Root Privileges

Carl Sagan

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  • The news exists to inform, not to educate

    I’d like to highlight a letter published in Science on January 2. I have many points of disagreement with it but I’d also like others to read and reflect on it, especially if they’re (you’re) also going to disagree with my reading. The letter is entitled ‘Beyond misalignment of science in the news and in schools’.

    What scientists want to get out of science journalism is not the same as what journalists want to get out of journalism. One symptom of this confusion — which is also what I’m disagreeing with the letter about — is that the authors of the letter use the terms “science journalism”, “science writing”, and “science communication” interchangeably. They’re really three distinct enterprises with distinct purposes. Science writing is a subset of science communication and science communication isn’t science journalism.

    Science communication is concerned with faithfully communicating the structures and practices of science and their outcomes. Science journalism on the other hand is a branch of journalism focusing on science, which is as much about scientific ideas as the social, political, economic, demographic, etc. dimensions of science as well.

    Importantly, science isn’t at the centre of the universe of science journalism: as with the other branches of journalism, public interest is. This means the object of science journalism is the public understanding of science — including its demands of governments, place in society, effect on public welfare, and so on, read together with our constitutional ideals, principles of justice and humanitarianism, the law of the land, and so on. It also includes scientific ideas but I think it’d be more useful if scientists understood the clear elucidation of those ideas is the beginning, not the end, of science journalism’s practice.

    Saying we have a problem because the practice of science journalism somewhere by specific people hasn’t conveyed what scientists would like to have conveyed on that topic — as the authors of the letter write — is like complaining a film journalist didn’t review a film exactly how the director would have liked or a business journalist didn’t assess the prospects of a company in line with its shareholders’ expectations. Here’s a particularly disagreeable expression of this notion from the letter:

    Stakeholders of science communication and education can learn from each other and address the misalignment of science in the news and in schools.

    The news exists to inform, not to educate. I find the conflation so disagreeable because, considered cumulatively, news determines whether the education we’re providing/receiving is adequate or if it leaves students out of step with the way the world works. To belabour the point: education is the controlled dissemination of knowledge synchronised with the psychological and political development of society’s members while journalism, whose product is news, is a “history of now”*, capable of surprising us by virtue of being a record of the world’s shared-lived reality, i.e. something we don’t control as much as effect together.

    On a somewhat related note, the letter begins by invoking Carl Sagan’s comment 40 years ago that newspapers ought to have science columns as often as they have astrology columns — which strikes me as a very convenient example that says nothing about what the study described in the letter is concerned with: how the press covers science. As the excerpt from the letter below indicates, Sagan’s problem is currently outdated: the press, mainstream or otherwise, covers science today to a much greater degree than it did in his time. It also covers a greater variety of topics. Thanks to the lower costs of publishing on the internet (as opposed to newspapers, which the letter is particularly concerned with), many magazines focused on specific topics have survived for longer than they would have if they were restricted to the printed medium.

    … how newspapers projected the nature of science to the public during the [COVID-19] pandemic and on what aspects of science did they focus remain questions. To address such questions, we investigated 1520 news articles from four national newspapers in the United Kingdom for their coverage of different aspects of science during the omicron variant phase. Our analysis was guided by a broad account of science that includes the cognitive (i.e., thinking and reasoning), the epistemic (i.e., knowledge and methods), the social (i.e., values and norms), and the institutional (i.e., organizations, politics, and economics) aspects. An underlying assumption of our analysis was that public understanding of science would be better served through a holistic coverage of science that does not miss out on vital elements of the scientific enterprise. For example, although scientific knowledge is important to understand, it is often difficult to make sense of such knowledge if there is no context that unpacks why such knowledge is important in the first place, where such knowledge is developed, by whom, and under what circumstances.

    This said, the conceptual framework the researchers developed to analyse the scientific contents of the four newspapers and their 1,520 articles — especially once it’s shorn of its relationship with science education — could be useful for science journalists to understand how their priorities may have ‘drifted’ during the pandemic, the consequences of their time-varying access to experts and/or expertise in different areas, and the place and value of the (free) press during public crises.

    The overall findings from our study showed that the social and institutional aspects of science were emphasized to a greater extent than the cognitive and the epistemic aspects in all the newspapers. When we unpacked each aspect to examine the details, different patterns emerged. For example, within the institutional aspects, the political dynamics of science were covered to a greater extent in all newspapers than any other aspect. Some of the social aspects were downplayed in all newspapers. There was hardly any coverage of scientific ethos that would capture scientific norms. … Likewise, social aspects of science that involve peer review processes in the validation of scientific knowledge were mentioned to a limited extent in all newspapers. When we examined the cognitive and epistemic aspects, we observed that there was hardly any reference to scientific methods.

    … in a related study in which we used the same sample of newspapers and focused on nonpharmaceutical interventions, our findings suggested that it was neither the number of COVID-19 news articles nor the actual number of cases and deaths, but the treatment in newspapers of specific aspects of science, particularly scientific knowledge and methods, that was associated with mobility change during the pandemic. The way that newspapers discuss epidemics may potentially influence changes in human mobility, a key factor in containing the spread of infectious diseases.

    I’m also gladdened by scientists’ interest in such exercises and hope they engage directly with journalists to develop conceptual frameworks that aren’t susceptible to misunderstandings of what science as well as journalists are or aren’t capable of. For example, here’s a short excerpt from a conversation I’d had last year with IISER Bhopal philosopher Varun Bhatta about the problems with invoking ideas from philosophy in a journalistic article, which I think is also implicated in the letter’s authors’ argument that while “scientific knowledge is important to understand, it is often difficult to make sense of such knowledge if there is no context that unpacks why such knowledge is important in the first place, where such knowledge is developed, by whom, and under what circumstances.”

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

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

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

    Against this background, in fact, it will be useful if scientists’ efforts to improve science education — by examining what students are taught and how that relates to the “public understanding of how science works” and its effects on people’s choices — focused instead on the genesis, constitution, and evolution of public interest. This is because the public interest, apart from railroading what narratives ought (or ought not) to be present in the news, has a strong influence on which combination of business models and ideologies a news publisher can adopt in order to have both a persistent readership and a sustainable revenue stream.

    * As a professor of journalism once put to me.

  • The news exists to inform, not to educate

    I’d like to highlight a letter published in Science on January 2. I have many points of disagreement with it but I’d also like others to read and reflect on it, especially if they’re (you’re) also going to disagree with my reading. The letter is entitled ‘Beyond misalignment of science in the news and in schools’.

    What scientists want to get out of science journalism is not the same as what journalists want to get out of journalism. One symptom of this confusion — which is also what I’m disagreeing with the letter about — is that the authors of the letter use the terms “science journalism”, “science writing”, and “science communication” interchangeably. They’re really three distinct enterprises with distinct purposes. Science writing is a subset of science communication and science communication isn’t science journalism.

    Science communication is concerned with faithfully communicating the structures and practices of science and their outcomes. Science journalism on the other hand is a branch of journalism focusing on science, which is as much about scientific ideas as the social, political, economic, demographic, etc. dimensions of science as well.

    Importantly, science isn’t at the centre of the universe of science journalism: as with the other branches of journalism, public interest is. This means the object of science journalism is the public understanding of science — including its demands of governments, place in society, effect on public welfare, and so on, read together with our constitutional ideals, principles of justice and humanitarianism, the law of the land, and so on. It also includes scientific ideas but I think it’d be more useful if scientists understood the clear elucidation of those ideas is the beginning, not the end, of science journalism’s practice.

    Saying we have a problem because the practice of science journalism somewhere by specific people hasn’t conveyed what scientists would like to have conveyed on that topic — as the authors of the letter write — is like complaining a film journalist didn’t review a film exactly how the director would have liked or a business journalist didn’t assess the prospects of a company in line with its shareholders’ expectations. Here’s a particularly disagreeable expression of this notion from the letter:

    Stakeholders of science communication and education can learn from each other and address the misalignment of science in the news and in schools.

    The news exists to inform, not to educate. I find the conflation so disagreeable because, considered cumulatively, news determines whether the education we’re providing/receiving is adequate or if it leaves students out of step with the way the world works. To belabour the point: education is the controlled dissemination of knowledge synchronised with the psychological and political development of society’s members while journalism, whose product is news, is a “history of now”*, capable of surprising us by virtue of being a record of the world’s shared-lived reality, i.e. something we don’t control as much as effect together.

    On a somewhat related note, the letter begins by invoking Carl Sagan’s comment 40 years ago that newspapers ought to have science columns as often as they have astrology columns — which strikes me as a very convenient example that says nothing about what the study described in the letter is concerned with: how the press covers science. As the excerpt from the letter below indicates, Sagan’s problem is currently outdated: the press, mainstream or otherwise, covers science today to a much greater degree than it did in his time. It also covers a greater variety of topics. Thanks to the lower costs of publishing on the internet (as opposed to newspapers, which the letter is particularly concerned with), many magazines focused on specific topics have survived for longer than they would have if they were restricted to the printed medium.

    … how newspapers projected the nature of science to the public during the [COVID-19] pandemic and on what aspects of science did they focus remain questions. To address such questions, we investigated 1520 news articles from four national newspapers in the United Kingdom for their coverage of different aspects of science during the omicron variant phase. Our analysis was guided by a broad account of science that includes the cognitive (i.e., thinking and reasoning), the epistemic (i.e., knowledge and methods), the social (i.e., values and norms), and the institutional (i.e., organizations, politics, and economics) aspects. An underlying assumption of our analysis was that public understanding of science would be better served through a holistic coverage of science that does not miss out on vital elements of the scientific enterprise. For example, although scientific knowledge is important to understand, it is often difficult to make sense of such knowledge if there is no context that unpacks why such knowledge is important in the first place, where such knowledge is developed, by whom, and under what circumstances.

    This said, the conceptual framework the researchers developed to analyse the scientific contents of the four newspapers and their 1,520 articles — especially once it’s shorn of its relationship with science education — could be useful for science journalists to understand how their priorities may have ‘drifted’ during the pandemic, the consequences of their time-varying access to experts and/or expertise in different areas, and the place and value of the (free) press during public crises.

    The overall findings from our study showed that the social and institutional aspects of science were emphasized to a greater extent than the cognitive and the epistemic aspects in all the newspapers. When we unpacked each aspect to examine the details, different patterns emerged. For example, within the institutional aspects, the political dynamics of science were covered to a greater extent in all newspapers than any other aspect. Some of the social aspects were downplayed in all newspapers. There was hardly any coverage of scientific ethos that would capture scientific norms. … Likewise, social aspects of science that involve peer review processes in the validation of scientific knowledge were mentioned to a limited extent in all newspapers. When we examined the cognitive and epistemic aspects, we observed that there was hardly any reference to scientific methods.

    … in a related study in which we used the same sample of newspapers and focused on nonpharmaceutical interventions, our findings suggested that it was neither the number of COVID-19 news articles nor the actual number of cases and deaths, but the treatment in newspapers of specific aspects of science, particularly scientific knowledge and methods, that was associated with mobility change during the pandemic. The way that newspapers discuss epidemics may potentially influence changes in human mobility, a key factor in containing the spread of infectious diseases.

    I’m also gladdened by scientists’ interest in such exercises and hope they engage directly with journalists to develop conceptual frameworks that aren’t susceptible to misunderstandings of what science as well as journalists are or aren’t capable of. For example, here’s a short excerpt from a conversation I’d had last year with IISER Bhopal philosopher Varun Bhatta about the problems with invoking ideas from philosophy in a journalistic article, which I think is also implicated in the letter’s authors’ argument that while “scientific knowledge is important to understand, it is often difficult to make sense of such knowledge if there is no context that unpacks why such knowledge is important in the first place, where such knowledge is developed, by whom, and under what circumstances.”

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

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

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

    Against this background, in fact, it will be useful if scientists’ efforts to improve science education — by examining what students are taught and how that relates to the “public understanding of how science works” and its effects on people’s choices — focused instead on the genesis, constitution, and evolution of public interest. This is because the public interest, apart from railroading what narratives ought (or ought not) to be present in the news, has a strong influence on which combination of business models and ideologies a news publisher can adopt in order to have both a persistent readership and a sustainable revenue stream.

    * As a professor of journalism once put to me.

  • What life on Earth tells us about life ‘elsewhere’

    Plumes of water seen erupting form the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus. NASA/JPL-Caltech and Space Science Institute
    Plumes of water seen erupting form the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. NASA/JPL-Caltech and Space Science Institute

    In 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi asked a question not many could forget for a long time: “Where is everybody?” He was referring to the notion that, given the age and size of the universe, advanced civilizations ought to have arisen in many parts of it. But if they had, then where are their space probes and radio signals? In the 60 years since, we haven’t come any closer to answering Fermi, although many interesting explanations have cropped up. In this time, the the search for “Where” has encouraged with it a search for “What” as well.

    What is life?

    Humankind’s search for extra-terrestrial life is centered on the assumption – rather hope – that life can exist in a variety of conditions, and displays a justified humility in acknowledging we really have no idea what those conditions could be or where. Based on what we’ve found on Earth, water seems pretty important. As @UrbanAstroNYC tweeted,

    And apart from water, pretty much everything else can vary. Temperatures could drop below the freezing point or cross to beyond the boiling point of water, the environment can be doused in ionizing radiation, the amount of light could dip to quasi-absolute darkness levels, acids and bases can run amok, and the concentration of gases may vary. We have reason to afford such existential glibness: consider this Wikipedia list of extremophiles, the living things that have adapted to extreme environments.

    Nonetheless, we can’t help but wonder if the qualities of life on Earth can tell us something about what life anywhere else needs to take root- even if that means extrapolating based on the assumption that we’re looking for something carbon-based, and dependent on liquid water, some light, and oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere. Interestingly, even such a leashed approach can throw open a variety of possibilities.

    “If liquid water and biologically available nitrogen are present, then phosphorus, potassium, sodium, sulfur and calcium might come next on a requirements list, as these are the next most abundant elements in bacteria,” writes Christopher McKay of the NASA Ames Research Center, California, in his new paper ‘Requirements and limits for life in the context of exoplanets’. It was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 9.

    Stuff of stars

    McKay, an astro-geophysicist, takes a stepped approach to understanding the conditions life needs to exist. He bases his argument on one inescapable fact: that we know little to nothing about how life originated, but a lot about how, once it exists, it can or can’t thrive on Earth. Starting from that, the first step he devotes to understanding the requirements for life. In the second step, he analyzes the various extreme conditions life can then adapt to. Finally, he extrapolates his findings to arrive at some guidelines.

    It’s undeniable that these guidelines will be insular or play a limited role in our search for extraterrestrial life. But such criticism can be partly ablated if you consider Carl Sagan’s famous words from his 1980 book Cosmos: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

    In 1991, RH Koch and RE Davies published a paper (titled ‘All the observed universe has contributed to life’) presenting evidence that “a standard 70 kg human  is always making about 7 3He, 600 40Ca, and 3,000 14N nuclei every second by radioactive decay of 3H, 40K, and 14C, respectively”. In other words, we’re not just made of starstuff, we’re also releasing starstuff! So it’s entirely plausible other forms of life out there – if they exist – could boast some if not many similarities to life on Earth.

    To this end, McKay postulates a ‘checklist for habitability’on an exoplanet based on what we’ve found back home.

    • Temperature and state of water – Between -15° C and 122° C (at pressure greater than 0.01 atm)
    • Water availability – Few days per year of rain, fog or snow, or relative humidity more than 80%
    • Light and chemical energy sources
    • Ionizing radiation – As much as the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans can withstand (this microbe is the world’s toughest extremophile according to the Guinness Book of World Records)
    • Nitrogen – Enough for fixation
    • Oxygen (as the molecule O2) – Over 0.01 atm needed to support complex life

    McKay calls this list “a reasonable starting point in the search for life”. Its items show that together they make possible environmental conditions that sustain some forms of chemical bonding – and such a conclusion could inform our search for ‘exo-life’. Because we’re pretty clueless about the origins of life, it doesn’t mean we’ve to look for just these items on exoplanets but the sort of environment that these items’ counterparts could make possible. For example, despite the abundance of life-friendly ecosystems on Earth today, one way life could have originated in the first place is by meteorites having seeded the crust with the first microbes. And once seeded, the items on the checklist could have taken care of the rest.

    Are you sure water is life?

    Such otherworldly influences present yet more possibilities; all you need is another interstellar smuggler of life to crash into a conducive laboratory. Consider the saturnine moon Titan. While hydrocarbons – the principal constituents of terran life – on Earth are thought to have gassed up and out from the mantle since its formative years, Titan already boasts entire lakes of methane (CH4), a simple hydrocarbon. A 2004 paper by Steven Benner et al discusses the implications of this in detail, arguing that liquid methane could actually be a better medium than water for certain simple chemical reactions that are the precursors of life to occur in.

    Another Solar System candidate that shows signs of habitability is Titan’s peer Enceladus. In April this year, teams of scientists studying data from the Cassini space probe said there was evidence that Enceladus hosts a giant reservoir of liquid water 10 km deep under an extensive ice shell some 30-40 km thick. Moreover, Cassini flybys since 2005 had shown that the moon had an atmosphere of 91% water vapor, 3-4% each of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, and the rest of methane.

    These examples in our Solar System reveal how the conditions necessary for life are possible not just in the Goldilocks zone because life can occur in a variety of environments as long some simpler conditions are met. The abstract of the paper by Benner et al sums this up nicely:

    A review of organic chemistry suggests that life, a chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution, may exist in a wide range of environments. These include non-aqueous solvent systems at low temperatures, or even supercritical dihydrogen– helium mixtures. The only absolute requirements may be a thermodynamic disequilibrium and temperatures consistent with chemical bonding.

    As humans, we enjoy the benefits of some or many of these conditions – although we know what we do only on the basis of what we’ve observed in nature, not because some theory or formula tells us what’s possible or not. Such is the amount of diversity of life on Earth, and that should tell us something about how far from clued-in we are to understanding what other forms of life could be out there. In the meantime, as the search for extra-terrestrial life and intelligence goes on, let’s not fixate on the pessimism of Fermi’s words and instead remember the hope in Sagan’s (and keep an eye on McKay’s checklist).