From ‘Tamil Nadu heatwave policy is only a start’, The Hindu, November 21, 2024:

Estimates of a heatwave’s deadliness are typically based on the extent to which the ambient temperature deviates from the historical average at a specific location and the number of lives lost during and because of the heatwave. This is a tricky, even devious, combination as illustrated by the accompanying rider: “to the reasonable exclusion of other causes of hyperthermia”.

A heatwave injures and/or kills by first pushing more vulnerable people over the edge; the less vulnerable are further down the line. The new policy is presumably designed to help the State catch those whose risk exposure the State has not been able to mitigate in time. However, the goal should be to altogether reduce the number of people requiring such catching. The policy lacks the instruments to guide the State toward this outcome.

I’m not just disappointed with an editorial published by the journal Science on November 14, I’m angry.

Irrespective of whether the Republican Party in the US has shifted more or less rightward on specific issues, it has certainly shifted towards falsehoods on many of them. Party leaders, including Donald Trump, have been using everything from lazily inaccurate information to deliberately misleading messages to preserve conservative attitudes wherever that’s been the status quo and to stoke fear, confusion, uncertainty, and animosity where peace and good sense have thus far prevailed.

Against this backdrop, which the COVID-19 pandemic revealed in all its glory, Science‘s editorial is headlined “Science is neither red nor blue”. (Whether this is a reference to the journal itself is immaterial.) Its author, Marcia McNutt, president of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), writes (emphasis added):

… scientists need to better explain the norms and values of science to reinforce the notion—with the public and their elected representatives—that science, at its most basic, is apolitical. Careers of scientists advance when they improve upon, or show the errors in, the work of others, not by simply agreeing with prior work. Whether conservative or liberal, citizens ignore the nature of reality at their peril. A recent example is the increased death rate from COVID-19 (as much as 26% higher) in US regions where political leaders dismissed the science on the effectiveness of vaccines. Scientists should better explain the scientific process and what makes it so trustworthy, while more candidly acknowledging that science can only provide the best available evidence and cannot dictate what people should value. Science cannot say whether society should prioritize allocating river water for sustaining fish or for irrigating farms, but it can predict immediate and long-term outcomes of any allocation scheme. Science can also find solutions that avoid the zero-sum dilemma by finding conservation approaches to water management that benefit both fish and farms.

Can anyone explain to me what the first portion in bold even means? Because I don’t want to assume a science administrator as accomplished as McNutt is able to ignore the narratives and scholarship roiling around the sociology of science at large or the cruel and relentless vitiation of scientific knowledge the first Trump administration practiced in particular. Even if the editorial’s purpose is to extend an olive branch to Trump et al., it’s bound to fail. If, say, a Republican leader makes a patently false claim in public, are we to believe an institution as influential as the NAS will not call it out for fear of being cast as “blue” in the public eye?

The second portion in bold is slightly less ridiculous: “science can only provide the best available evidence and cannot dictate what people should value.” McNutt is creating a false impression here by failing to present the full picture. During a crisis, science has to be able to tell people what to value more or less rather than what to value at all. Crises create uncertainty whereas science creates knowledge that is free from bias (at least it can be). It offers a pillar to lean on while we figure out everything else. People should value these pillars.

When a national government — in this case the government of one of the world’s most powerful countries — gives conspiracies and lies free reign, crises will be everywhere. If McNutt means to suggest these crises are so only insofar as the liberal order is faced with changes inimical to its sustenance, she will be confusing what is today the evidence-conspiracy divide for what was once, but is no longer, the conservative-liberal divide.

As if to illustrate this point, she follows up with the third portion in bold: “Science cannot say whether society should prioritize allocating river water for sustaining fish or for irrigating farms, but it can predict immediate and long-term outcomes of any allocation scheme.” Her choice of example is clever because it’s also fallacious: it presents a difficult decision with two reasonable outcomes, ‘reasonable’ being the clincher. The political character of science-in-practice is rarely revealed in debates where reasonability is allowed through the front door and given the power to cast the decisive vote. This was almost never the case under the first Trump administration nor the parts of the Republican Party devoted to him (which I assume is the whole party now), where crazy* has had the final say.

The choice McNutt should really have deliberated is “promoting the use of scientifically tested vaccines during a pandemic versus urging people to be cautious about these vaccines” or “increasing the stockpile of evidence-backed drugs and building social resilience versus hawking speculative ideas and demoralising science administrators”. When the choice is between irrigation for farms and water for fisheries, science can present the evidence and then watch. When the choice is between reason and bullshit, still advocating present-and-watch would be bullshit, too — i.e. science would be “red”.

This is just my clumsy, anger-flecked take on what John Stuart Mill and many others recognised long past: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing.” But if McNutt would still rather push the line that what seem like “bad men” to me might be good men to others, she and the policies she influences will have committed themselves to the sort of moral relativism that could never be relevant to politics in practice, which in turn would be a blow for us all.

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(* My colloquialism for the policy of being in power for the sake of being in power, rather than to govern.)

From ‘SC declines Ramdev, Patanjali apology; expresses concern over FMCGs taking gullible consumers ‘up and down the garden path’’, The Hindu, April 10, 2024:

The Supreme Court has refused to accept the unconditional apology from Patanjali co-founder Baba Ramdev and managing director Acharya Balkrishna for advertising medical products in violation of giving an undertaking in the apex court in November 2023 prohibiting the self-styled yoga guru. … Justices Hima Kohli and Ahsanuddin Amanullah told senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi that Mr. Ramdev has apologised only after being caught on the back foot. His violations of the undertaking to the court was deliberate and willful, they said. The SC recorded its dissatisfaction with the apology tendered by proposed contemnors Patanjali, Mr. Balkrishna and Mr. Ramdev, and posted the contempt of court case on April 16.

… The Bench also turned its ire on the Uttarakhand State Licensing Authority for “twiddling their thumbs” and doing nothing to prevent the publications and advertisements. “Why should we not come down like a ton of bricks on your officers? They have been fillibustering,” Justice Kohli said. The court said the assurances of the State Licensing Authority and the apology of the proposed contemnors are not worth the paper they are written on.

A very emotionally gratifying turn of events, but perhaps not as gratifying as they might have been had they transpired at the government’s hands when Patanjali was issuing its advertisements of pseudoscience-backed COVID-19 cures during the pandemic. Or if the Supreme Court had proceeded to actually hold the men in contempt instead of making a slew of observations and setting a date for another hearing. Still, something to cheer for and occasion to reserve some hope for the April 16 session.

But in matters involving Ramdev and Patanjali Ayurved, many ministers of the current government ought to be pulled up as well, including former Union health minister Harsh Vardhan, Union micro, small, and medium enterprises minister Nitin Gadkari, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi’s governance and policies both written and unwritten enabled Patanjali’s charlatanry while messrs Vardhan and Gadkari were present at an event in February 2021 when Patanjali launched a product it claimed could cure COVID-19, with Vardhan – who was health minister then – speaking in favour of people buying and using the unproven thing.

I think the Supreme Court’s inclination to hold Ramdev et al. in contempt should extend to Vardhan as well because his presence at the event conferred a sheen of legitimacy on the product but also because of a specific bit of theatrics he pulled in May the same year involving Ramdev and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Ramdev apologising because that’s more politically convenient rather than because he thinks he screwed up isn’t new. In that May, he’d called evidence-based medicine “stupid” and alleged such medicine had killed more people than the virus itself. After some virulent public backlash, Vardhan wrote a really polite letter to Ramdev asking him to apologise, and Ramdev obliged.

But just the previous month, in April 2021, Manmohan Singh had written a letter to Modi suggesting a few courses of action to improve India’s response to the virus’s spread. Its contents were perfectly reasonable, yet Vardhan responded to it accusing Singh of spreading “vaccine hesitancy” and alleging Congress-ruled states were responsible for fanning India’s deadly second wave of COVID-19 infections (in 2021). These were all ridiculous assertions. But equally importantly, his lashing out stood in stark contrast to his letter to Ramdev: respect for the self-styled godman and businessman whose company was attempting to corner the market for COVID-19 cures with untested, pseudo-Ayurvedic froth versus unhinged rhetoric for a well-regarded economist and statesman.

For this alone, Vardhan deserves the “ton of bricks” the Supreme Court is waiting with.

From 'SC declines Ramdev, Patanjali apology; expresses concern over FMCGs taking gullible consumers ‘up and down the garden path’', The Hindu, April 10, 2024:

The Supreme Court has refused to accept the unconditional apology from Patanjali co-founder Baba Ramdev and managing director Acharya Balkrishna for advertising medical products in violation of giving an undertaking in the apex court in November 2023 prohibiting the self-styled yoga guru. ... Justices Hima Kohli and Ahsanuddin Amanullah told senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi that Mr. Ramdev has apologised only after being caught on the back foot. His violations of the undertaking to the court was deliberate and willful, they said. The SC recorded its dissatisfaction with the apology tendered by proposed contemnors Patanjali, Mr. Balkrishna and Mr. Ramdev, and posted the contempt of court case on April 16.

... The Bench also turned its ire on the Uttarakhand State Licensing Authority for “twiddling their thumbs” and doing nothing to prevent the publications and advertisements. “Why should we not come down like a ton of bricks on your officers? They have been fillibustering,” Justice Kohli said. The court said the assurances of the State Licensing Authority and the apology of the proposed contemnors are not worth the paper they are written on.

A very emotionally gratifying turn of events, but perhaps not as gratifying as they might have been had they transpired at the government's hands when Patanjali was issuing its advertisements of pseudoscience-backed COVID-19 cures during the pandemic. Or if the Supreme Court had proceeded to actually hold the men in contempt instead of making a slew of observations and setting a date for another hearing. Still, something to cheer for and occasion to reserve some hope for the April 16 session.

But in matters involving Ramdev and Patanjali Ayurved, many ministers of the current government ought to be pulled up as well, including former Union health minister Harsh Vardhan, Union micro, small, and medium enterprises minister Nitin Gadkari, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi's governance and policies both written and unwritten enabled Patanjali's charlatanry while messrs Vardhan and Gadkari were present at an event in February 2021 when Patanjali launched a product it claimed could cure COVID-19, with Vardhan – who was health minister then – speaking in favour of people buying and using the unproven thing.

I think the Supreme Court's inclination to hold Ramdev et al. in contempt should extend to Vardhan as well because his presence at the event conferred a sheen of legitimacy on the product but also because of a specific bit of theatrics he pulled in May the same year involving Ramdev and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Ramdev apologising because that's more politically convenient rather than because he thinks he screwed up isn't new. In that May, he'd called evidence-based medicine "stupid" and alleged such medicine had killed more people than the virus itself. After some virulent public backlash, Vardhan wrote a really polite letter to Ramdev asking him to apologise, and Ramdev obliged.

But just the previous month, in April 2021, Manmohan Singh had written a letter to Modi suggesting a few courses of action to improve India's response to the virus's spread. Its contents were perfectly reasonable, yet Vardhan responded to it accusing Singh of spreading "vaccine hesitancy" and alleging Congress-ruled states were responsible for fanning India's deadly second wave of COVID-19 infections (in 2021). These were all ridiculous assertions. But equally importantly, his lashing out stood in stark contrast to his letter to Ramdev: respect for the self-styled godman and businessman whose company was attempting to corner the market for COVID-19 cures with untested, pseudo-Ayurvedic froth versus unhinged rhetoric for a well-regarded economist and statesman.

For this alone, Vardhan deserves the "ton of bricks" the Supreme Court is waiting with.