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The Epidemic of Bogus Science

 Anjana Ahuja in The FT

The 1996 paper is now legendary in academic circles. “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, penned by the mathematician Alan Sokal, was published in a cultural-studies journal. It claimed that physical reality was a social and linguistic construct. 

It was a floridly written spoof: a jargon-heavy, plausible-sounding parody designed to pander to the biases of lazy reviewers and expose flaws in the academic enterprise. The bogus paper, targeting preening postmodernist intellectuals pontificating on scientific matters, confirmed the suspicions of Sokal — now at University College London — that the canon of human knowledge was vulnerable to rogue infiltration.  

The hoax seems comically quaint today compared with the fraud crisis plaguing science journals. This week, the publisher Wiley announced it would close 19 journals, some of which had been linked to large-scale research fraud. In the past two years, according to reports, it has retracted more than 11,000 papers. Wiley and other publishers, such as Springer Nature, are battling an epidemic of fakery. 

But battle it they must. Without due diligence, science may suffer a reputational hit. With so many scientific challenges ahead — climate change, artificial intelligence, energy security, pandemics — it is a loss of trust humanity can ill-afford.  

Scholarly publishing is surprisingly lucrative, worth about $28bn annually worldwide. While top journals charge hefty subscriptions, others will publish, subject to peer review, for a fee. That system feeds off a “publish or perish” research culture, with academics rated for grants, tenure and promotion according to how often they publish and how frequently they are cited. 

The result is a feverishly competitive climate where authorship is a commodity, now brazenly touted on the open market. Nick Wise, an engineering researcher at Cambridge university, collates adverts by so-called authorship brokers and posts them on X under the handle @author_for_sale. 

In a 2022 interview with Retraction Watch, a website that monitors papers under suspicion (for unintended errors as well as fraud), Wise itemised how brokers hook up with unscrupulous academics: “There’s this entire economy, ecosystem of Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels selling authorship for papers, selling citations, selling book chapters, selling authorship of patents.” All pollute the knowledge pool. 

Authors, of course, need papers to put their names to. This is where the “paper mill” comes in, an industrial-scale operation that often uses AI to churn out papers en masse (many such mills are based in China). These are then submitted to multiple journals in the hope that some will slip past overworked reviewers.  

Investigators use fraud-busting software to spot defective offerings, such as the “tortured phrases” spat out by AI-generated papers to fool plagiarism detectors. AI becomes “counterfeit consciousness”; breast cancer is mangled into “bosom peril”. Other red flags include unlikely author collaborations; irrelevant reference lists; and clusters of papers that cite each other incestuously. “My hunch is that most fraud goes undetected,” Wise told me. 

Publishing companies, meanwhile, are opening fraud departments and trying to trap perpetrators who submit identical papers. But it is a perpetual struggle: brokers are wording their adverts more coyly; AI is writing more convincing papers. 

As Sokal correctly noted in his 2008 book Beyond the Hoax, preserving the integrity of science is an existential matter. “Clear thinking, combined with a respect for evidence . . . are of the utmost importance to the survival of the human race in the twenty-first century,” he wrote. This is an arms race that the science sleuths must win.

God™: an ageing product outperforms expectations

From The Economist

God gets mixed reviews on Amazon. This is perhaps surprising. His marketing campaign (now in its third millennium) has been strong. His slogans (“God is Great!”) are positive. And indeed many shoppers effuse. “Wonderful!” reads one five-star review beneath His best-known work, the Bible. “Beautiful,” says another. “Amen,” adds another satisfied customer.

Other reviewers are critical. One, after giving the Bible just a single star, observes bluntly, if rather blasphemously, that it is a “boring read”. Another review complains: “The plot is not cohesive.” A third disgruntled reader argues that there are “too many characters” and that the main protagonist is a bit full of himself.

If it feels surprising that God is reviewed on Amazon, it should not. He may have made heaven and earth, but He also makes an awful lot of money, as Paul Seabright, a British economist and professor at the University of Toulouse in France, points out in a new book.

Hard facts on the economics of the Almighty are hard to come by. But the Mormon church is reportedly one of the largest private landowners in America. One study found that in 2016 American faith-based organisations (non-profits with a religious bent) had revenues of $378bn. This was more than the revenues of Apple and Microsoft combined. Better yet, churches usually pay no tax. God may be great; His full-year results are greater.

Secularists may smirk at religion as silly, but it deserves proper analysis. “The Divine Economy” looks at how religions attract followers, money and power and argues that they are businesses—and should be analysed as such.

Professor Seabright calls religions “platforms”, businesses that “facilitate relationships”. (Other economists refer to religions as “clubs” or “glue”.) He then takes a quick canter through the history, sociology and economics of religions to illustrate this. The best parts of this book deal with economics, which the general reader will find enlightening.

Economists were slow to study religion. Some 250 years ago Adam Smith observed in “The Wealth of Nations” that the wealth of churches was considerable. He used secular language to describe how such wealth arose, observing that churches’ “revenue” (donations) flowed in and benefited priests, who he argued were sometimes animated less by love of God than by “the powerful motive of self-interest”. He also argued that if there were a better functioning market in religious providers, this would lead to increased religious harmony. According to Laurence Iannaccone, a professor of economics at Chapman University in California, Smith’s analysis was “brilliant”—and for a long time largely ignored.

Divinity departments are staffed by theologians rather than economists; the idea of mixing the dismal science with the divine strikes many people at the very least “as odd and at worst strikes them as blasphemous”, says Mr Iannaccone. People associate God with angels, not with Excel.

Yet religions lend themselves to economic analysis nicely. They offer a product (such as salvation), have networks of providers (priests, imams and so on) and benefit from good distribution networks. It is not just trade that travels on trade routes: ideas, diseases and religions do, too. Roman roads allowed the plague of Justinian to spread across Europe with a rapidity never seen before. They allowed Christianity to do so as well.

Starting in the 1970s, some economists have been approaching religion with more academic devotion, analysing, for example, the economics of extremism and obtaining a place in the afterlife. This mode of thinking can help clarify complicated religious history. When historians talk about the Reformation they tend to do so using thorny theological terms such as “transubstantiation”. Economists would describe it more simply as the moment when a monopoly provider (the Catholic church) was broken up, leading to an increase in consumer choice (Protestantism) and the price of services declining (indulgences were out).

A greater variety of suppliers started to offer road-maps to heaven. Henry VIII swapped his old service provider, Catholicism, for the new one—which was not only cheaper, but also allowed him to divorce a troublesome wife. There were, admittedly, some bumps: the pope was not pleased, and the habit of burning picky customers at the stake dented consumer confidence. But overall, the Reformation enabled people and their rulers to “get a better bargain”, says Davide Cantoni, a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Ask a believer why they believe in their particular deity, and they will tend to talk of religious truth. Professor Seabright offers another explanation. The two most popular religious “brands” (Christianity and Islam) have, he writes, replaced smaller local religions in much the same way that Walmart, Lidl and Tesco have replaced smaller local shops.

These brands have honed the international distribution of their product: the Catholic church, like McDonald’s, offers a striking uniformity of service, whether you are in the Vatican or Venezuela. They have the resources to compete for customers in ways that smaller, less well-financed, local gods cannot. Baal, it seems, died out not because—as the Bible has it—he was a false god but because his franchise failed.

Popular works have tackled the idea of religions as businesses before. In the 1960s Tom Lehrer, an American satirist, observed that if Catholics “really want to sell the product” they should improve their music: his solution was “The Vatican Rag”, which contained such lines as “Two-four-six-eight / time to transubstantiate”. Incensed Catholics declared it blasphemous.

“The Divine Economy” is more tactful than Mr Lehrer—though not quite as much fun. The book’s scope is big. So too, alas, are many of the words. Sentences such as “Probabilistic models of cognition assume that human cognition can be explained in terms of a rational Bayesian framework” leave the reader wishing for lines that are, like those in “The Vatican Rag”, a little snappier, and his idea that religions are “platforms” is at times more confusing than clarifying.

An obvious riposte to all this religious analysis is: who cares? It is 2024, not 1524. God, as Friedrich Nietzsche stated, is dead. But such a sweeping judgment is misplaced and wrong. The West may be less Christian—but the rest of the world is not. Between 1900 and 2020, the proportion of Africans who are Christian rose from under 9% to almost half; the proportion who are Muslim rose from around a third to over 40%.

Even in secular countries, faith remains powerful. In America in 2022, Roe v Wade was overturned due, in part, to decades of campaigning by evangelicals and Catholics. Non-believers dabble too. Jordan Peterson, a Canadian author, performs to stadiums with a talk titled “We Who Wrestle With God” and garnishes his books with statements such as “Our consciousness participates in the speaking forth of Being.” God might wish He were dead when He hears such things. He is not.

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Is asking Muslims to introspect too much?

Ibn Khaldun Bharati in The Print

The Modi Raj has been an undisguised blessing for Indian Muslims. They never experienced the kind of peace and prosperity that they have been enjoying for the past 10 years. Never in the history of independent India a decade has been so free from long, protracted bouts of Hindu-Muslim riots as the one from 2014-24; and never since the 1990s have Muslims remained so untouched by the shadow of suspicion on account of frequent bomb blasts and terrorist attacks. More importantly, never have Muslims evinced such little sign of unrest over non-issues as in these 10 years.

There has been a positive behavioural change in the community. Their focus has shifted from emotional agitation to constructive pursuits, which has begun to reflect in the unprecedented success of their youth in competitive examinations. A sign of their all-round progress is this year’s Civil Services Examination results, which have as many as 51 Muslims in the list of successful candidates. Such a number was unheard of during the Secular Raj.

Though Modi Raj has inspired a behavioural change in the Muslim community, for it to become permanent, it has to be accompanied by a sincere ideological transformation.

Narendra Modi, who always spoke of Muslims as inseparable from the 140 crore Indians, recently, in an interview with Times Now, spoke especially to them, and urged them to do something which no one wants them to — introspect!

He urged them to look into the sense of deprivation that they have been nurturing. The day such introspection is undertaken, the ground will slip from under the feet of the liberal politics of appeasement and the Muslim politics of victimhood.

Aversion to introspection

Introspection is a word that infuriates Muslim ideologues and makes Left-liberals no less indignant. In their opinion, Muslims, as self-proclaimed victims, can only have a litany of grievances against the Hindu community and the Indian state and make the claim — the First Claim — on its resources as compensation. Introspection is another name for self-investigation. A guilty conscience can’t face it. Not surprising why it makes the Muslim opinion makers so uneasy. The entitlements internalised over centuries of Muslim rule have made the Muslim elite incapable of self-enquiry. They are a people of rights, not duties. Therefore, they want the Hindu community and the Indian state to introspect why the Muslims are not happy with them.

One may ask why the idea of introspection so unsettles Muslim ideologues — the ulema, politicians, academics, columnists, journalists and social media influencers. Is it because the inconvenient questions may lay much of blame at their own doorstep? For example, how Islam came to India and what the nature of the Muslim rule was may be an academic question, but to ask whether medieval supremacism has been renounced or continues to flow in the contemporary Islamic discourse is a politically pertinent question. Do they have the character to answer it honestly? The inability to satisfactorily answer it forces them to allege “victim-blaming” — they being the universal victims. There is a deeper reason too. Muslim politics is so intricately imbricated into Islam that questioning it may implicate the religion and bring discredit whose consequences may unravel their worldview. It’s an existential question.

Enemy’s enemy is a friend

Muslims’ aversion to introspection has been as much their fault as of the post-Independence ‘secular’ politics. Independence came with Partition — the triumph of Muslim communalism over secular nationalism. Even as secularism lay defeated, Jawaharlal Nehru sensed a threat to his rule from the large Hindu nationalist faction of the Congress, and the forces represented by Hindu Mahasabha and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). He needed allies to fight them, and who could be a better ally against Hindu nationalism than the people of the Muslim League, who, having carved out a separate country for themselves, decided to stay back in India as they saw their interests better served here? Nehru needed them and pleaded with them to not leave. They were inducted into the Congress and made legislators and ministers without any re-education into the secular ethos on which he professed to base the new state. What an irony that they were taken into Congress not for their new-found secularism but for their old commitment to Muslim communalism. The perverse import that the Nehruvian template — the communalism of the majority is far more dangerous than the communalism of the minority — imparted to the secular praxis, has been so enduring that 77 years hence, no secular party wants Muslims to secularise. Indian secularism has thrived on Muslim communalism.

If the Muslim society is haunted by dejection for not having the standing that is its due, it’s the responsibility of their thought-leaders to diagnose the malaise and prescribe the recovery. Though the public intellectuals of any society come from its elite section, they inevitably end up critiquing the privileges of their own class, which hinders the progress of the masses. This small band of conscientious individuals keeps the moral compass of the society headed true north.

The Hindu society has been brought back to life by the people whose critique abolished their own privileges. In the social reform movements of the 19th century, it were the ‘upper’ caste men who first agitated against caste and gender discrimination. Later, the Constitution was enacted by the members of the Constituent Assembly, who had come from privileged backgrounds and were elected by a very limited electorate of the elite. However, by enshrining the promise of equality and instituting adult suffrage, they effectively abolished their own class. And, in the aftermath of independence, it were largely the legislators from the landed gentry who passed the zamindari abolition and land ceiling laws. The regeneration of Hindu society owes a lot to the self-annihilation of its elite. The ideal of tyag (sacrifice) had some reflection in collective renunciation too.

Character of Muslim elite

The Indian Muslim elite, aka the Ashraaf, remained tenaciously wedded to their tribal interests, and with animalistic instinct of self-preservation, tried to defend their privileges. They couldn’t reconcile to the loss of centuries-old political power, and as the Hindu society developed and raced past them in education, culture and politics, they formulated the ideology of victimhood. The promise of equal citizenship appeared to them as a diminution of their historical stature, and therefore, ‘weightage’ and ‘special treatment’ became the stock phrases in their political lexicon. They wanted an equivalent of Article 370, or special provision, in every sphere.

And, because they controlled the religious discourse and the political narrative, their sense of loss became universalised as the deprivation of the Muslim masses. In reality, however, the Muslim masses had been steadily prospering alongside other Indians, as the economy grew and democracy deepened. The Muslim melancholia is a poetic trope and narrative tool. It is a false consciousness.

Playing kingmaker

The arrogance of “satta pe hum bithayenge, hum utarenge (We decide who shall rule and who shall not)” is another delusion that Modi has appealed to Muslims to disabuse themselves of. The Hindu society has been in continuous churn for the last 200 years. India’s growth is a direct outcome of the progress toward social justice achieved through caste and gender reforms. Muslim ideologues mistook this churning as implosion, and the reform as derangement. They not only looked with glee at what they misperceived as the disintegration of the Hindu society, but actively interfered with the process by siding with one caste group against another. The only thing worse than divide-and-rule is divide-but-not-rule. While the Muslims strutted around as kingmakers, they were just wageless mercenaries. Being viewed as the ones who, after dividing the country, were now dividing the Hindu society, the Muslims invited the wrath that they could have done without.

And what did they receive from their favoured parties in return for the en bloc voting? Little besides a license to indulge in socially aggressive behaviour that would give them an illusion of political domination. Very often, there would be an open display of brazenly communal, anti-social and even anti-national activities. Riots were the inevitable consequence of this kind of politics. The irony is that when a riot erupted, the vote-bank parties left Muslims to their fate. During the Secular Raj, Hindu-Muslim riots were as regular as seasonal crops.

Not against Muslims

Though he need not, but Modi specified that he is not anti-Muslim or anti-Islam. He is just pro-India, which, besides being 80 per cent Hindu, is 14 per cent Muslim too. If Muslim ideologues see him as anti-Muslim, they would better introspect about the inherent conflict between their idea of the Muslim identity and India. Have they ever wondered why there isn’t a complete overlap between Muslim and Indian as there is between Hindu and Indian? Why the phrase ‘Indian Muslim’ doesn’t sound as ludicrous as Indian Hindu? Why do they have to resort to arcane theories of multiple identities and avoid answering their own question about the hierarchy of identities, whether one is first an Indian or a Muslim? They have to resolve the self-created dichotomy of belief and belonging. The Modi era is the best time for this, for he is not into a transactional relationship with them. He serves them equally irrespective of whether they vote for him or not.