Let the arrogators write
Bora Zivkovic, the former 'blogfather' of the Scientific American blogs network, said it best: journalists are temporary experts. Reporters have typically got a few days to write something up…
Op-eds
182 posts
Expertise's place
Over 1,600 scientists have signed a letter of protest addressed to the White House against its proposed definition of 'gender' that purportedly disidentifies transgender and intersex people. A…
Climate fear
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently published a report exhorting countries committed to the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to an additional 1.5º by the end of this century.…
What the Nobel Prizes are not
The winners of this year's Nobel Prizes are being announced this week. The prizes are an opportunity to discover new areas of research, and developments there that scientists consider particularly…
An epistocracy
The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has proposed a new textbook that will discuss the 'Indian knowledge system' via a number of pseudoscientific claims about the supposed inv…
Political activation
… all forms of knowledge are implicated in political structures in one way or another. If the people who actually have expertise in that form of knowledge are not the ones activating it politically, t…
I don't want your ideas
Tommaso Dorigo published a blog post on the Science 2.0 platform, where he's been publishing his writing, that I would have liked to read. It was about whether neural networks could help design pa…
Appeasement v. truth
Late last year, Facebook inducted The Weekly Standard (TWS), an American news outlet, as one of its only five fact-checkers and the sole conservative voice in the group. Earlier this week, TWS raised…
Idea of a country
The short excerpt below from Patriots and Partisans by Ram Guha caught my attention because it offers a simple definition of the idea of India (at the risk of oversimplification). One may have encount…
The editor, the writer and the exclusivity
Do all editors share that excoriating sensation that carves through one’s gut when one sees one’s writer writing for another publication? Of course, “one’s writer” is unjust phrasing because writers…
The spades
Donald Trump When you criticise a person, you naturally take into account their office and assess whether you know all that you need to to come to your conclusions. For a long time, this 'stop a…
'Work from home' is about culture, not economics
Working from home (WFH) is not for everyone or for every company. It works mostly when individual employees of an organisation don't need to work together often, or are embedded in workflows where…