Month: December 2019

The Mitr

Ersatz Coffee

Recently, I was traveling by train after a long time. The train, unfortunately, got delayed and I had to have breakfast in the train. So along with the breakfast, the server asked me if I want tea of coffee. Disclaimer: Nothing like Tea, Coffee or Me .
Now, tea or coffee in a train is a tricky affair. In trains that don’t have pantries, you usually get premade tea at stations, when the vendors start selling tea yelling “Chaiiiinnn, Chaiinn, Bolo Chaiiii”, read it like in a rhyme, with almost musical notes in the background. The tea is usually overboiled, with a high dose of sugar. Very rarely you would get black tea, with whitener and sugar in sachets. People who usually like tea, milk and sugar boiled together, don’t like the dip tea and vice versa. There is an interesting episode in the history of science that involves drinking tea. The idea for analysing randomised experiments was derived from whether one lady could tell whether the tea or the milk was added first to a cup.

The lady in question (Muriel Bristol) claimed to be able to tell whether the tea or the milk was added first to a cup. Fisher proposed to give her eight cups, four of each variety, in random order. One could then ask what the probability was for her getting the specific number of cups she identified correct, but just by chance.

This tea time question was developed as an analytical tool by R. Fisher and now has become a standard in design and analysis of experiments.
Every culture and sub-culture has its own way of making tea. In Bengal, I am told, people drink black tea. This perhaps is inspired by the British who introduced tea. George Orwell has an essay on how to make a nice cup of tea. Calcutta also had a substantial Chinese population perhaps this also contributed to the tea culture there. When tea was introduced to the general population in India, about a century back, it was a marketing stratagem. This is what my grandfather had told me, he was born in 1910s. Perhaps someone can actually look at the historical records to substantiate this. They would create tea in huge cauldrons in busy market places with lots of milk and sugar. They would advertise and give “free” samples to everyone. This is how they got an entire nation addicted to tea. Also a note about why the general teacup has loads of sugar and milk, whereas the typical English way of drinking tea does not involve loads of milk and sugar, and definitely does not involve boiling milk with tea. What you usually get is the dust tea, which does not taste well without loads of milk and sugar, like your Green or Earl Grey. To make it palatable it is loaded with milk and sugar. Try to drink your favourite dust tea like an Earl Grey.
Though there are people who will drink any kind of tea, their requirement is that of tea, not it’s quality or taste. Coffee is usually worse. When it is premade in trains, it has very little coffee and too much sugar. When they give you only hot milk it is pre-boiled with sugar, and thinned to its limits. Usually, the sachet of instant coffee contains too little in terms of coffee, at least for my taste. I usually avoid coffee when it is instant or premade, ever since I started to drink coffee from ground beans. I prefer tea in such cases, as

Bad coffee is worse than no coffee.

Anyways, so here I was sitting in the train, musing about the existential question of whether I should have tea or coffee or nothing at all, I decided to go with coffee. The smart, well-dressed server from IRCTC, handed over me a paper cup and a sachet with “काफी सामग्री” written over. Eff you if you can’t read the Devanagari script. I opened the sachet which had a sugar sachet, a coffee sachet and a milk powder sachet with a wooden spoon for mixing. Then he handed over a kettle containing hot water. I overcame a major, mental block while opening the sachets and pouring the coffee into the paper cup. Then I added a little water to maintain the colour to my liking. I was tempted to drink it black, but then why not go the entire routine. So I started to add the milk powder slowly as indicated on the sachet. The colour turned from darkest brown to slighter shade of brown. And it was ready. With a lot of anticipation of a caffeine kick, I sipped the liquid and…
“Ewwww!”
was my reaction. How can anyone call this coffee? It is not coffee! I even thought of starting a viral campaign with hashtag #NOTMYCOFFEE. Instead of delight it was despair. Thoughts of WHY? Why did I ever think this would be a good idea to drink this came to my mind? Somehow I managed to finish the cup in a couple of sips. I was left with a bad taste in my mouth, which I cannot describe, and the resulting reactions in my brain cells. It was a complete disaster. Never again! I would rather go without coffee than drinking this ersatz coffee. Once you know how actual coffee tastes like, you cannot go back to this. This is the same in the case of intellectuals too, once you know what an intellectual should be like, you can immediately sense the ersatz ones and you won’t like them just like the ersatz coffee.
Never again shall I drink this ersatz coffee.
I like my coffee as it is supposed to be. People become emosional on the account of coffee. For example, read this excellentest account of a French man from 1800s.
 
Edit 1: On the return journey, I actually tried something else. I had kept my South Indian style drip filter accessible with the coffee powder. Now, since the hot water is available in the form of flasks, I actually made hot decoction in the running train. But no hot milk was available, only milk powder, I had only the black coffee. It was definitely better than the ersatz coffee. Though the water I used for brewing could have been hotter.

The Mitr

On respect in the classroom

If you are a teacher (of any sort) and teach young people, don’t be disheartened if the students in your class don’t respect you or listen to you or maintain discipline. Even great philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle has a tough time dealing with their students

Socrates grumbled that he don’t get no respect: his pupils “fail to rise when their elders enter the room. They chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, and tyrannize over their teachers.” Aristotle was similarly pissed off by his stu­dents’ attitude: “They regard themselves as omniscient and are positive in their assertions; this is, in fact, the reason for their carrying everything too far.”Their jokes left the philosopher unamused: “They are fond of laughter and conse­quently facetious, facetiousness being disciplined insolence.”
– Judith Harris The Nurture Assumption

That being said, the students are also very perceptive about the knowledge of the teachers, and know who is trying to be a cosmetic intellectual.

The Mitr

Rotating Earth: the proofs or significance of Leon Foucault’s pendulum – Part 1

rotating-earth
In an earlier post, we had discussed proofs of the round shape of the Earth. This included some ancient and some modern proofs. There was, in general, a consensus that the shape of the Earth was spherical and not flat and the proofs were given since the time of ancient Greeks. Only in the middle ages, there seems to have been some doubt regarding the shape of the Earth. But amongst the learned people, there was never a doubt about the shape of the Earth. Counter-intuitive it may seem when you look at the near horizon, it is not that counter-intuitive. We can find direct proofs about it by looking around and observing keenly.
But the rotation of Earth proved to be a more difficult beast to tame and is highly counter-intuitive. Your daily experience does not tell you the Earth is rotating, rather intuition tells you that it is fixed and stationary. Though the idea of a moving Earth is not new, the general acceptance of the idea took a very long time. And even almost 350 years after Copernicus’ heliocentric model was accepted, a direct proof of Earth’s rotation was lacking. And this absence of definitive proof was not due to a lack of trying. Some of the greatest minds in science, mathematics and astronomy worked on this problem since Copernicus but were unable to solve it. This included likes of Galileo, Newton, Descartes, and host of incredibly talented mathematicians since the scientific revolution. Until Leon Foucaultin the mid-1800s provided not one but two direct proofs of the rotation of the Earth. In this series of posts, we will see how this happened.
When we say the movement of the Earth, we also have to distinguish between two motions that it has: first its motion about its orbit around the Sun, and second its rotational motion about its own axis. So what possible observational proofs or direct evidence will allow us to detect the two motions? In this post, we will explore how our ideas regarding these two motions of the Earth evolved over time and what type of proofs were given for and against it.

Even more, there was a simple geometrical fact directly opposed to the Earth’s annual motion around the Sun and there was nothing that could directly prove its diurnal rotation. (Mikhailov, 1975)

Let us consider the two components of Earth’s motion. The first is the movement around the Sun along the orbit. The simplest proof for this component of Earth’s motion is from the parallax that we can observe for distant stars. Parallax is the relative change in position of objects when they are viewed from different locations. The simplest example of this can be seen with our own eyes.
Straighten your hand, and hold your thumb out. Observe the thumb with both the eyes open. You will see your thumb at a specific location with respect to the background objects. Now close your left eye, and look at how the position of the thumb has changed with respect to the background objects. Now open the right eye, and close the left one. What we will see is a shift in the background of the thumb. This shift is related by simple geometry to the distance between our eyes, called the baseline in astronomical parlance. Thus even a distance of the order of a few centimetres causes parallax, then if it is assumed that Earth is moving around the Sun, it should definitely cause an observable parallax in the fixed stars. And this was precisely one of the major roadblock

Earth moving around an orbit raised mechanical objections that seemed even more serious in later ages; and it raised a great astronomical difficulty immediately. If the Earth moves in a vast orbit, the pattern of fixed stars should show parallax changes during the year. (Rogers, 1960)

The history of cosmic theories … may without exaggeration be called a history of collective obsessions and controlled schizophrenias.
– Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers

Though it is widely believed that Copernicus was the first to suggest a moving Earth, it is not the case. One of the earliest proponents of the rotating Earth was a Greek philosopher named Aristarchus. One of the books by Heath on Aristarchus is indeed titled Copernicus of Antiquity (Aristarchus of Samos). A longer version of the book is Aristarchus of Samos: The Ancient Copernicus. In his model of the cosmos, Aristarchus imagined the Sun at the centre and the Earth and other planets revolving around it. At the time it was proposed, it was not received well. There were philosophical and scientific reasons for rejecting the model.

aristarchus-01
Aristarchus’s model of the heliocentric Universe

First, let us look at the philosophical reasons. In ancient Greek cosmology, there was a clear and insurmountable distinction between the celestial and the terrestrial. The celestial order and bodies were believed to be perfect, as opposed to the imperfect terrestrial. After watching and recording the uninterrupted waltz of the sky over many millennia, it was believed that the heavens were unchangeable and perfect. The observations revealed that there are two types of “stars”. First the so-called “fixed stars” do not change their positions relative to each other. That is to say, their angular separation remains the same. They move together as a group across the sky. Imagination coupled with a group of stars led to the conceiving of constellations. Different civilizations imagined different heroes, animals, objects in the sky. They formed stories about the constellations. These became entwined with cultures and their myths.
telescope_0013
The second type of stars did change their positions with respect to other “fixed stars”. That is to say, they changed their angular distances with “fixed stars”. These stars, the planets, came to be called as “wandering stars” as opposed to the “fixed stars”.

Ancient Greeks called these lights πλάνητες ἀστέρες (planētes asteres, “wandering stars”) or simply πλανῆται (planētai, “wanderers”),from which today’s word “planet” was derived.
Planet

So how does one make sense of these observations? For the fixed stars, the solution is simple and elegant. One observes the set of stars rising from the east and setting to the west. And this set of stars changes across the year (which can be evidenced by changing seasons around us). And this change was found to be cyclical. Year after year, with observations spanning centuries, we found that the stars seem to be embedded on inside of a sphere, and this sphere rotates at a constant speed. This “model” explains the observed phenomena of fixed stars very well.
The unchanging nature of this cyclical process observed, as opposed to the chaotic nature on Earth, perhaps led to the idea that celestial phenomena are perfect. Also, the religious notion of associating the heavens with gods, perhaps added to them being perfect. So, in the case of perfect unchanging heavens, the speeds of celestial bodies, as evidenced by observing the celestial sphere consisting of “fixed stars” was also to be constant. And since celestial objects were considered as perfect, the two geometrical objects that were regarded as perfect the sphere and the circle were included in the scheme of heavens. To explain the observation of motion of stars through the sky, their rising from the east and setting to the west, it was hypothesized that the stars are embedded on the inside of a sphere, and this sphere rotates at a constant speed. We being fixed on the Earth, observe this rotating sphere as the rising and setting of stars. This model of the world works perfectly and formed the template for explaining the “wandering stars” also.
These two ideas, namely celestial objects placed on a circle/sphere rotating with constant speed, formed the philosophical basis of Greek cosmology which would dominate the Western world for nearly two thousand years. And why would one consider the Earth to be stationary? This is perhaps because the idea is highly counter-intuitive. All our experience tells us that the Earth is stationary. The metaphors that we use like rock-solid refer to an idea of immovable and rigid Earth. Even speculating about movement of Earth, there is no need for something that is so obviously not there. But as the history of science shows us, most of the scientific ideas, with a few exceptions, are highly counter-intuitive. And that the Earth seems to move and rotate is one of the most counter-intuitive thing that we experience in nature.
The celestial observations were correlated with happenings on the Earth. One could, for example, predict seasons as per the rising of certain stars, as was done by ancient Egyptians. Tables containing continuous observations of stars and planets covering several centuries were created and maintained by the Babylonian astronomers. It was this wealth of astronomical data, continuously covering several centuries, that became available to the ancient Greek astronomers as a result of Alexander’s conquest of Persia. Having such a wealth of data led to the formation of better theories, but with the two constraints of circles/spheres and constant speeds mentioned above.
With this background, next, we will consider the progress in these ideas.
A stabilised image of the Milky Way as seen from a moving Earth.

 

The Mitr

Another Life – a review

I recently saw (or tried to) a sci-fi series titled Another Life on Netflix. The basic premise is in the first contact schema, wherein an alien spacecraft lands on Earth in the near future. The alien spacecraft looked cool, a rotating infinity sign. The promo and visuals looked nice hence I decided to watch.
Screenshot 2019-12-05 at 12.22.33 PM
The alien spacecraft lands and builds a crystal tower.
Screenshot 2019-12-07 at 7.11.23 PMIt is not communicating and experts are trying to communicate with it via infrasound. The lead scientist here is the husband of the main protagonist Niki (who is captaining the spaceship Slavere being sent to investigate). So both are involved one in space and one on Earth in the matter. Now, no one is aware of whether the aliens are benevolent or malicious. They finally get to communicate with it by playing Western classical music, while the Salvere is en-route to its destination Pi Canis Majoris. So far so good.
Screenshot 2019-12-07 at 7.32.52 PM
Yet, I couldn’t get to like the series. I expected the show will gather plot and pace, once I get past the first few episodes. This happened to me in the case of The Expanse, it turned out to be really good after the first few episodes). The series sort of grows on you, but not this one, at least not for me.
The first offputting thing was the design of the space-ship Salvere. It is supposed to be the most advanced and well-equipped ship yet design-wise the ship is absolute crap. In the control room of the ship, all the crew is standing. Yes, standing! And when the ship does some somersaults, people and things get thrown off-board. I mean a simple design sense would dictate that there must be seats, especially in an artificial gravity ship which undergoes tremendous acceleration, but no, it instead goes
Screenshot 2019-12-05 at 1.12.40 PM

Space saftey 101: no seatbelts

Incidentally, the only person who is standing in the picture above is the holographic projection of the anthropomorphic computer named William onboard the ship. Hence, no inertia (well, technically speaking we are not in the GR domain) and hence sudden accelerations don’t affect him. I thought this would have been a one-off incidence, but things kept getting worse. After a mutiny, Niko kills her second in command over a decision which she takes a call which is not supposed to be tough enough. Was no psychological evaluation done?  The highly trained team (including the computer) looks like it is a bunch of teenagers high on hormonal imbalance. They loose a lot of resources while trying to get a slingshot from Sirius. The scene of Niko looking at Sirius through an observation deck is strange. Sirius in all its blue glory (temperature equivalent of 9500 K) is seen overshadowing the observation port, yet the light on her face is equivalent to 5500 K, the colour of golden hour.
Screenshot 2019-12-07 at 7.37.38 PMScreenshot 2019-12-07 at 7.37.56 PM

Blue light but yellow effect!Screenshot 2019-12-07 at 7.37.56 PM3

The pic in the middle is how the face is lit in the blue light of Sirius is shown in the series, right at least how it should be like. Perhaps the director is too heliocentric.
Now they are off to a planetoid they discover randomly moving across space to mine for crystals which contain a lot of water. I mean how much two people in spacesuits can mine by hand? Surely not enough to fulfill the requirements of a spaceship.
screenshot-2019-12-07-at-8.59.28-pm.png

This big suitcase will carry all our requirement of oxygen and hydrogen.

Anyways they come back in a hurry because of a life-threatening “earthquake” on another planet. One of the members of the crew is infected with a boron-based virus that kills one of the staff and infects all of them. The nervous system coming out of the host is one gruesome scene, though reminiscent of H. R. Giger‘s creature emerging from the host in Aliens. The crew discovers that it is airborne and the entire ship is infected with it. Then they find a cure that irradiating by gamma rays will kill the virus. Ergo the electromagnetic shields are brought down so that gamma rays from Sirius can enter the ship and disinfect it. If anything, gamma rays are not affected by electromagnetic fields at moderate levels, though they are electromagnetic in nature. They are not visible to us, neither we can feel them immediately.
Screenshot 2019-12-07 at 9.02.16 PM

Achtung: Gamma ray march begins!

Screenshot 2019-12-07 at 9.02.24 PM

Constipating out boron-based virus with gamma radiation

Yet the crew is bathed in a white light of gamma rays, and after contortions of their faces as if constipating they are cured. Magically no radiation sickness happens. How their own DNA and on-board electronics are not fried is a question worth pondering.
Moving forward, they discover a similar signal to the one earth coming from one of the moons. They find extraterrestrial life there. Which surprisingly is very much like the earth, including its atmosphere and also has liquid water. Now thankfully, at least they are not drawing water by bucket, but by a spaceship.
Screenshot 2019-12-07 at 9.54.38 PM

A nice-cozy stroll on an unknown alien planet teeming with alien life

They find a planet full of alien life, and yet their reaction is so underwhelming. Read this statement in an as dead and as serious and slow voice you can

The excitement is killing me.

They rely completely on the computer to run the scans for any bio-hazard and find no problems at all. This is rather strange, I mean you are effing landing on an alien planet full of alien life and yet you don’t even put a spacesuit? Elementary error. They are not even bothered by the eerie similarity of the planet with earth, neither want to investigate the biochemistry. A rather strange (and dull) space crew who is not thrilled by the discovery of ET life. Through the day, they see only plant life. Even taste fruits by rubbing them on the skin and the licking a bit before eating! C’mon.
At the day end, they are attacked by alien animals (hexpods). They somehow get back to the spaceship without being eaten. And they are scanned and decontaminated, and yet an alien offspring manages to get onboard. So much for the decontamination and the automatic facility.
Screenshot 2019-12-07 at 10.05.51 PM

Screenshot 2019-12-07 at 10.04.05 PM Then who am I?

A few moments later, the friendly onboard computer loses its circuits. And gravity goes off in the section where Niko is working. And she floats upwards… No magnetic boots on board a spaceship in zero gravity!? I mean this is not even wrong.
Screenshot 2019-12-07 at 6.32.27 PM

Look no hands and I am floating.

Now, the artificial gravity on board Salvere is induced by rotation of the ship. In order to remove it, you will have to stop the rotation and it will affect the entire ship. But here it is hown to affect only one room, while in the next room it is normal. Gravity cannot be turned on or off at will. It stays.
About the warp speeds and lights years, they show the ship can travel. We are told it is 3 months onward and 3 months return journey (a total of six months). Considering that Sirius is at about 8 light-years, it has to be a warp drive. As even going at very high speeds will take certainly more than 8 years, one way.  But then if it is indeed a warp drive, why do we need that much time? Also, the ship has a sleeping/hibernating soma technology about which also I can rant, but won’t. There is another parallel plot developing on Earth with the crystal tower and trying to communicate with it, which I found even more boring.
I gave the serial a try for 5 full episodes but cannot do this further. If it cannot get its act together by this time, I guess it won’t in the future. It is a torture to watch so many commonsensical and scientific principles getting butchered. When there are so many amazing sci-fi stories that can be serialised, why these without any depth or even elementary sense are being made?
If I had to write, at least I would not make such elementary scientific blunders or plot with so many holes. Maybe I should write one, perhaps I have enough negative expertise on this topic now so that it won’t be as bad as some of them. Phew! I just stop it here as one of the bad-mouthing characters in the series sums it up for me
Screenshot 2019-12-07 at 6.36.21 PM
The infinity sign shaped spaceship seduced me to watch this, you have been warned, watch it at your own risk

The Mitr

Cosmetic Intellectuals (+ IYI)

In the last few years, the very connotation of the term intellectual has seen a downward slope. Such are the times that we are living in that calling someone an “intellectual” has become more like an insult rather than a compliment: it means an idiot who doesn’t understand or see things clearly. Now as the title of the post suggests it is this meaning, not the other meaning intellectuals who know about cosmetics. Almost two decades back Alan Sokal wrote a book titled Intellectual Impostures, which described quite a few of them. In this book, Sokal exposed the posturing done by people of certain academic disciplines who were attacking science from a radical postmodernist perspective. What Sokal showed convincingly through his famous hoax, is that many of these disciplines are peddling out bullshit with no control over the meaning contained. Only the form was important not the meaning. And in the book, he takes it a step forward, showing that this was not an isolated case. He exposes the misuse of the technical terms (which often have precise and operational meanings) as loose metaphors or even worse completely neglecting the accepted meaning of those terms. The examples given are typical, and you cannot make sense of what is being written. You can read, but cannot understand. It makes no sensible meaning. At this point, you start to doubt your own intelligence and intellectual competence, perhaps you have not read enough to understand this complex piece of knowledge. It was after all written by an intellectual. Perhaps you are not aware of the meaning of the jargon or their context, hence you are not able to understand it. After all there are university departments and journals dedicated to such topics. Does it not legitimise such disciplines as academic and its proponents/followers as intellectuals? Sokal answered it empirically by testing if presented with nonsense whether it makes any difference to the discipline. You are not able to make sense of these texts because they are indeed nonsensical. To expect any semblance of logic and rationality in them is to expect too much.
Nassim Taleb has devised the term Intellectual Yet Idiots (the IYI in the title) in his Incerto series. He minces no words and takes no bullshit. Sokal appears very charitable in comparison. Taleb sets the bar even higher. Sokal made a point to attack mostly the postmodernists, but Taleb bells the cats who by some are even considered proper academics, for example, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. He considers entire disciplines as shams, which are otherwise considered academic, like economics, but has equal if not more disdain to several others also, for example, psychology and gender studies. Taleb has at times extreme views on several issues and he is not afraid to speak of his mind on matters that matter to him. His writings are arrogant, but his content is rigorous and mathematically sound.

they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence, hence fall into circularities—their main skill is a capacity to pass exams written by people like them, or to write papers read by people like them.
But there are people who are like IYIs, but don’t even have the depth of the content or knowledge of IYIs. They are wannabe IYIs, all form no conent. They are a level below IYIs. I term such people as cosmetic intellectuals (cosint). We have met them before: they are the envious mediocre and the ones who excel in meetings. The term cosmetic is used in two senses both as adjectives. The first sense is the Loreal/Lakme/Revlon fashion sense as given from the dictionary entry below:

cosmetic

  • relating to treatment intended to restore or improve a person’s appearance
  • affecting only the appearance of something rather than its substance

It is the second sense that I mean in this post. It is rather the substance of these individuals that is only present in the appearance. And as we know appearance can be deceiving. Cosints appear intellectuals, but only in appearance, hence the term cosmetic. So how does one become a Cosint? Here is a non-exhaustive list that can be an indicator (learn here is not used in the deeper sense of the word, but more like as in rote-learn):

  1. Learn the buzzwords: Basically they rote learn the buzzwords or the jargon of the field that they are in. One doesn’t need to understand the deeper significance or meaning of such words, in many cases just knowing the words works. In the case of education, some of these are (non-comprehensive): constructivism, teaching-learning process, milieu, constructivist approaches, behaviorism, classroom setting, 21st-century skills, discovery method, inquiry method, student-centered, blended learning, assessments, holistic, organic, ethnography, pedagogy, curriculum, TLMs. ZPD, TPD, NCF, RTE, (the more complicated the acronyms, the better). More complicated it sounds the better. They learn by association that certain buzzwords have a positive value (for example, constructivism) and other a negative one (for example, behaviorism) in the social spaces where they usually operate in, for example, in education departments of universities and colleges. Not that the Cosints are aware of the deeper meaning of there concepts, still they make a point of using them whenever possible. They make a buzz using the buzzwords. If you ask them about Piaget, they know the very rudimentary stuff, anything deeper and they are like rabbits in front of flashlight. They may talk about p-values, 𝛘2 tests, 98.5 % statistical significances, but when asked will not be able to distinguish between dependent and independent variables.
  2. Learn the people: The CosInts are also aware of the names of the people in their trade. And they associate the name to a concept or of a classic work. They are good associating. For example, (bad) behaviorism with Burrhus F. Skinner or Watson, hence Skinner bad. Or Jean Piaget with constructivism and stages (good). Vygotsky: social constructivism, ZPD. Or John Dewey and his work. So they have a list of people and concepts. Gandhi: Nayi Taleem.  Macauley: brought the English academic slavery on India (bad).
  3. Learn the classics: They will know by heart all the titles of the relevant classics and some modern ones (you have to appear well-read after all). Here just remembering the names is enough. No one is going to ask you what was said in section 1.2 of Kothari Commission. Similarly, they will rote learn the names of all the books that you are supposed to have read, better still carry a copy of these books and show off in a class. Rote learn a few sentences, and spew it out like a magic trick in front of awestruck students. Items #1 through #3 don’t work very well when they have real intellectual in front of them. A person with a good understanding of basics will immediately discover the fishiness of the facade they put up. But that doesn’t matter most of the time, as we see in the next point.
  4. Know the (local) powerful and the famous: This is an absolute must to thrive with these limitations. Elaborated earlier.
  5. Learn the language aka Appear academic (literally not metaphorically): There is a stereotype of academic individuals. They will dress in a particular manner (FabIndia?, pyor cotton wonly, put a big Bindi, wear a Bongali kurta etc, carry ethnic items, conference bags (especially the international ones), even conference stationery), carry themselves in a particular manner, talk in a particular manner (academese). This is also true of wannabe CosInt who are still students, they learn to imitate as soon as they enter The Matrix. Somehow they will find ways of using names and concepts from #1 #2 #3 in their talk, even if they are not needed. Show off in front of the students, especially in front of the students. With little practice one can make an entire classroom full of students believe that you are indeed learned, very learned. Any untoward questions should be shooed off, or given so tangential an answer that students are more confused than they were earlier.
  6. Attend conferences, seminars and lectures: The primary purpose is network building and making sure that others register you as an academic. Also, make sure that you ask a question or better make a tangential comment after the seminar so that everyone notices you. Ask the question for the sake of asking the question (even especially if you don’t have any real questions). Sometimes the questions devolve into verbal diarrhea and don’t remain questions and don’t also have any meaning that can be derived from them (I don’t have a proper word to describe this state of affairs, but it is like those things which you know when you see it). But you have to open your mouth at these events, especially when you have nothing substantial/meaningful to say. This is how you get recognition. Over a decade of attending various conferences on education in India, I have come to realise that it is akin to a cartel. You go to any conference, you will see a fixed set of people who are common to these conferences. Many of these participants are the cosints (both the established and the wannabes). After spending some time in the system they become organisers of such conferences, seminars and lectures definitely get other CosInts to these conferences. These are physical citation rings, I call you to my conference you call me to yours. Year after year, I see the same patterns, so much so I can predict, like while watching a badly written and cliche movie, what is going to happen when they are around. That person has to ask a question and must use a particular buzzword. (I myself don’t ask or comment, unless I think I have something substantial to add. Perhaps they think in same manner, just that their definition of substantial is different than mine.) Also, see #5, use the terms in #1, #2 and #3. Make sure to make a personal connection with all the powerful and famous you find there, also see #4.
  7. Pedigree matters: Over the years, I have seen the same type of cosints coming from particular institutions. Just like you can predict certain traits of a dog when you know its breed, similarly one can predict certain traits of individuals coming from certain institutions. Almost without exception, one can do this, but certain institutions have a greater frequency of cosints. Perhaps because the teachers who are in those places are themselves IYI+cosints. Teaching strictly from a  prescribed curriculum and rote-learning the jargon: most students just repeat what they see and the cycle continues. Sometimes I think these are the very institutions that are responsible for the sorry state of affairs in the country. They are filled to the brim with IYIs, who do not have any skin in the game and hence it doesn’t matter what they do. Also, being stamped as a product of certain institution gives you some credibility automatically, “She must be talking some sense, after all he is from DU/IIT/IIM/JNU/”
  8. Quantity not quality: Most of us are not going to create work which will be recognised the world over (Claude Shannon published very infrequently, but when he did it changed the world). Yet were are in publish or perish world. CosInts know this, so they publish a lot. It doesn’t matter what is the quality is (also #4 and #5 help a lot). They truly are environmentalists. They will recycle/reuse the same material with slight changes for different papers and conferences, and surprisingly they also get it there (also #4 and #5 help a lot). So, at times, you will find a publication list which even a toilet paper roll may not be able to contain. Pages after pages of publications! Taleb’s thoughts regarding this are somewhat reassuring, so is the Sokal’s hoax, that just when someone has publications (a lot of them) it is not automatic that they are meaningful.
  9. Empathisers and hypocrites: Cosints are excellent pseudo-emphatisers. They will find something to emphathise with. Maybe a class of people, a class of gender (dog only knows how many). Top of the list are marginalised, poor low socio-economic status, underprivileged, rural schools, government students, school teachers, etc. You get the picture.  They will use the buzz words in the context of these entities they emphathise with. Perhaps, once in their lifetimes, they might have visited those whom they want to give their empathy, but otherwise, it is just an abstract entity/concept.(I somehow can’t shake image of Arshad Warsi in MunnaBhai MBBS “Poor hungry people” while writing about this.) It is easier to work with abstract entities than with real ones, you don’t have to get your hands (or other body parts) dirty. The abstract teacher will do this, will behave in this way: they will write a 2000 word assignment on a terse subject. This is all good when designing things because abstract concepts don’t react in unwanted ways. But when things don’t go as planned in real world, teachers don’t react at all! The blame is on everyone else except the cosints. Perhaps they are too dumb to understand that it is they are at fault. Also, since they don’t have skin in the game, they will tell and advise whatever they have heard or think to be good, when it is implemented on others. For example, if you talk to people especially from villages, they will want to learn English as it is seen as the language which will give them upward mobility. But cosints, typically in IYI style, some researchers found that it is indeed the mother tongue which is better for students to learn, it should be implemented everywhere. The desires and hopes of those who will be learning be damned, they are too “uneducated” to understand what they need. It is the tyranny of fake experts at work here.

    He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests… When plebeians do something that makes sense to themselves, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated.” (SITG Taleb)
    Now one would naturally want to know under what conditions that research was done? was there any ideological bias of the researchers? whether it is applicable in as diverse a country as India? What do we do of local “dialects”? But they don’t do any of this. Instead, they will attack anyone who raises these doubts, especially in #6. They want to work only with the government schools: poor kids, poor teachers no infrastructure. But ask them where their own children study: they do in private schools! But their medium must be their mother tongue right? No way, it is completely English medium, they even learn Hindi in English. But at least the state board? No CBSE, or still better ICSE. Thus we see the hypocrisy of the cosint, when they have the skin in the game. But do they see it themselves? Perhaps not, hence they don’t feel any conflict in what they do.

So we see that IYI /cosint are not what they seem or consider themselves. Over the last decade or so, with the rise of the right across the world is indicating to everyone that something is wrong when cosints tell us what to do. The tyranny of pseudo-experts has to go.  But why it has come to that the “intellectuals” who are supposed to be the cream of the human civilisation, the thinkers, the ideators, so why the downfall? Let us first look at the meaning of the term, so as to be not wrong about that:

 The intellectual person is one who applies critical thinking and reason in either a professional or a personal capacity, and so has authority in the public sphere of their society; the term intellectual identifies three types of person, one who:

  1. is erudite, and develops abstract ideas and theories;
  2. a professional who produces cultural capital, as in philosophy, literary criticism, sociology, law, medicine, science; and
  3. an artist who writes, composes, paints and so on.

Intellectual (emphasis mine)

Now, see in the light of the above definition, it indeed seems that it must be requiring someone to be intelligent and/or well-cultured individual. So why the change in the tones now? The reasons are that the actual intellectual class has degraded and cosints have replaced them, also too much theory and no connect with the real world has made them live in a simulacrum which is inhabited and endorsed by other cosints. And as we have seen above it is a perpetuating cycle, running especially in the universities (remember Taleb’s qualification). They theorize and jargonise (remember the buzzwords) simple concepts so much that no one who has got that special glossary will understand it). And cosints think it is how things should be. They write papers in education, supposedly for the betterment of the classroom teaching by the teachers, in such a manner that if you give it to a teacher, they will not be able to make any sense of it, leave alone finding something useful. Why? Because other cosints/IYI demand it! If you don’t write a paper in a prescribed format it is rejected, if it doesnt have enough statistics it is rejected, if it doesn’t give enough jargon in the form of theoretical review, and back scratching in the form of citations it is rejected. So what good are such papers which don’t lead to practice? And why should the teachers listen to you if you don’t have anything meaningful to tell them or something they don’t know already?
The noun to describe them:
sciolist – (noun) – One who engages in pretentious display of superficial knowledge.