Month: August 2021

Climate: The US needs to do more – and India needs to, too

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Shortly after the IPCC published the first installment of its AR6 report, The Wire Science produced a short video explaining the report’s salient points. It swiftly met with some backlash from some scientists, who were miffed that the video spoke about India reducing its carbon dioxide emissions without emphasising that the US and many European nations needed to commit to greater reductions than others.

I’m wary that repeatedly stressing that point could lead to a mindset that if the US, the UK, Germany, etc. don’t reduce their emissions, India has a free-pass to not reduce its emissions either. From a bird’s eye view, this ‘free pass’ might seem like a distant possibility considering, according to Climate Action Tracker, India is on course to do its bit to keep the world’s average surface temperature increase below 2º C over pre-industrial levels – the Paris Agreement line. However, there are two issues here that should dispel this sense of satiation.

First, climate change will affect India more than it will affect most other countries, and what India needs to do to stave off the worst of these effects is not something Climate Action Tracker or any other global monitor measures. Second, ‘they are not doing it, so we won’t either’ is a not-so-distant possibility because it has already turned up in some narratives – but especially ones concerned with getting people out of poverty.

The latter, we are told, is a carbon-intensive exercise, but we must also consider how and to whom the benefits of such development accrue, considering arguments that India should be allowed to emit some more carbon dioxide for some more time typically emerge when a hydrocarbon extraction project in Tamil Nadu, a transshipment project in Nicobar, an iron-ore mine in Goa, a railway line in Maharashtra, an oil pipeline or sand-mine in Assam, a solar-power plant in Rajasthan or a diamond-mine in Bundelkhand is at stake.

As M. Rajshekhar has written in Seminar, one big difference between the UPA I/II and the BJP I/II governments is that the former was corrupt and sought profits, while the latter is corrupt and seeks rent. Under the BJP, Adani, Reliance, Essar and a few other corporate groups have benefited inordinately to the exclusion of most others, as a result oligopolising a swathe of the country’s natural resources, including forests, mountains, water bodies and non-agricultural land. This is not sustainable development and can’t possibly lead to it either.

In this sense, Rajshekhar wrote for CarbonCopy, “the country’s inability to lift its people out of poverty shouldn’t become an unlimited pass to pump greenhouse gases into the air.” That is, if eliminating poverty is taking the form of allowing Adani, Reliance, Essar, etc. to pad their bottom lines by building roads, airports and railway tracks (often to the rejection of all ecological wisdom), then the emissions resulting from these activities don’t deserve to be excused. And considering the incumbent government has made a habit of accelerating and approving such projects, the added pressure of having to cut emissions is a good thing.

On the first count, that climate change will affect India more than most: climate policy expert Kapil Subramanian broke down the IPCC report’s predictions in three different emissions scenarios for the South Asia region, and found that “the 1º C difference in warming in South Asia between the SSP 2-4.5 and the SSP 1-2.6 scenarios is more than worth fighting for.” (This is the difference between global mean surface temperature rise of 1.8º C and 2.7º C.)

As examples, he discusses projected weather patterns – which we ought to consider as conservative ‘estimates’ – over India corresponding to the scenarios: more days of extreme heat, more flood-causing rainfall and longer summer monsoons, and extreme events that happened once a year likely happening 4-6 times a year. Climate Action Tracker or any other similar entities that take a big-picture view of India’s actions are blind to these considerations, to which India alone can, and must, respond.

So while emphasising that the US and some European countries should do more at every turn is important in some fora, we don’t have to do it at every turn all the time. Instead, we need to flip our own demands, bearing in mind that ‘cutting emissions’ – i.e. mitigation – isn’t the full picture. India needs to cut its own emissions, irrespective of how much the US, the EU, etc. are cutting, while transitioning to sustainable development (long fricking shot but we must demand it), and, on a related note, make its adaptation policies better and more just.

The US needs to do more; India needs to do more as well.

Stream of nothing

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I decided to go out this evening.

First I went to Bookworm’s new setup on Church Street. There, I started skimming the shelves from the first one on the right, moving from right to left, front to back, room by room.

I picked up the first book I saw, The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin. I like to hold something.

The store was quite big. Even though there were 30-40 people there, I could still find an empty room in which to fart in peace and have no one hear.

There was a Tamil-speaking dude in the store. He assumed that no one else there understood Tamil (he said just that out loud, unless of course he was trolling the rest of us), and was giving his companion pretentious gyan about books in the science section.

I picked up The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus and randomly opened it. Page 93: ABSURD CREATION Philosophy and Fiction. I continued reading.

All those lives maintained in the rarefied air of the absurd could not persevere without some profound and constant thought to infuse its strength into them. Right here, it can be only a strange feeling of fidelity. Conscious men have been seen to fulfill their task amid the most stupid of wars without considering themselves in contradiction. This is because it was essential to elude nothing. There is thus a metaphysical honor in enduring the world’s absurdity. Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance.

I liked it. Shortlisted.

I came across the science section. Ugh.

Internal monologue: The books in the science section are all written by scientists, and many of them cross over to comment on other issues as well. Why is no book here written by a social scientist, a philosopher or a thinker broadly who crossed over, made sense of some science and wrote about it? There’s Nietzsche, and then there’s Camus, who builds over, around, under Nietzsche with much less impeding prose. It didn’t seem to me to be an indictment of the philosophers and thinkers but of how science is understood these days – what it contains and what it can tell us about the world and life today, and who gets to talk about that.

But what about exceptions like Oliver Sacks and Stephen Gould? I’d spotted Sacks in another section, but more importantly both were blah.

Consider the authors of the science books. There is no diversity. The hits (according to Bookworm) are by the same people who wrote the hits I read a decade ago, even two decades ago. And most of the new writers are writing about similar things in similar ways.

I spotted and hung on to Being and Event by Alain Badiou (two friends had recommended it) and Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky for a bit, but finally decided to go with The City We Became and The Myth of Sisyphus. It’s the first time I’m going to be reading Jemisin.

I went to Blossoms next, to return two books I’d bought there a couple weeks ago and finished reading. I got Rs 350 in store credit. Awesome.

I’d been anxious about where I would eat. I’ve always had Church Street dinners at Coconut Grove but wanted to try something new this time. Brik Oven it was – just because it had people in it, so it must be good I figured.

I picked a fig and onion pizza. It was excellent. The staff was great, too, not entirely reserved but not too chatty either. They had a wood-fired oven that made me think about climate change. Where do we draw the line?

I daydreamed: if I was really rich, I’d set up an anti-growth fund. It would have money I’d give to companies to keep them from doing foolish things in the pursuit of scale or more capital. We’re already seeing this with pharma and online erotica.

I paid the bill and called a cab. So much traffic getting out of Church Street. So much stress for the driver. Wish I could help.

I got my earphones out, plugged them into the phone and resumed compiling a new walking playlist. I called it ‘Dark Energy’ because I was looking for energy but not of the uplifting variety. Des Rocs was the star, but I also loved ‘Cabin Fever’ by Reignwolf.

As we waited at a signal, in a sea of yellow and red lights, the headlights of a car behind us went off just as ‘Outta My Mind’ hit a crescendo. It was a moment, I smiled to myself.

The earphones’ right earpiece kept popping out of my ear all the way home, had to keep putting it back in. I thought my earhole was shrinking. Haven’t stranger things happ–

Hey, it’s raining.

Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance.

They’re trying to build a telescope

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If a telescope like the TMT and a big physics experiment like the INO are being stalled for failing to account for the interests and sensibilities of the people already living at or near their planned sites, what should scientists do when they set out to plan for the next big observatory or similar installation at a new site? A new paper published by Nature on August 18, by a bunch of researchers from China, describes in great detail their efforts to qualify a new “astronomical observing site”. “On Earth’s surface,” their paper begins, “there are only a handful of high-quality astronomical sites that meet the requirements for very large next-generation facilities. In the context of scientific opportunities in time-domain astronomy, a good site on the Tibetan Plateau will bridge the longitudinal gap between the known best sites (all in the Western Hemisphere). The Tibetan Plateau is the highest plateau on Earth, with an average elevation of over 4,000 metres, and thus potentially provides very good opportunities for astronomy and particle astrophysics.” In the paper, the researchers explain their estimates of the available observing time; seeing with a differential image motion monitor; and air stability and turbulence and water vapour over the site – near a town named Lenghu in the Qinghai province (central China).

Such exhaustive detail may be common when it comes to qualifying one astronomical observing spot over another, but information about the mountain, the town, the people who live there, how they use the land, the cultural significance of their natural surroundings and – given that Qinghao is on the Tibetan plateau – if the installation of a telescope, if and when that happens, will be perceived as yet another form of colonialism by the Chinese state are all conspicuous by absence. I’m sure most readers of this blog are familiar with the TMT – short for Thirty-Meter Telescope – story: residents of Mauna Kea, where the observatory is to be built, protested and stopped its construction in 2014. Work resumed only in 2019 after a series of interventions, one outcome of which was that the international astronomy community had to reckon with its colonial history and present. Let me quote at length from an article Nithyanand Rao wrote for The Wire Science in 2020, about the “shared history” of astronomy and colonialism:

[Leandra] Swanner finds that for native Hawaiians, “science has effectively become an agent of colonisation”, “fundamentally indistinguishable from earlier colonisation activities”. This puts astronomers in a difficult position. They see the economic benefits astronomy brings to Hawai’i – over a thousand jobs, business for local firms and services and, once the TMT comes online, a promise to pay $1 million in annual lease rent — and their own work as a noble pursuit of knowledge. However, they encounter opposition that has charged them with environmental and cultural destruction.

“Unfortunately for the astronomers involved in the TMT debate,” writes Swanner, “whether they identify as indigenous allies or neocolonialists ultimately matters less than whether they are perceived as practicing neocolonialist science” (emphasis in the original).

Astronomers have attempted a counter-narrative, linking the contemporary practice of astronomy to ancient Polynesian explorers and astronomers who navigated using the stars. A concrete outcome and centrepiece of this effort was a science education centre and planetarium that “links to early Polynesian navigation history and knowledge of the night skies, and today’s renaissance of Hawaiian culture and wayfinding with parallel growth of astronomy and scientific developments on Hawaii island.”

Swanner notes the unequal relationship – the centre “merely grafts Native Hawaiian culture onto the dominant culture of Western science … Astronomers do not look to traditional knowledge to carry out their observing runs, after all, but the observatories studding the summit physically deny access to sites of sacred importance.”

The story of the India-based Neutrino Observatory is equally cynical, and equally problematic in a different way. When I commissioned Rao, and Virat Markandeya, to investigate the INO’s ‘situation’ in 2016, some four years after the Indian government had permitted its constriction, for The Wire, I assumed that it was being held back by bureaucratic inefficiency, as is so common in India, and a mulch of pseudoscience and regional politics in Tamil Nadu. But when they were pursuing the story, I learnt of a small but interesting detail: since 2010, India has required any agency that prepares an environmental impact assessment report (for a project that might damage the environment) to be accredited by the Quality Council of India. The INO collaboration’s report had been prepared by an unaccredited body, and this presented a stumbling block. Members of the collaboration – physicists – thought this was okay, just a minor detail, but to the people protesting the project, it was one thorn among many that they’d come to identify with numerous projects that governments have approved in India and which have overlooked the rights of the people living near those projects. And in the INO’s case, the principal offenders have been the Department of Atomic Energy and the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board, helped along of late by the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change. It struck me that people overlooking the little things was, for many of those at the receiving end of the new India’s ‘acche din’, a perfectly legitimate reason to suspect something was up. I’m bummed that the INO isn’t being built (and in fact could be cancelled, if the state’s new chief minister M.K. Stalin has his way – although I was confused when he expressed his opposition to the INO but his government had, a month or so ago, allowed the embattled Sterlite copper-smelting unit in Thoothukudi to reopen) but I wouldn’t have the project’s still being stalled any other way.

The problem is what counts as due process, and who gets to decide. As Swanner has noted, a bunch of astronomers “grafting” one idea onto another was for them the right way to go – but it’s of little use to the people in Hawai’i who are afraid of losing access to what is to them a culturally and spiritually significant location, in exchange for something originally conceived to benefit other people. (It was also quite ironic when astronomers were pissed after SpaceX’s Starlink constellation satellites began to obstruct astronomical observations of the night sky, and began to complain that the sky is a global commons, etc. It’s perhaps a greater irony that India – which contributes to 10% of the TMT collaboration – wants the telescope to be shifted away from Mauna Kea, to a different site, because of the threat of future protests – the same India that has almost amended all the country’s environmental laws to include a ‘pay and pollute’ clause.) The INO outreach team has insisted that it conducted regular and effective outreach among the people of Theni, the district in which the INO’s site is located, but they may have overlooked the wider environment of cynicism and bureaucratic dishonesty in which their efforts, and the public perception of those efforts, was couched.

Environmental activist and writer (and my former teacher) Nityanand Jayaraman told me sometime between 2016 and 2020 that at no time did the governments of India and Tamil Nadu nor the INO collaboration give themselves or the people of Theni opposed to the project the option of moving the experiment to a different location. When the latter group did demand that the project be moved away, members of the INO collaboration and other scientists that Rao and Markandeya spoke to countered that the protestors’ reasons were pseudoscientific (most of them were pseudoscientific) – but this was hardly the point. The protestors had no need to be scientific any more than they had to be guaranteed their rights and other entitlements. (It nags me that ‘solving’ the latter is a much larger problem than the proponents of one project could accommodate, but I don’t know what else I’d advocate.)

And now, astronomers in China have published a paper expressing their excitement about having spotted a new location at which to mount a telescope, themselves overlooking considerations of whether the people who are already there might be okay with it. As a result they may have effectively shut one option out. This is an important factor because, as Rao has written (see excerpt below), many people seem to think that Hawaiians’ resistance to the TMT and others of its kind on the islands is fairly recent; this is not true. They expressed their opposition how they could; the rest of us didn’t pay attention. From Rao’s article:

For a historically informed understanding of the conflict, we have to go back much further, to Hawaii’s annexation by the US in 1898, following which land was ceded to the US government.

In 1959, these lands – including Mauna Kea – were in turn ceded by the US government to the State of Hawai’i, which held them “in trust” for native Hawaiians. The next year, a tsunami laid waste to the city of Hilo in Hawai’i, prompting its chamber of commerce to write to universities in the US and Japan suggesting that Mauna Kea might be useful for astronomical observatories. This event coincided with US astronomers’ interest in Hawai’i as well.

And so the conflict between native Hawaiians and the American astronomy community began in the 1960s, when the first of the 13 observatories was constructed on the mountain that the former consider to be “a place revered as a house of worship, an ancestor, and an elder sibling in the mo’okū’auhau (or genealogical succession) of all Hawaiians.”

At the time, writes [Iokepa] Casumbal-Salazar, “there was no public consultation, no clear management process and little governmental oversight.” Environmentalists soon began opposing further construction on the mountain, arguing that the existing telescopes had contaminated local aquifers and destroyed the habitat of a rare bug found only on the mountain’s summit. …

Contrary to the narrative that native Hawaiians did not oppose the first telescopes on Mauna Kea in the 1960s and 1970s, Casumbal-Salazar shows how they did indeed express their dissent “in the few public forums available, by writing newspaper editorials, publishing opinion pieces and speaking out at public events” while also fighting other battles, such as those to reclaim their rights to land, resources, cultural practices — even the right to teach their children in the Hawaiian language.

They were also fighting evictions and resettlements in the name of tourism development and decades of the US Navy’s use of an island as target practice for its bombs. At the same time, the state’s dependence on tourism and militarism resulted in income inequalities and emigration. …

Similarly, native communities and environmentalists opposed the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, concerned about the ecology and “spiritual integrity” of the mountain. At the time the new observatory was proposed, Kitt Peak was already host to two dozen telescopes.

Today, moving the TMT or any of the other observatories away will be no small feat: they draw hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants and investments every year, not to mention setting them up took decades of work. To echo Jayaraman, not having any observatories here is no longer an option. And this is the same future the new Chinese Nature paper seems to augur: pick a spot, plan a telescope, and then ask the locals if they’re okay with it. If they’re not, tough luck. To borrow a few words from the abstract of Casumbal-Salazar’s thesis, it will become another push for a telescope “realised through law and rationalised by science”.

(I’m not sure if a lot of people got the headline – a play on the name of a song by System of a Down.)

Rupavardhini B.R. read a draft of this post before it was published.

PeerJ’s peer-review problem

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Of all the scientific journals in the wild, there are a few I keep a closer eye on: they publish interesting results but more importantly they have been forward-thinking on matters of scientific publishing and they’ve also displayed a tendency to think out loud (through blog posts, say) and actively consider public feedback. Reading what they publish in these posts, and following the discussions that envelope them, has given me many useful insights into how scientific publishing works and, perhaps more importantly, how the perceptions surrounding this enterprise are shaped and play out.

One such journal is eLife. All their papers are open access, and they also publish the papers’ authors’ notes and reviewers’ comments with each paper. They also have a lively ‘magazine’ section in which they publish articles and essays by working scientists – especially younger ones – relating to the extended social environments in which knowledge-work happens. Now, for some reason, I’d cast PeerJ in similarly progressive light, even though I hadn’t visited their website in a long time. But on August 16, PeerJ published the following tweet:

It struck me as a weird decision (not that anyone cares). Since the article explaining the journal’s decision appears to be available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, I’m reproducing it here in full so that I can annotate my way through it.

Since our launch, PeerJ has worked towards the goal of publishing all “Sound Science”, as cost effectively as possible, for the benefit of the scientific community and society. As a result we have, until now, evaluated articles based only on an objective determination of scientific and methodological soundness, not on subjective determinations of impact, novelty or interest.

At the same time, at the core of our mission has been a promise to give researchers more influence over the publishing process and to listen to community feedback over how peer review  should work and how research should be assessed.

Great.

In recent months we have been thinking long and hard about feedback, from both our Editorial Board and Reviewers, that certain articles should no longer be considered as valid candidates for peer review or formal publication: that whilst the science they present may be “sound”, it is not of enough value to either the scientific record, the scientific community, or society, to justify being peer-reviewed or be considered for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Our Editorial Board Members have asked us that we do our best to identify such submissions before they enter peer review.

This is the confusing part. To the uninitiated: One type of the scientific publishing process involves scientists writing up a paper and submitting it to a journal for consideration. An editor, or editors, at the journal checks the paper and then commissions a group of independent experts on the same topic to review it. These experts are expected to provide comments to help the journal decide whether it should publish the paper, and if yes, if the paper can be improved. Note that they are usually not paid for their work or time.

Now, if PeerJ’s usual reviewers are unhappy with how many papers the journal’s asking them to review, how does it make sense to impose a new, arbitrary and honestly counterproductive sort of “value” on submissions instead of increasing the number of reviewers the journal works with?

I find the journal’s decision troublesome because some important details are missing – details that encompass borderline-unethical activities by some other journals that have only undermined the integrity and usefulness of the scientific literature. For example, the “high impact factor” journal Nature has asked its reviewers in the past to prioritise sensational results over glamorous ones, overlooking the fact that such results are also likelier to be wrong. For another example, the concept of pre-registration has started to become more recently simply because most journals used to refuse (and still do) negative results. That is, if a group of scientists set out to check if something was true – and it’d be amazing if it was true – and found that it was false instead, they’d have a tough time finding a journal willing to publish their paper.

And third, preprint papers have started to become an acceptable way of publishing research only in the last few years, and that too only in a few branches of science (especially physics). Most grant-giving and research institutions still prefer papers being published in journals, instead of being uploaded on preprint repositories, not to mention a dominant research culture in many countries – including India – still favouring arbitrarily defined “prestigious journals” over others when it comes to picking scientists for promotions, etc.

For these reasons, any decision by a journal that says sound science and methodological rigour alone won’t suffice to ‘admit’ a paper into their pages risks reinforcing – directly or indirectly – a bias in the scientific record that many scientists are working hard to move away from. For example, if PeerJ rejects a solid paper, to speak, because it ‘only’ confirms a previous discovery, improves its accuracy, etc. and doesn’t fill a knowledge gap, per se, in order to ease the burden on its reviewers, the scientific record still stands to lose out on an important submission. (It pays to review journals’ decisions assuming that each journal is the only one around – à la the categorical imperative – and that other journals don’t exist.)

So what are PeerJ‘s new criteria for rejecting papers?

As a result, we have been working with key stakeholders to develop new ways to evaluate submissions and are introducing new pre-review evaluation criteria, which we will initially apply to papers submitted to our new Medical Sections, followed soon after by all subject areas. These evaluation criteria will define clearer standards for the requirements of certain types of articles in those areas. For example, bioinformatic analyses of already published data sets will need to meet more stringent reporting and data analysis requirements, and will need to clearly demonstrate that they are addressing a meaningful knowledge gap in the literature.

We don’t know yet, it seems.

At some level, of course, this means that PeerJ is moving away from the concept of peer reviewing all sound science. To be absolutely clear, this does not mean we have an intention of becoming a highly-selective “glamour” journal publisher that publishes only the most novel breakthroughs. It also does not mean that we will stop publishing negative or null results. However, the feedback we have received is that the definition of what constitutes a valid candidate for publication needs to evolve.

To be honest, this is a laughable position. The journal admits in the first sentence of this paragraph that no matter where it goes from here, it will only recede from an ideal position. In the next sentence it denies (vehemently, considering in the article on its website, this sentence was in bold) its decision is a move that will transform it into a “glamour” journal – like Nature, Science, NEJM, etc. have been – nor, in the third sentence, that it will stop publishing “negative or null results”. Now I’m even more curious what these heuristics could be which specify that a) submissions have to have “sound science”, b) “address a meaningful knowledge gap”, and c) don’t exclude negative/null results. It’s possible to see some overlap between these requirements that some papers will occupy – but it’s also possible to see many papers that won’t tick all three boxes yet still deserve to be published. To echo PeerJ itself, being a “glamour” journal is only one way to be bad.

We are being influenced by the researchers who peer review our research articles. We have heard from so many of our editorial board members and reviewers that they feel swamped by peer review requests and that they – and the system more widely – are close to breaking point. We most regularly hear this frustration when papers that they are reviewing do not, in their expert opinion, make a meaningful contribution to the record and are destined to be rejected; and should, in their view, have been filtered out much sooner in the process.

If you ask me (as an editor), the first sentence’s syntax seems to suggest PeerJ is being forced by its reviewers, and not influenced. More importantly, I haven’t seen these bespoke problematic papers that are “sound” but at the same time don’t make a meaningful contribution. An expert’s opinion that a paper on some topic should be rejected (even though, again, it’s “sound science”) could be rooted either in an “arrogant gatekeeper” attitude or in valid reasons, and PeerJ‘s rules should be good enough to be able to differentiate between the two without simultaneously allowing ‘bad reviewers’ to over-“influence” the selection process.

More broadly, I’m a science journalist looking into science from the outside, seeing a colossal knowledge-producing machine that’s situated on the same continuum on which I see myself to be located. If I receive too many submissions at The Wire Science, I don’t make presumptuous comments about what I think should and shouldn’t belong in the public domain. Instead, I pitch my boss about hiring one more person on my team and, second, I’m honest with each submission’s author about why I’m rejecting it: “I’m sorry, I’m short on time.”

Such submissions, in turn, impact the peer review of articles that do make a very significant contribution to the literature, research and society – the congestion of the peer review process can mean assigning editors and finding peer reviewers takes more time, potentially delaying important additions to the scientific record.

Gatekeeping by another name?

Furthermore, because it can be difficult and in some cases impossible to assign an Academic Editor and/or reviewers, authors can be faced with frustratingly long waits only to receive the bad news that their article has been rejected or, in the worst cases, that we were unable to peer review their paper. We believe that by listening to this feedback from our communities and removing some of the congestion from the peer review process, we will provide a better, more efficient, experience for everyone.

Ultimately, it comes down to the rules by which PeerJ‘s editorial board is going to decide which papers are ‘worth it’ and which aren’t. And admittedly, without knowing these rules, it’s hard to judge PeerJ – except on one count: “sound science” is already a good enough rule by which to determine the quality of a scientist’s work. To say it doesn’t suffice for reasons unrelated to scientific publishing, and the publishing apparatus’s dangerous tendency to gatekeep based on factors that have little to do with science, sounds at least precarious.

Engels, Weinberg

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Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels, 1883 (ed. 1976):

… an acquaintance with the historical course of evolution of human thought, with the views on the general inter-connections in the external world expressed at various times, is required by theoretical natural science for the additional reason that it furnishes a criterion of the theories propounded by this science itself. Here, however, lack acquaintance with the history of philosophy is fairly frequently and glaringly displayed. Propositions which were advanced in philosophy centuries ago, which often enough have long been disposed of philosophically, are frequently put forward by theorising natural scientists as brand-new wisdom and even become fashionable for a while. It is certainly a great achievement of the mechanical theory of heat that it strengthened the principle of the theory of heat that it strengthened the principle of the conservation of energy by means of fresh proofs and put it once more in the forefront; but could this principle have appeared on the scene as something so absolutely new if the worthy physicists had remembered that it had already been formulated by Descartes? Science physics and chemistry once more operate almost exclusively with molecules and atoms, the atomic philosophy of ancient Greece has of necessity come to the fore again. But how superficially it is treated even by the best of natural scientists! Thus Kekulé tells us … that Democritus, instead of Leucippus, originated it, and he maintains that Dalton was the first to assume the existence of qualitatively different elementary atoms and was the first to ascribe to them different weights characteristic of the different elements. Yet anyone can read in Diogenes Laertius that already Epicurus had ascribed to atoms differences not only of magnitude and form but also of weight, that is, he was already acquanited in his own way with atomic weight and atomic volume.

The year 1848, which otherwise brought nothing to a conclusion in Germany, accomplished a complete revolution only in the sphere of philosophy. By throwing itself into the field of the practical, here setting up the beginnings of modern industry and swindling, there initiating the mighty advance which natural science has since experienced in Germany and which was inaugurated by the caricature-like itinerant preachers Vogt, Büchner, etc., the nation resolutely turned its back on classical German philosophy that had lost itself in the sands of Berlin Old-Hegelianism. Berlin Old-Hegelianism had richly deserved that. But a national that wants to climb the pinnacles of science cannot possibly manage without theoretical thought. Not only Hegelianism but dialectics too was thrown overboard—and that just at the moment when the dialectical character of natural processes irresistibly forced itself upon the mind, when therefore only dialectics could be of assistance to natural science in negotiating the mountain of theory—and so there was a helpless relapse into the old metaphysics. What prevailed among the public since then were, on the one hand, the vapid reflections of Schopenhauer, which were fashioned to fit the philistines, and later even those of Hartmann, and, on the other hand, the vulgar itinerant-preacher materialism of a Vogt and a Büchner. At the universities the most diverse varieties of eclecticism competed with one another and had only one thing in common, namely, that they were concocted from nothing but remnants of old philosophies and were all equally metaphysics. All that was saved from the remnants of classical philosophy was a certain neo-Kantianism, whose last word was the eternally unknowable thing-in-itself, that is, the bit of Kant that least merited preservation. The final result was the incoherence and confusion of theoretical thought now prevalent.

One can scarcely pick up a theoretical book on natural science without getting the impression that natural scientists themselves feel how much they are dominated by this incoherence and confusion, and that the so-called philosophy now current offers them absolutely no way out. And here there really is no other way out, no possibility of achieving clarity, than by a return, in one form of another, from metaphysical to dialectical thinking.

Dreams of a Final Theory, Steven Weinberg, 1992:

Even where philosophical doctrines have in the past been useful to scientists, they have generally lingered on too long, becoming of more harm than ever they were of use. Take, for example, the venerable doctrine of “mechanism,” the idea that nature operates through pushes and pulls of material particles or fluids. In the ancient world no doctrine could have been more progressive. Ever since the pre-Socratic philosophers Democritus and Leucippus began to speculate about atoms, the idea that natural phenomena have mechanical causes has stood in opposition to popular beliefs in gods and demons. The Hellenistic cult leader Epicurus brought a mechanical worldview into his creed specifically as an antidote to belief in the Olympian gods. When Rene Descartes set out in the 1630s on his great attempt to understand the world in rational terms, it was natural that he should describe physical forces like gravitation in a mechanical way, in terms of vortices in a material fluid filling all space. The “mechanical philosophy” of Descartes had a powerful influence on Newton, not because it was right (Descartes did not seem to have the modern idea of testing theories quantitatively) but because it provided an example of the sort of mechanical theory that could make sense out of nature. Mechanism reached its zenith in the nineteenth century, with the brilliant explanation of chemistry and heat in terms of atoms. And even today mechanism seems to many to be simply the logical opposite to superstition. In the history of human thought the mechanical worldview has played a heroic role.

That is just the trouble. In science as in politics or economics we are in great danger from heroic ideas that have outlived their usefulness. The heroic past of mechanism gave it such prestige that the followers of Descartes had trouble accepting Newton’s theory of the solar system. How could a good Cartesian, believing that all natural phenomena could be reduced to the impact of material bodies or fluids on one another, accept Newton’s view that the sun exerts a force on the earth across 93 million miles of empty space? It was not until well into the eighteenth century that Continental philosophers began to feel comfortable with the idea of action at a distance. In the end Newton’s ideas did prevail on the Continent as well as in Britain, in Holland, Italy, France, and Germany (in that order) from 1720 on. To be sure, this was partly due to the influence of philosophers like Voltaire and Kant. But here again the service of philosophy was a negative one; it helped only to free science from the constraints of philosophy itself.

Cooperative distrust

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Is there a doctrine or manifesto of cooperative distrust? Because I think that’s what we need today, in the face of reams of government data — almost all of it, in fact — that is untrustworthy, and the only way it can support our democracy is if the public response to it (if and when it becomes available in the public domain) is led by cooperative distrust: one and all distrusting it, investigating the specific way in which it has been distorted, undoing that distortion and, finally, reassessing the data.

The distrust here needs to be cooperative not to undermine the data (and thus avoid spiralling off into conspiracies) but to counteract the effects of ‘bad data’ on ethical public governance. There are some things that we the public trust our government to not undercut – but our present one has consistently undercut government while empowering the party whose members occupy it.

In the latest, and quite egregious, example, the Indian government has said an empowered committee it set up during the country’s devastating second COVID-19 outbreak to manage the supply of medical oxygen does not exist. Either the government really didn’t create the committee and lied during the second wave or it created the committee but is desperately trying to hide its proceedings now by lying. Either way, this is a new low. But more pertinently, the government is behaving this way because it seems to be intent on managing each event to the party’s utmost favour – pointing to a committee when having one is favourable, pretending it didn’t exist when it is unfavourable – without paying attention to the implications for the public memory of government action.

Specifically, the government’s views at different points of time don’t – can’t – fit on one self-consistent timeline because its reality in, say, April 2021 differs from its reality in August 2021. But to consummate its history-rewrite, it has some commentators’ help; given enough time, OpIndia and its ilk are sure to manufacture explanations for why there never was a medical oxygen committee. On the other hand, what do the people remember? Irrespective of public memory, public attention is more restricted and increasingly more short-lived, and it has always boded poorly that both sections of the press and the national government have been comfortable with taking advantage of this ‘feature’, for profits, electoral gains, etc.

Just as there is a difference between what the world really looks like and what humans see (with their eyes and brains), there is a significant difference between history and memory. Today, remembering that there was a medical oxygen committee depends simply on recent memory; one more year and remembering the same thing will also demand the inclination to distrust the government’s official line and reach for the history books (so to speak).

But the same government has also been eroding this inclination – with carrots as well as sticks – and it will continue, resulting ultimately in the asymptotic, but fallacious and anti-democratic, convergence of history and memory. Cooperative distrust can be a useful intervention here, especially as a matter of habit, to continuously reconcile history and memory (at least to the extent to which they concern facts) into a self-consistent whole at every moment, instead of whenever an overt conflict of facts arises.

Freatured image credit: geralt/pixabay.