Root Privileges

Elon Musk

A tale of two awardees

In many respects Krishna Ella and Elon Musk are poles apart but on some they share a few similarities. Both of them have played along with nationalist elements in their respective national governments in order to further their agendas, if not profits. Both men are also at the helm of successful companies that build valuable products that a lot of people need, that the world needs. But while Elon Musk continues to be a despotic techbro, Krishna Ella is just a fellow who’s made some poor decisions.

Recently, both men were also in the news for honours they’d received.

The Royal Society in the UK continues to remain under pressure to rescind its fellowship of Musk, which it granted in 2018, owing to his attacks on free speech (ironically in the guise of protecting an absolute right to free speech), support for pseudoscientific ideas (including his antivaccine sentiments and support for climate denialism), and generally being unable to tell profundity from horseshit.

At least one other fellow has resigned to protest the Royal Society’s unwillingness to suspend Musk’s membership: retired University of Oxford psychologist Dorothy Bishop. She wrote in November 2024 on her blog:

There was no formal consultation of the Fellowship but via informal email contacts, a group of 74 Fellows formulated a letter of concern that was sent in early August [2024] to the President of the Royal Society, raising doubts as to whether he was “a fit and proper person to hold the considerable honour of being a Fellow of the Royal Society”. The letter specifically mentioned the way Musk had used his platform on X to make unjustified and divisive statements that served to inflame right-wing thuggery and racist violence in the UK.

Somebody (not me!) leaked the letter to the Guardian, who ran a story about it on 23rd August.

I gather that at this point the Royal Society Council opted to consult a top lawyer to determine whether Musk’s behaviour breached their Code of Conduct. The problem with this course of action is that if you are uncertain about doing something that seems morally right but may have consequences, then it is easy to find a lawyer who will advise against doing it. … And, sure enough, the lawyer determined that Musk hadn’t breached the Code of Conduct.

According to Bishop, Musk is in breach of sections 2.6, 2.10, and 2.11 of the ‘Code of Conduct’:

2.6: Fellows and Foreign Members shall carry out their scientific research with regard to the Society’s statement on research integrity and to the highest standards.

2.10: Fellows and Foreign Members shall treat all individuals in the scientific enterprise collegially and with courtesy, including supervisors, colleagues, other Society Fellows and Foreign Members, Society staff, students and other early‐career colleagues, technical and clerical staff, and interested members of the public.

2.11: Fellows and Foreign Members shall not engage in any form of discrimination, harassment, or bullying.

Seems fair. I reckon that together with the possibility of the unspecified “consequences” for the Royal Society Bishop has speculated, the body will also be mindful of being obligated to reassess the fellowship of many other individuals on its roster should it remove Musk on these grounds. (To be clear, this isn’t a defence of its position.)

I’ve always held that awards are distinguished by their laureates and not the other way around. Fellowship of the Royal Society isn’t technically an award but for the most part it operates with the same incentives. Its code is thoughtful enough to not be limited to one’s conduct as a scientist. Just as the Millennium Plaque of Honour wouldn’t make a dent on the reputation of any scientist who wins it because it was awarded to Appa Rao Podile in 2017 — after he let police personnel lathi-charge the students in his care at the University of Hyderabad — it must be difficult to count Musk among one’s peers as fellows of the Royal Society.

Consider Krishna Ella now. As part of its annual routine, the Indian National National Science Academy (INSA) handed out 61 fellowships last week, Ella among them. It’s the first time INSA has included industry leaders for this recognition. According to a statement on the INSA website:

Dr. Krishna Ella, a prominent Indian scientist and entrepreneur, leads Bharat Biotech in ground-breaking vaccine development. His achievements include India’s Covaxin, the world’s first clinically proven conjugated Typhoid Vaccine, ROTAVAC, and the first preservative-free vaccine, Revac-B mcf Hepatitis B Vaccine. Bharat Biotech also introduced India’s first cell-cultured Swine Flu vaccine and manufactures the world’s most affordable Hepatitis vaccines. Additionally, they were the first globally to develop a vaccine for the Zika virus.

Impressive achievements, right? But to me, Ella will equally be the man who filed defamation cases against me and many of my fellow journalists for publishing evidence-based articles critical of the manner in which the Indian government approved Covaxin for COVID-19 (with emphasis on the Indian government, not Bharat Biotech).

I’m not at liberty to quote from these articles as Bharat Biotech was able to obtain an ex-parte injunction to take them offline until the proceedings concluded. But as with Bishop vis-à-vis Musk, here’s an instructive passage from the INSA ‘Code of Conduct’:

All people associated with INSA are expected to adhere to certain minimal standards of ethical behaviour which include but are not limited to, honesty, integrity, and professional (sic). Integrity in the context of scientific research means trustworthiness of the data collected/presented, their interpretation, and the soundness of methodology/protocol followed in carrying out the research.

At the time the Drugs Controller General of India (DGCI) signed off on the use of Covaxin and Covishield in “clinical trial mode” on the cusp of India’s drive to vaccinate against COVID-19, in January 2021, the country’s medico-legal doctrine didn’t recognise the term “trial mode” and phase III trials of both vaccines hadn’t been completed.

To make matters worse, the DGCI said the vaccines were “110% safe” when the safety data hadn’t even been collected. AstraZeneca came through later with the complete safety and efficacy data for Covishield. In July 2021, Bharat Biotech researchers uploaded a preprint paper reporting safety data for only 56 days following vaccination with Covaxin. To this day, Bharat Biotech and the Union health ministry have yet to release the long-term safety data collected during Covaxin’s phase-III trial. Instead, both the company and the national government have simply expected people at large to trust them. Irrespective of whether the vaccine is safe, these actions are inimical to trustworthiness.

I’m not opposed to Ella becoming an INSA fellow because I don’t care. Instead, my concerns are about INSA: I know it focuses on a prospective fellow’s scientific work at the time of granting the fellowship (see link below) and I suspect the Royal Society does too, but the latter also has a code of conduct that extends to fellows’ conduct beyond the scientific enterprise and other fellows who find value in all their peers adhering to it.

The Royal Society fellows’ protests against sharing the honour with Musk is of a piece with his increasingly rightward turn in recent years being met with scientists speaking up against him in various fora. While there isn’t a correspondingly objectionable scientist in India, I also don’t recall members of the Indian scientific community speaking up in defence of science journalists who are speaking for science when they’re harassed by other members of the research enterprise, at least beyond the constant few I remain grateful for.

Jan 12, 2025
A tale of two awardees

In many respects Krishna Ella and Elon Musk are poles apart but on some they share a few similarities. Both of them have played along with nationalist elements in their respective national governments in order to further their agendas, if not profits. Both men are also at the helm of successful companies that build valuable products that a lot of people need, that the world needs. But while Elon Musk continues to be a despotic techbro, Krishna Ella is just a fellow who’s made some detrimental decisions.

Recently, both men were also in the news for honours they’d received.

The Royal Society in the UK continues to remain under pressure to rescind its fellowship of Musk, which it granted in 2018, owing to his attacks on free speech (ironically in the guise of protecting an absolute right to free speech), support for pseudoscientific ideas (including his antivaccine sentiments and support for climate denialism), and generally being unable to tell profundity from horseshit.

At least one other fellow has resigned to protest the Royal Society’s unwillingness to suspend Musk’s membership: retired University of Oxford psychologist Dorothy Bishop. She wrote in November 2024 on her blog:

There was no formal consultation of the Fellowship but via informal email contacts, a group of 74 Fellows formulated a letter of concern that was sent in early August [2024] to the President of the Royal Society, raising doubts as to whether he was “a fit and proper person to hold the considerable honour of being a Fellow of the Royal Society”. The letter specifically mentioned the way Musk had used his platform on X to make unjustified and divisive statements that served to inflame right-wing thuggery and racist violence in the UK.

Somebody (not me!) leaked the letter to the Guardian, who ran a story about it on 23rd August.

I gather that at this point the Royal Society Council opted to consult a top lawyer to determine whether Musk’s behaviour breached their Code of Conduct. The problem with this course of action is that if you are uncertain about doing something that seems morally right but may have consequences, then it is easy to find a lawyer who will advise against doing it. … And, sure enough, the lawyer determined that Musk hadn’t breached the Code of Conduct.

According to Bishop, Musk is in breach of sections 2.6, 2.10, and 2.11 of the ‘Code of Conduct’:

2.6: Fellows and Foreign Members shall carry out their scientific research with regard to the Society’s statement on research integrity and to the highest standards.

2.10: Fellows and Foreign Members shall treat all individuals in the scientific enterprise collegially and with courtesy, including supervisors, colleagues, other Society Fellows and Foreign Members, Society staff, students and other early‐career colleagues, technical and clerical staff, and interested members of the public.

2.11: Fellows and Foreign Members shall not engage in any form of discrimination, harassment, or bullying.

Seems fair. I reckon that together with the possibility of the unspecified “consequences” for the Royal Society Bishop has speculated, the body will also be mindful of being obligated to reassess the fellowship of many other individuals on its roster should it remove Musk on these grounds. (To be clear, this isn’t a defence of its position.)

I’ve always held that awards are distinguished by their laureates and not the other way around. Fellowship of the Royal Society isn’t technically an award but for the most part it operates with the same incentives. Its code is thoughtful enough to not be limited to one’s conduct as a scientist. Just as the Millennium Plaque of Honour wouldn’t make a dent on the reputation of any scientist who wins it because it was awarded to Appa Rao Podile in 2017 — after he let police personnel lathi-charge the students in his care at the University of Hyderabad — it must be difficult to count Musk among one’s peers as fellows of the Royal Society.

Consider Krishna Ella now. As part of its annual routine, the Indian National National Science Academy (INSA) handed out 61 fellowships last week, Ella among them. It’s the first time INSA has included industry leaders for this recognition. According to a statement on the INSA website:

Dr. Krishna Ella, a prominent Indian scientist and entrepreneur, leads Bharat Biotech in ground-breaking vaccine development. His achievements include India’s Covaxin, the world’s first clinically proven conjugated Typhoid Vaccine, ROTAVAC, and the first preservative-free vaccine, Revac-B mcf Hepatitis B Vaccine. Bharat Biotech also introduced India’s first cell-cultured Swine Flu vaccine and manufactures the world’s most affordable Hepatitis vaccines. Additionally, they were the first globally to develop a vaccine for the Zika virus.

Impressive achievements, right? But to me, Ella will equally be the man who saw fit to file defamation cases against me and many of my fellow journalists for publishing evidence-based articles critical of the manner in which the Indian government approved Covaxin for COVID-19 (with emphasis on the Indian government, not Bharat Biotech).

I’m not at liberty to quote from these articles as Bharat Biotech was able to obtain an ex-parte injunction to take them offline until the proceedings concluded. But as with Bishop vis-à-vis Musk, here’s an instructive passage from the INSA ‘Code of Conduct’:

All people associated with INSA are expected to adhere to certain minimal standards of ethical behaviour which include but are not limited to, honesty, integrity, and professional (sic). Integrity in the context of scientific research means trustworthiness of the data collected/presented, their interpretation, and the soundness of methodology/protocol followed in carrying out the research.

At the time the Drugs Controller General of India (DGCI) signed off on the use of Covaxin and Covishield in “clinical trial mode” on the cusp of India’s drive to vaccinate against COVID-19, in January 2021, the country’s medico-legal doctrine didn’t recognise the term “trial mode” and phase III trials of both vaccines hadn’t been completed.

To make matters worse, the DGCI said the vaccines were “110% safe” when the safety data hadn’t even been collected. AstraZeneca came through later with the complete safety and efficacy data for Covishield. In July 2021, Bharat Biotech researchers uploaded a preprint paper reporting safety data for only 56 days following vaccination with Covaxin. To this day, Bharat Biotech and the Union health ministry have yet to release the long-term safety data collected during Covaxin’s phase-III trial. Instead, both the company and the national government have simply expected people at large to trust them. Irrespective of whether the vaccine is safe, these actions are inimical to trustworthiness.

I’m not opposed to Ella becoming an INSA fellow because I don’t care. Instead, my concerns are about INSA: I know it focuses on a prospective fellow’s scientific work at the time of granting the fellowship (see link below) and I suspect the Royal Society does too, but the latter also has a code of conduct that extends to fellows’ conduct beyond the scientific enterprise and other fellows who find value in all their peers adhering to it.

The Royal Society fellows’ protests against sharing the honour with Musk is of a piece with his increasingly rightward turn in recent years being met with scientists speaking up against him in various fora. While there isn’t a correspondingly objectionable scientist in India, I also don’t recall members of the Indian scientific community speaking up in defence of science journalists who are speaking for science when they’re harassed by other members of the research enterprise, at least beyond the constant few I remain grateful for.

Jan 12, 2025
Solve all our problems

This is xkcd #1232. When it came out I remember it was to rebut a particular line of argument against NASA’s lunar and interplanetary missions — that the agency was spending large sums of money that would be better spent on “solving problems on Earth”. Considering Earth would always have problems, xkcd and others contended, we’d never be able to go to space if we had to spend all our time, money, and labours fixing them. The snark implied in #1232 was warranted.

But recently, I saw this comic used in a different context: during a conversation (in a private group) about Elon Musk’s aggression with SpaceX and his plans to colonise the moon and visit Mars in his lifetime. Insofar as #1232 pushed back against space exploration that couldn’t by any measure subtract from public spending on socio-economic welfare and justice, it was clever and good. But in the conversation in the group, #1232 donned a new implication: of reducing any other (even minimally) legitimate criticism of the world’s plans to land probes on the moon, establish lunar bases, and start the human campaign to permanently settle the moon and of Elon Musk’s and SpaceX’s plans to being an argument about spending on space exploration subtracting from more immediately measurable pursuits.

Two arguments come to mind that are poorly served by such flattening. First: the pace at which SpaceX has been manufacturing satellites, launching rockets, and expanding its satellite constellations is at odds with its, and our, ability to deal with the environmental footprint of these activities. Neither SpaceX nor Musk have made any provisions for the activities to be sustainable and they should asap. Doing so might slow the company down, and the company needs to stop considering this retardation to be undesirable. Yet SpaceX’s supporters have often construed any criticism of the company’s pace to be criticism of the company altogether and as the argument that its money would be better spent doing other things.

Second: I was recently asked a curious question during a formal engagement at work. Is it ethical for India to spend so much on Gaganyaan considering we live in a world with war, violence, and poverty? Gaganyaan has so far cost the Indian government more than Rs 11,000 crore. But there are a couple underlying assumptions here, leading up to questions of the ethicality of human spaceflight, that are flawed.

(i) The allocation of resources for various activities isn’t a zero-sum game in India. The national budget is voluminous enough for the government to fund both human spaceflight and poverty alleviation programmes. Also unlike in game theory, fractional outcomes are possible and possibly more desirable. For example, India can make great strides in its poverty alleviation programme if it diverts only 0.1% of its defence spending (Rs 6.2 lakh crore in 2024-2025) that way.

(ii) Many of us like to believe if we don’t spend money on X, it will be available for Y. (Here, X could be ’spaceflight’ and Y could be ‘alleviating poverty’.) We don’t stop to ask whether the state will divert it to Z instead (say, ‘missiles’). If we’d like to guarantee X → Y, we need to persuade the state to rejig its existing priorities and prevent X → Z. Expecting ISRO to not pursue Gaganyaan with funds provided by the state isn’t reasonable.

In sum, it seems like the “let’s first fix all problems on Earth” argument has become both straw man and red herring in conversations about off-world human activities whose benefits aren’t entirely clear at the moment. The real problem is of course that the benefits aren’t clear, not that the activities are happening at all, plus the belief that money spared by not performing one activity will automatically become available for the precise alternative activity we’re rooting for.

Dec 12, 2024
Marginalia: Romila on textbooks, Rapido ad, Nobel nonsense

We may go on deleting sections of our history but in the world outside where there are multiple centres of research into the Indian past, and many scholars, there these expunged sections from books used in India will continue to be studied. They will be subjected to new methods of analyses, will be commented upon, will enrich the understanding of India with new knowledge, and all this will be incorporated into the history of India that will be taught everywhere except in India. We in India will not know anything about that section of Indian history which has been deleted from our books.

Outside India, the multiple cultures of India and their achievements will be studied as part of Indian history and Indian culture, irrespective of the religion of the dynasties that may have presided over the achievements. They will be studied in universities, libraries and museums dedicated to the study of India, as a continuation of not only the Indian past but also of the past pertaining to happenings current in various parts of the world. These will have pride of place not only in the history of India but in the history of human achievements. But we in India will be entirely ignorant of their significance since we shall not know them as a part of Indian history nor as a part of other histories of the world. These would have been cultures that we once recognised as those to which we once contributed, and with which we once had exchanges, when we created the Indian civilisation of past times.
‘If NCERT Has its Way, the Study of Indian History Will Move Entirely Outside of India’, Romila Thapar, The Wire

Well written by historian Romila Thapar, on the NCERT’s decision to excise some important parts of Indian history from school textbooks. First, it’s hard not to come away after reading this being struck by how reminiscent this ‘moving out’ of scholarship is of what colonialism inflicted on India, especially in terms of the natural resources that were transferred from India to the United Kingdom, never to be returned – resources that both the left and the right like to thump their chests over. Self-inflicted colonialism is worse than tragedy. I did think the “we in India will not know anything about that section of Indian history which has been deleted from our books” part was a bit of a reach because I know from experience that as long as you have access to uncensored information on the internet and a few people in your familial or social circles to nudge you to access it, it’s possible to start questioning ideologies, privileges, faith, assumptions, etc. This said, I don’t claim to understand the consequences of depriving relatively very young people of a wholesome history education, which only heightens the risk of ignorance if the people around them agree with their syllabus. Third, while alt-history edits to school textbooks have really brought the problem home, they have been preceded in time by, among others, the Vedas and Ayurvedic texts. They weren’t literary edited; however, the government changed what most people believed their contents to be. And I suspect it will be possible to see in the textbooks’ fate parallels to what befell the Vedas and Ayurveda: one fed Hindutva myths about the mythical achievements of ‘ancient India’ while the other helped pro-party businessmen commercialise these myths.

Rapido’s ads continue to be nonsensical, or appeal to sensibilities that on the face of it have nothing to do with public transport and commuting. Last time, the ad with Allu Arjun and Ranbir Kapoor (among others) took a cynical view of road traffic, asking commuters to opt for Rapido’s ‘bike taxis’ because they could cut through traffic and wouldn’t “mince” them up like public buses might, effectively discouraging encouraging unsafe driving on roads and discouraging, to quote myself, “civic disengagement from the task of improving public transport”. A new ad that’s been airing for a week or so has the tagline, “bike-wali taxi, sabse saxi“, to the accompaniment of visual narratives in which there is a long queue of people waiting to catch an auto and a bus packed to the rafters with people. So… I’m to take bike taxis because they’re “sexy?” I don’t get it. Maybe the purpose of the new ad is to be an ad for an ad’s sake, to let people know that such a thing exists, but I’m not sold. It’s still a lot like the first ad, and both of which are like Elon Musk’s comments in the context of his Hyperloop idea: that we should desist from using public transport because we might be travelling with a serial killer (and his hope that someone else will build a Hyperloop provided a high-speed rail line in California, and its higher carrying capacity, is cancelled). In all cases, we have people being asked to take the easy way out, in favour of corporate entities invested in people being concerned only with their own comfort, over forcing the government to do better. The latter is always only going to be hard, requiring public organisation and mobilisation, but never opting for this path just opens the door wider to self-serving companies and further undermine the centrality of public transport to a healthy democracy. If India’s status as a democracy is fading, as even The Lancet noted earlier today, we’re contributing, too.

Also how much are these bike-wali drivers paid?

“This is embarrassing,” [Charles Lieber] said at his trial. “Every scientist wants to win a Nobel Prize.”
‘Charles Lieber, Ex-Harvard Professor, Sentenced in China Ties Case’, Gina Kolata, The New York Times

An obligatory reminder that the Nobel Prizes influence how science is practiced – rather than being a completely isolated entity that just selects some arbitrarily defined “best scientific endeavour” and gives it a medal, a certificate, and lots of money. We’ve seen this before with Brian Keating, who made a big mistake before acknowledging it and coming clean. Now that Charles Lieber has committed his blunder, I hope he’ll stop pursuing a Nobel Prize as well and just pursue good science instead. But the ideal, but seemingly also very unlikely, thing to happen would be for scientists at large to understand a) why trying to win a Nobel Prize is not trying to do good science even though the former claims to exclusively reward the latter and b) that almost all ‘prestigious’ honours concerned with scientific work – including the universities to work at, the grants to win, and the journals in which to publish – will over time distort the desirability of different fields of study (and even scientists’ estimate of which questions are worth answering), the contents of the scientific literature, what constitutes ‘success’ (e.g. positive results v. negative results), and who can be considered to be successful. (Pseudo-prestigious awards might be even more dangerous.)

May 6, 2023
Marginalia: Romila on textbooks, Rapido ad, Nobel nonsense

We may go on deleting sections of our history but in the world outside where there are multiple centres of research into the Indian past, and many scholars, there these expunged sections from books used in India will continue to be studied. They will be subjected to new methods of analyses, will be commented upon, will enrich the understanding of India with new knowledge, and all this will be incorporated into the history of India that will be taught everywhere except in India. We in India will not know anything about that section of Indian history which has been deleted from our books.

Outside India, the multiple cultures of India and their achievements will be studied as part of Indian history and Indian culture, irrespective of the religion of the dynasties that may have presided over the achievements. They will be studied in universities, libraries and museums dedicated to the study of India, as a continuation of not only the Indian past but also of the past pertaining to happenings current in various parts of the world. These will have pride of place not only in the history of India but in the history of human achievements. But we in India will be entirely ignorant of their significance since we shall not know them as a part of Indian history nor as a part of other histories of the world. These would have been cultures that we once recognised as those to which we once contributed, and with which we once had exchanges, when we created the Indian civilisation of past times.
‘If NCERT Has its Way, the Study of Indian History Will Move Entirely Outside of India’, Romila Thapar, The Wire

Well written by historian Romila Thapar, on the NCERT’s decision to excise some important parts of Indian history from school textbooks. First, it’s hard not to come away after reading this being struck by how reminiscent this ‘moving out’ of scholarship is of what colonialism inflicted on India, especially in terms of the natural resources that were transferred from India to the United Kingdom, never to be returned – resources that both the left and the right like to thump their chests over. Self-inflicted colonialism is worse than tragedy. I did think the “we in India will not know anything about that section of Indian history which has been deleted from our books” part was a bit of a reach because I know from experience that as long as you have access to uncensored information on the internet and a few people in your familial or social circles to nudge you to access it, it’s possible to start questioning ideologies, privileges, faith, assumptions, etc. This said, I don’t claim to understand the consequences of depriving relatively very young people of a wholesome history education, which only heightens the risk of ignorance if the people around them agree with their syllabus. Third, while alt-history edits to school textbooks have really brought the problem home, they have been preceded in time by, among others, the Vedas and Ayurvedic texts. They weren’t literary edited; however, the government changed what most people believed their contents to be. And I suspect it will be possible to see in the textbooks’ fate parallels to what befell the Vedas and Ayurveda: one fed Hindutva myths about the mythical achievements of ‘ancient India’ while the other helped pro-party businessmen commercialise these myths.

Rapido’s ads continue to be nonsensical, or appeal to sensibilities that on the face of it have nothing to do with public transport and commuting. Last time, the ad with Allu Arjun and Ranbir Kapoor (among others) took a cynical view of road traffic, asking commuters to opt for Rapido’s ‘bike taxis’ because they could cut through traffic and wouldn’t “mince” them up like public buses might, effectively discouraging encouraging unsafe driving on roads and discouraging, to quote myself, “civic disengagement from the task of improving public transport”. A new ad that’s been airing for a week or so has the tagline, “bike-wali taxi, sabse saxi“, to the accompaniment of visual narratives in which there is a long queue of people waiting to catch an auto and a bus packed to the rafters with people. So… I’m to take bike taxis because they’re “sexy?” I don’t get it. Maybe the purpose of the new ad is to be an ad for an ad’s sake, to let people know that such a thing exists, but I’m not sold. It’s still a lot like the first ad, and both of which are like Elon Musk’s comments in the context of his Hyperloop idea: that we should desist from using public transport because we might be travelling with a serial killer (and his hope that someone else will build a Hyperloop provided a high-speed rail line in California, and its higher carrying capacity, is cancelled). In all cases, we have people being asked to take the easy way out, in favour of corporate entities invested in people being concerned only with their own comfort, over forcing the government to do better. The latter is always only going to be hard, requiring public organisation and mobilisation, but never opting for this path just opens the door wider to self-serving companies and further undermine the centrality of public transport to a healthy democracy. If India’s status as a democracy is fading, as even The Lancet noted earlier today, we’re contributing, too.

Also how much are these bike-wali drivers paid?

“This is embarrassing,” [Charles Lieber] said at his trial. “Every scientist wants to win a Nobel Prize.”
‘Charles Lieber, Ex-Harvard Professor, Sentenced in China Ties Case’, Gina Kolata, The New York Times

An obligatory reminder that the Nobel Prizes influence how science is practiced – rather than being a completely isolated entity that just selects some arbitrarily defined “best scientific endeavour” and gives it a medal, a certificate, and lots of money. We’ve seen this before with Brian Keating, who made a big mistake before acknowledging it and coming clean. Now that Charles Lieber has committed his blunder, I hope he’ll stop pursuing a Nobel Prize as well and just pursue good science instead. But the ideal, but seemingly also very unlikely, thing to happen would be for scientists at large to understand a) why trying to win a Nobel Prize is not trying to do good science even though the former claims to exclusively reward the latter and b) that almost all ‘prestigious’ honours concerned with scientific work – including the universities to work at, the grants to win, and the journals in which to publish – will over time distort the desirability of different fields of study (and even scientists’ estimate of which questions are worth answering), the contents of the scientific literature, what constitutes ‘success’ (e.g. positive results v. negative results), and who can be considered to be successful. (Pseudo-prestigious awards might be even more dangerous.)

May 6, 2023
Why there’s no guarantee that Musk’s Twitter will resemble Dorsey’s

A lot of folks are saying they’re not going to leave Twitter, in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform, because Musk and its once and long-time CEO and cofounder Jack Dorsey aren’t very different: both are billionaires, tech-bros, libertarian and pro-cryptocurrencies. And they say that they did okay under Dorsey, so why wouldn’t we under Musk? I find this argument to only be partly acceptable. The other part is really two parts.

First, Twitter under Dorsey is significantly different because he cofounded the platform and nurtured through a few years of relative quiescence, followed by a middle period and finally to the decidedly popular platform that it is today. (I joined Twitter in the middle period, in 2008, when it was hard to say if the next person you were going meet in real-life was be on Twitter. Today the converse is true.)

Musk, however, is inheriting a more matured platform, and one whose potential he believes hasn’t been “fulfilled”. I’m not sure what that means, and the things Musk has said on Twitter itself haven’t inspired confidence. Both men may be evil billionaires but setting aside the sorts of things Dorsey supports for a moment, you’ve got to admit he doesn’t have nearly the persona, the reputation and the cult-following that Musk does. These differences distinguish these men in significant ways vis-à-vis a social media platform – a beast that’s nothing like EVs, spaceflight or renewables.

(In fact, if Musk were to adopt an engineer’s approach to ‘fixing’ whatever he believes he’s wrong with Twitter, there are many examples of the sort of problematic solutions that could emerge here.)

The second part of the “Musk and Dorsey are pretty much the same” misclaim is that a) Musk is taking the company private and b) Musk has called himself a “free-speech absolutist”. I’m not a free-speech absolutist, in fact most of the people who have championed free speech in my circles are not. Free-speech absolutism is the view that Twitter (in this context) should support everyone’s right to free speech without any limitations on what they’re allowed to say. To those like me who reject the left-right polarisation in society today in favour of the more accurate pro-anti democracy polarisation, Twitter adopting Musk’s stance as policy would effectively recast attempts to curtail abuse and harrassment directed at non-conservative voices as “silencing the right”, and potentially allow their acerbic drivel to spread unchecked on the platform.

Running Twitter famously affected Dorsey. Unless we can be sure that the platform and its users will have the same effect on Musk, and temper his characteristic mercuriality, Twitter will remain a place worth leaving.

Apr 26, 2022
Re: Musk v. Twitter

I don’t want Elon Musk to acquire Twitter because I don’t like his idea of free speech. Twitter, which adopted a ‘poison pill strategy’, may just be bargaining on the other hand:

True to form, Twitter left its door open by emphasising that its poison pill will not prevent its board from “engaging with parties or accepting an acquisition proposal” at a higher price.
…
But on Thursday he indicated he was ready to wage a legal battle.
“If the current Twitter board takes actions contrary to shareholder interests, they would be breaching their fiduciary duty,” Musk tweeted. “The liability they would thereby assume would be titanic in scale.”
‘What is Twitter’s ‘poison pill’ and what is it supposed to do?’, Al Jazeera, April 16, 2022

Rosen calls out the weird thread by @Yishan that, to me, failed to acknowledge the responsibility of social media platforms in placing the lies increasingly typical of conservative politics on the same footing as pro-democracy writing, and undermining the value of public dialogue.

Compelling thread by a former executive at Reddit. Good enough to overcome one of the most determined acts of hyper-symmetric "both sides" thinking I have come across. Read it and you will see what I mean. https://t.co/3u2skCoQgY
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) April 16, 2022

Can't agree with you on minimizing his both sides rant. He went out of his way to paint a symmetrical picture, with each side doing exactly the same thing. And he showed no awareness of the risk of distortion in doing that.
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) April 16, 2022

What might Twitter be like under Musk? His ‘Pravda’ idea comes to mind:

Elon Musk tweeted this week that he plans to setup an online platform called ‘Pravda’, where people can “rate the core truth of any article and track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor and publication.” This isn’t a joke. Bloomberg reported on May 24, “The California secretary of state’s website shows a Pravda Corp. was registered in October in Delaware. The filing agent and the address listed – 216 Park Road, Burlingame, California – are identical to the name and location used for at least two other Musk entities: brain-computer interface startup Neuralink Corp. and tunnel-digging company Boring Co.”
…
Musk wants to call this platform ‘Pravda’. Even as an attempt at irony or black humour, the name cannot transcend the founding conceit of the initiative. The word is Russian for ‘truth’; more notably, Pravda was the name of the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It served the Bolsheviks at the time of the 1917 revolution, and was published continuously until 1991. Until the late 1980s, it published propaganda that furthered the cause of ‘actually existing socialism’ – the official ideology of the erstwhile USSR. While this ‘official organ’ of the Communist Party underwent an ideological transition towards 1990 and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union, Pravda‘s editorial positions on either side of this historic line illustrate the vacancy of Musk’s idea as well as choice of name.
…
Musk is lazy because, instead of trying to build a credibility-rating platform, he could either engage with journalists – especially women, whose credibility is constantly dragged down by faceless trolls assailing them not for their views but for their gender – and the underlying idea of journalism (together with how its purpose continues to be misunderstood). He is lazy because he thinks that by getting the numbers on his side, he can show journalists up for the phonies he thinks they are. Musk is likely to have better success at shaping public opinion if he launched a news publication himself.
‘There Is Neither Truth nor News in Elon Musk’s ‘Pravda’ – Forget Usefulness’, The Wire, May 25, 2018

Also:

While Elon Musk is trying to buy Twitter Inc., he’s no longer the company’s largest shareholder.
Funds held by Vanguard Group recently upped their stake in the social-media platform, making the asset manager Twitter’s largest shareholder and bumping Mr. Musk out of the top spot.
Vanguard disclosed on April 8 that it now owns 82.4 million shares of Twitter, or 10.3% of the company, according to the most recent publicly available filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
‘Elon Musk Is No Longer Twitter’s Largest Shareholder’, Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2022

Ultimately, this is what we’re hanging on right now:

Still I imagine that Twitter’s bankers at Goldman Sachs will sit down with Musk’s bankers at Morgan Stanley and Goldman will say “so uh where’s the financing coming from” and Morgan Stanley will say “oh the financing is in this can” and hand Goldman a can and Goldman will open the can and a bunch of fake snakes will pop out. “AAAHHH,” Goldman will scream, and then they will chuckle and say “oh Elon, you got us again” and everyone will have a good laugh. Because, again, uniquely among public-company CEOs, Elon Musk has in the past pretended he was going to take a public company private with pretend financing! I am not saying that he’s joking now; I am just saying he’s the only person who has ever made this particular joke in the past.
‘Sure Elon Musk Might Buy Twitter’, Bloomberg, April 15, 2022

Then there’s this guy:

Elon Musk controlling Twitter and allowing for free speech is literally worse than Pearl Harbor!!!

You know it’s coming folks
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) April 15, 2022

Apr 17, 2022
Free-speech as an instrument of repression

One of the more eye-opening discussions on Elon Musk’s attempt to take control of Twitter, and the Twitter board’s attempts to defend the company from the bid, have been playing out on Hacker News (here and, after Twitter’s response, here) – the popular discussion board for topics related to the tech industry. The first discussion has already racked up over 3,000 comments, considered high for topics on the platform – but most of them are emblematic of the difference between the industry’s cynical view of politics and that of those who have much more skin in the game, for whom it’s a problem of regulation, moral boundaries and, inevitably, the survival of democracies. (Here is one notable exception.)

For example, the majority of comments on the first discussion are concerned with profits, Twitter’s management, the stock market and laws pertaining to shareholding. The second one also begins with a comment along similar lines, repeating some points made in the ‘All In Podcast’, together with an additional comment about how “one AI engineer from Tesla could solve Twitter’s bot and spam problem”. The podcast is hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg, all investors and entrepreneurs of the Silicon Valley variety. A stream of comments rebuts this one, but in terms of it being an engineering problem instead of the kind of place Twitter might be if Musk takes ownership.

There have also been several comments either along the lines of or premised on the fact that “many people don’t use Twitter anyway, so Twitter’s board shouldn’t deprive its shareholders of the generous premium that Musk is offering”. Not many people use Twitter compared to Facebook – but the platform is in sufficient use in India and in other countries for its misuse to threaten journalists, activists and protestors, to undermine public dialogue on important government policies, and to spread propaganda and misinformation of great consequence. Such a mentality – to take the money and run, courtesy of a business mogul worth $260 billion – represents an onion of problems, layer over layer, but most of all that those running a company in one small part of one country can easily forget that social media platforms are sites of public dialogue, that enable new forms of free speech, in a different country.

If Twitter goes down, or goes to Musk, which is worse, those who are nervous enough will switch to Mastodon (I have been running a server for three years now), but if this is an acceptable outcome, platforms like Twitter can only encourage cynicism when they seek to cash in on their identities as supporters of free speech but then buckle with something Muskesque comes calling. Thus far, Twitter hasn’t buckled, which is heartening, but since it is a private company, perhaps it is just a matter of time.

Another point that grates at me is that there seems to be little to no acknowledgment in the Hacker News discussions that there are constitutional limits to free speech in all democracies. (Again, there are nearly 4,000 comments on both discussions combined, so I could have missed some.) As Article 19(2) of the Indian Constitution reads:

(2) Nothing in sub-clause (a) of clause (1) shall affect the operation of any existing law, or prevent the State from making any law, in so far as such law imposes reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right conferred by the said sub-clause in the interests of 4[the sovereignty and integrity of India], the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.

Musk has said he wants to take over Twitter because, in a letter he wrote to the company, it “will neither thrive nor serve [its free speech] societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.” He also said separately that “having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilisation”. Yet his own conviction in the virtues of free-speech absolutism has blinded him from seeing he’s simply bullying Twitter into changing its agenda, or that he is bullying its hundreds of millions of users into accepting his.

He also seems unable to acknowledge that “maximally trusted and broadly inclusive” – by which I’m not-so-sure he means both the far-left and the far-right should be allowed to mouth off, without any curbs – points only to one type of social media platform: one that is owned, run and used by the people (Mastodon is one example). As another point from the ‘All In Podcast’ was quoted on the forum: “The elites have somehow inverted history so they now believe that it is not censorship that is the favored tool of fascists and authoritarians, even though every fascist and despot in history used censorship to maintain power, but instead believe free speech, free discourse, and free thought are the instruments of repression.” It’s hard to tell which ‘free speech’ they mean: the one in both the US and India, where it is limited in ways that are designed to protect the safety of the people and their rights, or the lopsided one in Musk’s mind that free speech must be guaranteed in the absolute.

I have no interest in listening to the podcast – but the latter is entirely plausible: while keeping the rest of us occupied with fact-checking The Party’s lies, lodging police complaints against its violent supporters and protecting the rights of the poor and the marginalised, the ministers can run the country in peace.

Apr 16, 2022
Disappointing persons of the year 2021

I’m starting to think that in this day and age, you will but err when you pick individuals for traditionally ‘prestigious’ awards, prizes, recognitions, etc., probably because the sort of people who can stand out by themselves have to have had the sort of clout and power that typically comes not through personal achievement as much as systemic prejudice – or they need to have screwed up on a magnitude so large that the nature of their action must overlap significantly with a combination of centralised power and lack of accountability. And on the spectrum of possibilities between these two extremes lie The Week‘s and Time‘s persons of the year 2021.

The Week has picked – wait for it – Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) director-general Balram Bhargava for his leadership of India’s medical response to the country’s COVID-19 crises. I doubt I’d lose my journalistic equipoise if I said he deserved to be the “clown of the year” not just because Bhargava, and ICMR with him, has made many batty claims throughout the epidemic – principally in press conferences – but also because, to echo the recent words of Barton Gellman, he has pushed an independent medical research body outside the democratic system and into the prime minister’s office.

Yet The Week‘s article justifying its choice makes no mention of these transgressions and sticks only to Bhargava making life-impacting decisions at 3 am – like tens of thousands of healthcare workers around the country, who did that and kept their collective spine – and a can-do attitude in which The Week fails to see that “getting things done” to the appreciation of your colleagues also means that unless someone takes more initiative than they’re expected to, the organisation is systematically incapable of going “over and beyond”, so to speak. One way or another, it’s not hard to conclude that Bhargava will leave ICMR worse than it was when he joined.

Time‘s person of the year 2021 is Elon Musk. Its profile reads much less like the profilee is doing the profiler a favour, but it also fails to overcome the suspicion that it expects the sheer magnitude of Musk’s ambitions for the world to absolve him of his failures – failures that appear like minor glitches in a grand, technocratic future-vision to Silicon Valley and Wall Street honchos (and their mimics worldwide) but to anyone else suggest something worse but also familiar: a plutocracy in which each billionaire is only looking out for himself, or at best his company’s interests.

Time‘s profile is essentially a paean to the extent to which Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX companies have reinvigorated their respective industries (automotives and spaceflight) through innovations in manufacturing and industrial management, but it’s often presented in a context-limited, value-neutral fashion that prompts concerns that the magazine wouldn’t have had access to Musk if it didn’t promise to write nice things about him.

For example, Time writes that “Musk’s … announcement of a $100 million climate prize rankled some environmentalists because of its inclusion of proposals for direct-air carbon capture,” and that its sole criticism is that this tech doesn’t work. But the greater issue is that focusing on carbon capture and storage technologies is a technofix that allows Tesla and other vehicle-makers to evade responsibility to reduce the demand for carbon, and that Musk’s ‘challenge’ is really a bid through philanthrocapitlism to prolong ‘business as usual’ climate scenarios. For another related example, about Tesla’s success with electric vehicles, the profile says:

That has made Musk arguably the biggest private contributor to the fight against climate change. Had the 800,000 Teslas sold in the last year been gas-powered cars, they would have emitted more than 40 million metric tons of CO₂ over their lifetimes—equivalent to the annual emissions of Finland. But EVs may ultimately be less important to the climate fight than the central innovation that made them possible: batteries. Tesla has repurposed the lightweight, energy-dense cells that power its cars for huge grid-scale batteries that provide essential backup for renewables. Demand for Tesla’s smaller home-based Powerwall, which can store electricity from rooftop solar systems, has spiked as consumers look for alternatives to the grid, driven by everything from February’s Texas power shortage to the fire risk in California that has led to power shutoffs.

Yet the profile doesn’t mention that even when electrified, more and more people owning cars only exacerbates the underlying problem – the demand for electricity, from a climate mitigation standpoint, and urban traffic and congestion – and that we need cities to shift to more affordable, usable and efficient modes of public transport. (The profile also and obviously doesn’t include Musk’s comment in 2017 that he dislikes public transport because he grossly mistrusts other people.) And if Tesla’s technologies will ultimately benefit the US’s, and the world’s, public transport systems, it’s hard to imagine the extent to which they would’ve also undermined our fight for climate and social justice by then.

Instead, this is profiteering, plain and simple, and Time‘s failure to see it as such – throughout the profile, not just in this instance, it repeatedly tries to reflect the world’s aspirations in his own – seems to me to be a symptom of a desire to coexist with Musk more than anything else. Once in a while the profile has a few paragraphs of complaints against Musk and his businesses, only for them to be followed by an excuse for his behaviour or an indication that he was sanctioned appropriately for it, and never anything that goes far enough to contemplate what Musk’s politics might be. “Something about our upbringing makes us constantly want to be on the edge,” Elon’s brother Kimbal says – in the same paragraph that makes the profile’s sole meaningful allusion to the centrality of lucrative NASA contracts to SpaceX’s success. That, to me, said enough.

I wish both The Week and Time had picked persons of the year who make the world fairer and better in spite of the people they’ve actually picked – but at the same time must conclude that perhaps this is one more tradition whose time has ended.

Featured image credits: ICMR/Facebook and Steve Jurvetson/Flickr.

Dec 14, 2021
‘Real science’

From ‘The most influential climate science paper of all time’, The Conversation, October 8, 2021 (emphasis added):

Manabe, working with various colleagues, went on to write many more seminal climate modelling papers. He set the foundation for today’s global climate modelling efforts. The physics was beguilingly simple so his models could run on these early computers. Yet, by being simple, the results could be understood and tested. His application of these simple models to the pressing problems of today was insightful.
After graduating with a degree in physics over 30 years ago, I chose a career in atmospheric science over particle physics. I always worried about how my applied physics was viewed by mainstream physics colleagues. With a Nobel prize in physics under our discipline’s belt, it gives me and climate modelling colleagues the credibility and recognition we have yearned for: climate science is real science.

The author of the article is a Piers Forster, a professor of physical climate change at the University of Leeds. The part in bold is an unlikely comment from a ‘real scientist’, quite in the spirit of Elon Musk when the latter said in 2018 that nanotechnology is “bs”. But while it’s disappointing to read, considering how it equates scientific legitimacy with winning a Nobel Prize, it may be more useful to interpret the comment as a reflection of how science really works: not by the isolation of facts and discernment of principles alone but also through social acceptance and the (maximal) recognition of one’s peers.

Oct 12, 2021