Category: Life notes

Posted in Life notes

In pursuit of a nebulous metaphor…

Posted on by newyesterday

I don’t believe in god, but if he/it/she/they existed, then his/its/her/their gift to science communication would’ve been the metaphor. Metaphors help make sense of truly unknowable things, get a grip on things so large that our minds boggle trying to comprehend them, and help writers express book-length concepts in a dozen words. Even if there is something lost in translation, as it were, metaphors help both writers and readers get a handle on something they would otherwise have struggled to.

One of my favourite expositions on the power of metaphors appeared in an article by Daniel Sarewitz, writing in Nature (readers of this blog will be familiar with the text I’m referring to). Sarewitz was writing about how nobody but trained physicists understands what the Higgs boson really is because those of us who do think we get it are only getting metaphors. The Higgs boson exists in a realm that humans cannot ever access (even Ant-Man almost died getting there), and physicists make sense of them through complicated mathematical abstractions.

Mr Wednesday makes just this point in American Gods (the TV show), when he asks his co-passenger in a flight what it is that makes them trust that the plane will fly. (Relatively) Few of us know the physics behind Newton’s laws of motion and Bernoulli’s work in fluid dynamics – but many of us believe in their robustness. In a sense, faith and metaphors keep us going and not knowledge itself because we truly know only little.

However, the ease that metaphors offer writers at such a small cost (minimised further for those writers who know how to deal with that cost) sometimes means that they’re misused or overused. Sometimes, some writers will abdicate their responsibility to stay as close to the science – and the objective truth, such as it is – as possible by employing metaphors where one could easily be avoided. My grouse of choice at the moment is this tweet by New Scientist:

The writer has had the courtesy to use the word ‘equivalent’ but it can’t do much to salvage the sentence’s implications from the dumpster. Different people have different takeaways from the act of smoking. I think of lung and throat cancer; someone else will think of reduced lifespan; yet another person will think it’s not so bad because she’s a chain-smoker; someone will think it gives them GERD. It’s also a bad metaphor to use because the effects of smoking vary from person to person based on various factors (including how long they’ve been smoking 15 cigarettes a day for). This is why researchers studying the effects of smoking quantify not the risk but the relative risk (RR): the risk of some ailment (including reduced lifespan) relative to non-smokers in the same population.

There are additional concerns that don’t allow the smoking-loneliness congruence to be generally applicable. For example, according to a paper published in the Journal of Insurance Medicine in 2008,

An important consideration [is] the extent to which each study (a) excluded persons with pre-existing medical conditions, perhaps those due to smoking, and (b) controlled for various co-morbid factors, such as age, sex, race, education, weight, cholesterol, blood pressure, heart disease, and cancer. Studies that excluded persons with medical conditions due to smoking, or controlled for factors related to smoking (e.g., blood pressure), would be expected to find lower RRs. Conversely, studies that did not account for sufficient confounding factors (such as age or weight) might find higher RRs.

So, which of these – or any other – effects of smoking is the writer alluding to? Quoting from the New Scientist article,

Lonely people are at increased risk of “just about every major chronic illness – heart attacks, neurodegenerative diseases, cancer,” says Cole. “Just a completely crazy range of bad disease risks seem to all coalesce around loneliness.” A meta-analysis of nearly 150 studies found that a poor quality of social relationships had the same negative effect on risk of death smoking, alcohol and other well-known factors such as inactivity and obesity. “Correcting for demographic factors, loneliness increases the odds of early mortality by 26 per cent,” says Cacioppo. “That’s about the same as living with chronic obesity.”

The metaphor the writer was going for was one of longevity. Bleh.

When I searched for the provenance of this comparison (between smoking and loneliness), I landed up on two articles by the British writer George Monbiot in The Guardian, both of which make the same claim*: that smoking 15 cigarettes a day will reduce your lifespan by as much as a lifetime of loneliness. Both claims referenced a paper titled ‘Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review’, published in July 2010. Its ‘Discussion’ section reads:

Data across 308,849 individuals, followed for an average of 7.5 years, indicate that individuals with adequate social relationships have a 50% greater likelihood of survival compared to those with poor or insufficient social relationships. The magnitude of this effect is comparable with quitting smoking and it exceeds many well-known risk factors for mortality (e.g., obesity, physical inactivity).

In this context, there’s no doubt that the writer is referring to the benefits of smoking cessation on lifespan. However, the number ’15’ itself is missing from its text. This is presumably because, as Cacioppo – one of the scientists quoted by the New Scientist – says, loneliness can decrease your lifespan by 26%, and I assume an older study cited by the one quoted above relates it to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So I went looking, and (two hours later) couldn’t find anything.

I don’t mean to rubbish the congruence as a result, however – far from it. I want to highlight the principal reason I didn’t find a claim that fit the proverbial glove: most studies that seek to quantify smoking-related illnesses like to keep things as specific as possible, especially the cohort under consideration. This suggests that extrapolating the ’15 cigarettes a day’ benchmark into other contexts is not a good idea, especially when the writer does not know – and the reader is not aware of – the terms of the ’15 cigarettes’ claim nor the terms of the social relationships study. For example, one study I found involved the following:

The authors investigated the association between changes in smoking habits and mortality by pooling data from three large cohort studies conducted in Copenhagen, Denmark. The study included a total of 19,732 persons who had been examined between 1967 and 1988, with reexaminations at 5- to 10-year intervals and a mean follow-up of 15.5 years. Date of death and cause of death were obtained by record linkage with nationwide registers. By means of Cox proportional hazards models, heavy smokers (≥15 cigarettes/day) who reduced their daily tobacco intake by at least 50% without quitting between the first two examinations and participants who quit smoking were compared with persons who continued to smoke heavily.

… and it presents a table of table with various RRs. Perhaps something from there can be fished out by the New Scientist writer and used carefully to suggest the comparability between smoking-associated mortality rates and the corresponding effects of loneliness…

*The figure of ’15 cigarettes’ seems to appear in conjunction with a lot of claims about smoking as well as loneliness all over the web. It seems 15 a day is the line between light and heavy smoking.

Featured image credit: skeeze/pixabay.

Posted in Life notes, Op-eds, Tech

A close encounter with the first kind: the obnoxious thieves of good journalism

Posted on by newyesterday

A Huffington Post article purportedly published by the US bureau has flicked two quotes from a story first published by The Wire, on the influenza epidemics ravaging India. The story’s original author and its editor (me) reached out to HuffPo India folks via Twitter to get them to attribute The Wire for both quotes – and remove, rephrase or enclose-in-double-quotes a paragraph copied verbatim from the original. What this resulted in was half-assed acknowledgment: one of the quotes was attributed to The Wire, the other quote was left unattributed, giving the impression that it was sourced first-hand, and the plagiarised paragraph was left in as is.

I’m delighted that The Wire‘s story is receiving wider reach, and is being read by the people who matter around the world. (And I request you, the reader, to please share the original article and not the plagiarised version.)

But to acknowledge our requests for change and then to assume that attributing only one of the quotes will suffice is to suggest that “this is enough”. This is an offensive attitude that I think has its roots in a complacence of sorts. Huffington Post could be assuming that a partial attribution (and plagiarism) is ‘okay’ because nobody cares about these things because they’re getting valuable information in return that’s going to distract consumers, and because it’s Huffington Post and their traffic volumes are going to make up for the oversight.

For the average consumer – by which I mean someone who only consumes journalism and doesn’t produce it – does it matter that Huffington Post, in some sense, has cheated to get the content it has? I don’t think it does. (This is a problem; there should be specific short-term sanctions if a publisher chooses to behave this way. Edit: Priyanka Pulla, the original author: “It DOES hurt you, the reader. Each time you read bad journalism, it’s because content thieves destroy market for good journalism and skew incentives.”) However, if anything, the publisher effectively signals that consumers will be getting content produced in newsrooms other than the Post’s. The website is now a ‘destination’ site.

Who this kind of irreverence really hurts is other journalists. For example, Pulla spent a lot of time and work writing the piece, I spent a lot of time and work editing it and The Wire spent a lot of money for commissioning and publishing it. By thinking our work is available to reuse for free, Huffington Post disparages the whole enterprise.

This enterprise is an intangible commodity – the kind that encourages readers to pay for journalism because it’s the absence of this enterprise, and the attendant diligence, that leads to ‘bad journalism’. And at a time when every publisher publishing journalistic content online on the planet is struggling to make money, what Huffington Post has done is value theft. At last check, the article on their site had 3,300 LinkedIn Shares and 5,100 shares on StumbleUpon.

(Edit: “We didn’t know” wouldn’t work with HuffPo here because my issue is with their response to our bringing the problems to their notice.)

This isn’t the first time such a thing has happened with The Wire. From personal experience (having managed the site for 18 months), there are three forms of content-stealing I’ve seen:

  1. The more obnoxious kind – where a publisher that has traffic in the millions every month lifts an article, or reuses parts of it, without permission; and when pulled up for it, gives this excuse: “We’re giving your content free publicity. You should let us do this.” The best response for this has been public-shaming.
  2. The more insidious kind – where a bot from an algorithmic publisher freely republishes content in bulk without permission, and then takes the content down 24-48 hours later once its shelf-life has lapsed. The most effective, and also the most blunt-edged, response to this has been to issue a DMCA notice.
  3. The more frustrating kind – where a small publisher (monthly traffic at 1 million/month or less and/or operating on a small budget) reuses some articles without permission and then pulls a sad face when pulled up for the act. The best response to this has either been to strike a deal with the publisher for content-exchange or a small fee or, of course, a strongly worded email (the latter is restricted to some well-defined circumstances because otherwise it’s The Wire strong-arming the little guy and nobody likes that).

Dear Huffington Post – I dearly hope you don’t belong to the first kind.

Featured image credit: TheDigitalWay/pixabay.

Posted in Life notes

Writing, journalism and the revolutionary spirit

Posted on by newyesterday

One of my favourite essays of all time – insofar as that’s a legitimate category – is one called ‘How to do what you love’ by Paul Graham, the startup guru. In it, he makes a case for the usefulness of a passion. Mine is writing; what kind of writing I don’t know yet. According to Graham,

To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that’s pretty cool. This doesn’t mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that’s pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.

So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is reading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there’s no test of how well you’ve read a book, and that’s why merely reading books doesn’t quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you’ve read to feel productive.

My personal test of how I’ve read a book comes to be when I write about it, when I take away something the book’s author did not directly intend, but which I realised by merging the book’s lessons and my experiences. I’ve applied my habit of writing – whether for The Wire or for the blog – in a similar vein to almost everything I do, hear, read or think. I write personally informed takeaways. The flipside of this is that when I’m unable to write about something, I disregard it, and I don’t know what the consequences of this have been or will be.

The one thing I’ve realised I don’t like about this habit is that it prevents me from crafting bigger lessons. Because I read a book, write about it, and then throw the book away (figuratively speaking), I make a habit of ‘not mulling over it’. I move on. As a result, my blog is littered with a string of shorter, piecemeal observations but nothing too protracted or profound. Thankfully, my writing habit also improves my memory: I remember better what I’ve written than what I’ve read/seen/heard. So looking back, I can piece together a picture of my thoughts over the course of time. The true issue arises when this habit is brought over into journalism.

In journalism, this seems to be a problem because it fosters a coverage-oriented mindset: “Have I covered this? If yes, then move on. If not, then cover it now and then move on.” Our coupling with the news cycle – which is a polished way of saying our dependence on traffic from Google News – means we cover frequently cover the smaller issues but rarely piece them together to reflect on the bigger ones. Ultimately, we believe that because we’ve written about it, it counts for something, and that we get to move on with clearer heads.

Mayank Tewari, who wrote the dialogues for the Bollywood film Newton, perhaps alludes to this when he tells Anindita Ghose (in Livemint),

“We are living in a time of self-conscious irony,” says Tewari. “We are aware of what’s wrong with our society… but if you read the righteous online news platforms, it’s as if just knowing this elevates [their writers and editors] from that reality. The revolutionary spirit is exhausted right there…the constant talking about what they are doing and what other people are not doing.”

The realisation that one knows about something is meaningless to our readers at large. But is its expression in words also equally meaningless? If they’ve adopted the coverage mindset, then Tewari is right: “the revolutionary spirit is exhausted right there”. We need to stop assuming that expressing our knowledge once will change anything.

This is difficult to internalise, however, especially if the journalist in question is busy. To go hammer and tonks at an issue, to repeat some details over and over again, doesn’t make for good business; it’s novelty that sells so it’s novelty that journalists seek out. And depending on what kind of a news organisation a journalist is employed at, I wouldn’t blame her if she wasn’t harbouring the revolutionary spirit.

Featured image credit: ChristopherPluta/pixabay.