The criticisms generally disregard the socio-political context in which science operates and to which journalists are required to be attuned.

    This said, and as Ritchie also admits, the scientific paper itself is not science – so why can’t it be repurposed to ends that scientists are better off meeting than one that’s widely misguided? Ritchie writes:

    “Science isn’t a story – and it isn’t even a scientific paper. The mere act of squeezing a complex process into a few thousand words … is itself a distortion of reality. Every time scientists make a decision about “framing” or “emphasis” or “take-home messages”, they risk distorting reality even further, chipping away at the reliability of what they’re reporting. We all know that many science news articles and science books are over-simplified, poorly-framed, and dumbed-down. Why push scientific papers in the same direction?”

    That is, are scientific papers the site of knowledge production? With the advent of preprint papers, research preregistration and open-data and data-sharing protocols, many papers of today are radically different from those a decade or two ago. Especially online, and on the pages of more progressive journals like eLife, papers are accompanied by peer-reviewers’ comments, links to the raw data (code as well as multimedia), ways to contact the authors, a comments section, a ready-reference list of cited papers, and links to other articles that have linked to it. Sometimes some papers deemed to be more notable by a journal’s editors are also published together with commentary by an independent scientist on the papers’ implications for the relevant fields.

    Scientific papers may have originated as, and for a long time have been, the ‘first expression’ of a research group’s labour to produce knowledge, and thus perfectly subject to Ritchie’s concerns about transforming them to be more engaging. But today, given the opportunities that are available in some pockets of research assessment and publishing, they’re undeniably the sites of knowledge consumption – and in effect the ‘first expression’ of researchers’ attempts to communicate with other scientists as well as, in many cases, the public at large.

    It’s then effectively down to science journalists, and the resistance offered by their integrity to report on papers responsibly – although even then we should beware the “seduction of storytelling”.

    I think the 2021 editorial is targetting the ‘site of knowledge consumption’ identity of the contemporaneous scientific paper, and offers ways to engage its audience better. But when the point is to improve it, why continue to work with, in Ritchie’s and the editorial’s words, a “journal-imposed word count” and structure?

    A halfway point between the editorial’s recommendations and Ritchie’s objections (in his post, but more in line with his other view that we should do away with scientific papers altogether) is to publish the products of scientific labour taking full advantage of what today’s information and communication technologies allow: without a paper per se but a concise description of the methods and the findings, an explicitly labeled commentary by the researchers, the raw code, multimedia elements with tools to analyse them in real-time, replication studies, even honest (and therefore admirable) retraction reports if they’re warranted. The commentary can, in the words of the editorial, have “a beginning, a middle and an end”; and in this milieu, in the company of various other knowledge ‘blobs’, readers – including independent scientists – should be able to tell straightforwardly if the narrative fits the raw data on offer.

    All this said, I must add that what I have set out here are far from where reality is at the moment; in Ritchie’s words,

    “Although those of us … who’ve been immersed in this stuff for years might think it’s a bit passé to keep going on about “HARKing” and “researcher degrees of freedom” and “p-hacking” and “publication bias” and “publish-or-perish” and all the rest, the word still hasn’t gotten out to many scientists. At best, they’re vaguely aware that these problems can ruin their research, but don’t take them anywhere near seriously enough.”

    I don’t think scientific papers are co-identifiable with science itself, or they certainly needn’t be. The latter is concerned with reliably producing knowledge of increasingly higher quality while the former explains what the researchers did, why, when and how. Their goals are different, and there’s no reason the faults of one should hold the other back. However, a research communication effort that has completely and perfectly transitioned to embodying the identity of the modern research paper (an anachronism) as the site of, among other things, knowledge consumption is a long way away – but it helps to bear it in mind, to talk about it and to improve it.

  • Links (2)

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