Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

  • Against the idea of building loyal subscribers

    Daily writing prompt
    How do you build loyal subscribers?
    View all responses

    I’ve always found that a somewhat strange thing to aim for. I understand there are several thousand people worldwide working to build a loyal subscriber base (“building loyal subscribers” makes one sound like Dr. Frankenstein). And whatever their reasons are, I’m sure at least one of them is “to build community” or “to make money”. Those are perfectly legitimate things to do. But insofar as the question of a loyal subscriber base is raised with regards to writing, I don’t have an answer. Before I became a journalist in 2012, I’d been a blogger for four years, writing about physics and an intellectual life centered on that topic. After I became a journalist, I began to write on science, health, environment, spaceflight, higher education, science policy and administration, research fraud, and many other things that caught my fancy. And I continued blogging. Over time, I realised a few things:

    (i) I write because I have something to say, rather than because someone wanted something specific to read or even because someone might find what I say useful.

    Follow-up: I’ve found that by making of myself a better person every day, in as many of the infinite ways in which a life can be lived as possible, in steps marginally small or revolutionarily big, I can still ensure the number of people who find what I have to say engaging, entertaining or even useful is non-zero. That is, I believe good people have good things to say. I’m not there yet but I hope to be. As a corollary, my writing at various times has only mirrored me at various times, opening windows into my own psyche that might otherwise have taken me years of mental probing.

    (ii) I attach a great deal of importance to writing something just because one needs to say it, or more broadly to communicate per se, rather than keep it to oneself. No self-censoring (with reasonable limits).

    Follow-up: Writing has its own merits. The more you write, the better you write and the clearer you think. Importantly, these relationships are entirely independent of whether someone is reading your words. (To be sure, audiences are not redundant. Having one will also train you in the peculiarities of public sensibilities, social norms, satire, the virtues of dialogue, and what a difference writing when you’re angry makes, among other things.)

    (iii) The internet has increased by leaps and bounds a person’s ability to seek out, find, and consistently access new information. This includes both loitering over the internet, jumping from one website (or Wikipedia page) to the next, and staying in ‘touch’ using bookmarks, RSS feeds, email subscriptions, and other forms of notifications.

    (iv) Frankly, I care little for a loyal subscriber base. I care much more for having a place to write, for more people to write, and for you to find whatever kind of writing you’re looking for. (This is why my fondness for WordPress.com persists: the cost of getting started is just a little time, and not even any money.)

    (v) If there is something you won’t say because your subscribers might disagree and/or unsubscribe — I’ll be disappointed but not surprised. Such is the world. But if you won’t say something because your subscribers won’t be interested, you should drop the subscribers and keep the writing habit. If you can’t, you should admit that you’re being dishonest.

    Follow-up: Point (v) might do a good job of tempting you into believing that I’m really repudiating my readers (such as they are) before they can repudiate me, but in my defence… I don’t care.

    Granted in the first instance: applying these same ideas over and over while maintaining a fixed presence online — e.g. at the same domain name or the same account on a platform — is what leads to loyal subscribers. However, these days, you’ll agree such a base also demands that the writer, or content-producer more broadly, focus on a fixed set of themes, ideas, peeves or what-have-you. I don’t think I could ever promise such a thing. All I can promise is that I will think about the contents of a post to the best of my ability on that particular day before publishing it. This together with point no. (iv) means that if I write about bananas one day, I expect banana-reader to be able to discover it, and if I write about chillies the next day, I expect chilli-reader to be able to discover it.

    Granted in the second: my professional identity as a journalist is bound up with this kind of thinking. I’ve always only worked for publications that had a daily readership of at least a million. Each of my articles has been read by at least a few thousand people, but often by many more, and on some rare occasions by more people than the number that reads my blog in a whole year. You’ll have to trust me when I say I don’t take this readership for granted, and in return I will admit that it also allows me to adopt that laid-back but sincere policy towards my blog. If you won’t do something even when you’re suitably privileged, you suck.

  • Writing with WordPress Write

    I’m writing this post on Write, the new text composer/editor on WordPress.com. According to the official blog post, Write is a response to last year’s Creators survey, where “‘simplify the editor’ was the single most-requested improvement from the people already publishing on WordPress.com”. The tool itself was originally created by WordPress developer Jamie Marsland, with the WordPress.com team then adopting/adapting it. According to Marsland:

    WordPress is extraordinary software. But when you sit down to write a blog post, you’re greeted by a dashboard, a sidebar, an admin bar, a block inserter, a settings panel, and dozens of options that have nothing to do with the words you’re about to put down. For writers — especially those who aren’t developers — it’s a lot of visual noise between you and a blank page. Write strips all of that away.

    So far, Write looks good to me. WordPress.com ruined the writing experience when it introduced Gutenberg. Many bloggers have already commented that WordPress.com should just have brought back the Classic editor, i.e. the TinyMCE editor. I don’t think the Classic editor produces blocks when you publish, so it can’t benefit from the advantages of the block editor, such as they are.

    However, I also don’t think WordPress.com needs to go that far back to restore a good writing experience. Calypso, the WordPress.com front-end before Gutenberg, was remarkably smooth and conducive to writing. WordPress.com has been bloated for a long time; the “you’re greeted by a dashboard, a sidebar, an admin bar, a block inserter, a settings panel, and dozens of options” was as true of Gutenberg as it was of prior versions. What changed was the additional bloat of Gutenberg, which made the writing experience unwieldy and unsupportive of the speed of thinking, as it were.

    Since the launch of Gutenberg with WordPress 5.0 (and then Full-Site Editing with v5.9), I’ve considered the editor that shipped with Ghost.org, Koenig, to be the gold standard. To be clear, I’m restricting myself to editors that ship along with publishing platforms, rather than including standalone editors (in that case, my current favourite is Sublime Text). Ghost built Koenig on the Lexical framework and ever since its launch in 2018, it has been damn smooth.

    Koenig and Gutenberg both allow the writer (composer) to invoke blocks in the writing area. In Gutenberg alone, however, the view-port would jump back and forth depending on which paragraph the cursor was on, the cursor wouldn’t move in an intuitive war, the font in the composing area would change depending on the site theme, and there would be a noticeable lag when invoking a block or moving between paragraphs on a long article (1,000+ words across 5-6+ paragraphs).

    If Write is to stay good, it needs to beat Koenig (although hosting with WordPress remains a lot cheaper than hosting with Ghost, so there’s that). That means making Write easy to find, introducing and harmonising keyboard shortcuts — even now, Ctrl+S sometimes saves the post, sometimes asks to save the webpage —, supporting Markdown, and removing all of the clunk that belaboured Gutenberg.

    Most of all, as more and more writers use Write in different ways, the people at WordPress.com should streamline the feedback and changes that arise in a way that doesn’t compromise the raison d’être of Write. Losing track of that spirit was what gave us the Gutenberg writing experience in the first place.

    Featured image: A preview of the new Write editor. Credit: WordPress.com.

  • State and crime

    From ‘The Sulur horror story of child sexual assault and murder’, The Hindu, May 31, 2026:

    The abduction, sexual assault, and murder of the girl sent shock waves across Tamil Nadu, coming as it did immediately after the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) came to power with C. Joseph Vijay as the Chief Minister. The heinous crime also became a dark spot in the early days of the TVK government as Mr. Vijay had targeted the previous DMK government vehemently during his election campaign over crimes against women and children.

    Mr. Vijay, who sent Director-General of Police Sandeep Rai Rathore and Additional DGP (Law and Order) Maheshwar Dayal to Coimbatore after the crime, said the murder had caused immense pain and shock. …

    Leader of the Opposition Udhayanidhi Stalin alleged that 30 major incidents of crime, including the murder of the girl, were reported within 12 days of Mr. Vijay assuming office, casting serious doubts about the State’s law and order situation. AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K. Palaniswami accused the government of not taking swift action after receiving a complaint about the girl’s disappearance.

    Udhayanidhi’s criticism seems misguided. A single murder, however horrific, is not a good basis on which to judge the State’s overall law and order situation or the safety of women and girls. Whether a crime occurred says nothing about law and order because serious crimes occur in every society, including those with highly capable police forces and governments. The more meaningful questions are whether crime rates are falling, whether the State can prevent foreseeable risks, how quickly it responds when a serious crime does occur, how effectively it investigates them, and whether the perpetrators are punished. A good law and order apparatus could never promise to prevent crime.

    It is even more absurd that Tamil Nadu’s law and order situation deteriorated within 12 days of a new government taking office — when it will have had little time to review and institute changes (as necessary) to policing, prosecution, the administration of criminal justice, urban planning, social services, and the many other factors that influence crime. In fact, one crime committed shortly after an election almost certainly originated in conditions that predated that government. In fact, the risk of sexual violence — as at Sulur — at large also depends on several factors, including the offender’s behaviour, family and neighbourhood networks, policing practices, urban design, alcohol use, social norms, reporting rates, court effectiveness, school systems, and — like it or not — sheer chance.

    No chief minister who has been in power for just under a fortnight can directly control these factors on a daily basis. This individual can effectively influence how the State reacts to crime, much less so whether a particular crime occurs. But over five years, a State government — like the one Udhayanidhi was until recently part of — can matter substantially because they can hire more police officers, improve the State’s forensic capacity, expand CCTV coverage, redesign unsafe public spaces, strengthen survivor support services, accelerate trials, improve conviction rates, regulate alcohol sales, improve public transport safety, and invest in education and social welfare.

    Yet again, even if these changes can alter the probability that such crimes occur and the likelihood that offenders are caught and punished, these changes will not eliminate crimes against women and girls with certainty. But even more: a government should be judged less by a handful of shocking cases than by long-term trends. If crimes against women, child sexual offences, murder rates, conviction rates, response times, and public perceptions of safety improve (or do not) over several years, then it is reasonable to attribute some responsibility to the government. Otherwise, it is just bickering.

    Featured image credit: Joshua Coleman/Unsplash.

  • People, place, animal, disease

    In an article published in The Hindu this morning about the difficulties of developing an ebolavirus vaccine, I wrote:

    Many NTDs [neglected tropical diseases] are caused by eukaryotic parasites, i.e. worms and protozoa, which develop in multiple stages across multiple hosts, complicating researchers’ efforts to identify a stable antigen for vaccines to target. The immune system also struggles to confer lasting protection against infections by these organisms, making them categorically harder to vaccinate against than, say, measles.

    On a second reading, a particular point caught my eye. NTDs are prevalent in the world’s tropical and the subtropical areas. Most of the world’s poor people are also located in this belt (and/or a few degrees above/below). Their poverty can be traced back to colonial-era exploits and plunder and the unstable governments that followed since their independence. The disease-causing pathogens in these regions also seem more complicated, developing in stages and whatnot. Is it coincidental that both realities — more ‘complicated’ pathogens to vaccinate against and more poverty/poorer countries — share a geographic area?

    On the one hand, eukaryotic parasites have multi-stage, multi-host life cycles because tropical areas are highly biodiverse. (I believe why that is has yet to be settled, although scientists have evidence that the tropics have had a stable climate for longer stretches of geological time, their ecosystems occupy larger areas on the ground, the warmer weather speeds up metabolism and mutations, the more sunlight received supports more biomass, and their ecological niches are often narrower.) That means more host species to ‘choose’ from, more ecological niches to occupy, and more pressure to evolve in complex ways. At the same time, it is not a good idea for a pathogen’s survival to depend on multiple hosts — unless the hosts are reliably available. And the conditions in the tropic, but especially the weather changing relatively minimally between seasons, ensure this availability. In the temperate zones and beyond, the weather changes more drastically, forcing many species to proliferate or not depending on the time of year.

    On the other hand, poverty is a risk factor for exposure to pathogens. When a community lacks good sanitation and has to defecate in the open, hookworm larvae can be deposited in the soil, where they hatch and become infectious. For another example, snails shed Schistosoma cercariae larvae, which can come in contact with human skin through dirty water. Malnutrition also reduces immune function. If a poor person develops a chronic disease, their chances of escaping poverty can drop further. For instance, schistosomiasis causes liver fibrosis and cognitive impairment in children while hookworm causes anaemia and stunts development. Put another way, economic development and the disease environment go hand in hand, instead of one causing the other.

    Further, colonialism created and sustained living conditions that made it harder for people to escape being affected by dangerous pathogens. Colonial economies were for the most part extractive; even tropical medicine, such as it was, took shape as a discipline for doctors to attend to British (or European) administrators and soldiers, rather than the native population. And the end of colonialism did not spell the end of this neglect: it continued in the capitalist world-system by acting through purchasing power, neglecting those who lack it.

    In sum, the disease environment influenced the colonists’ strategies (they wanted to extract and leave more than settle down and develop), those strategies produced the institutional deficit that drove poverty (ignoring the infrastructure and institutions that could have laid the groundwork for self-sustaining economies after they left), and poverty sustained the disease environment (this does not mean “poverty causes disease” but that poverty helps sustain disease transmission and severity if certain pathogens are already present). To round things off, today, the impulses of colonialism have been replaced with those of market-driven exclusion.

    Featured image credit: Jordan Opel/Unsplash.

  • Find the dictionary

    From ‘Measure for measure: On India’s courts and criticism’, The Hindu, May 21, 2026:

    In the Ali Khan Mahmudabad matter, the Court granted him relief from coercive action but also imposed a gag order. Then, in a display of willingness to discipline the norms of public conduct rather than determine legality, it urged the state to decline to prosecute him as a concession.

    The irony is that in a May 2025 hearing in this matter, Justice Surya Kant — who became the Chief Justice in November that year — said, “The learned professor cannot have the lack of dictionary words … He could convey the very same feelings in a simple language without hurting others. Have some respect for the sentiments of others. Use simple and neutral kind of language, respecting others.” This is the same judge who earlier this month called people “cockroaches” and “parasites”. Surely he must not want for a dictionary to find the right language to criticise people?

    Featured image credit: Towfiqu Barbhuiya/Pexels.

  • Why analysis matters

    I am a journalist… I think. I have been a desk guy most of my professional life (14+ years). In this time, I have commissioned and published hundreds of pieces, from news reports to investigative features, from explainers to commentary. However, I myself am more of an essayist — and even then an essayist of big ideas rather than ground realities. For a recent piece I wrote about David Attenborough — which discussed fortress conservation and violence against Indigenous peoples, even though I have never been in the ‘field’ the way an ecologist or a reporter has — I received an unexpectedly large volume of positive feedback. Thus far, I have written pieces of this nature because I have had something to say, not necessarily because someone could have benefited from reading it. But if I had to think about that beforehand, how would I go about it? As I was pondering this, I started to have some ideas about how the two kinds of journalistic reports on my mind — those written based on people’s experiences and those written at the level of ideas — do and do not relate to each other. (In this sense, this post is a spiritual cousin to this one.)

    Ground-level knowledge is strongly tacit. It resists generalisation, but more importantly, it is not supposed to be generalisable. It arises from specific people in specific places simultaneously living through, shaping, and responding to specific experiences. It cannot be easily abstracted either because any abstraction would betray the essence of what makes ground-level knowledge true. On the other hand, discursive or analytical knowledge is in part based on how ideas circulate among people and how people synthesise paradigms and sustain them. For an example from my Attenborough piece, such knowledge would be how a specific concept like the “pristine” wilderness becomes an ideological instrument across research institutions as well as news-media audiences. In fact, my piece does not claim to know what it feels like to be evicted from an ecosystem one’s community depends on — but it does claim to understand how a particular way to narrate a story (or set of ideas) about forests has served particular political interests. And unlike ground-level knowledge, this variety is very easy to translate: the barrier to moving it from a newspaper to a policy seminar, say, without also distorting it is very low. In fact, translatability may be the raison d’être of analytical knowledge — and certainly what distinguishes it.

    This said, the two kinds of knowledge also depend on each other. The first dependence, from the ground to the analysis, is more well-known: for example, while it may be easy to dismiss one community’s grievance as a special pleading of sorts, the essayist’s work can name the paradigm to which the grievance belongs and give the community’s experiences the political traction that allows them to transcend their geography. Conversely, analytical knowledge that is not grounded in specific material realities can mistake the map for the territory, even implicitly. This is part of what I think Attenborough has done, creating a lush yet sterile story about what is really a messy reality.

    The dependency from analytical to ground-level knowledge on the other hand takes three forms: the more obvious policy — since analytical frames influence what institutions do — and the less obvious conceptuality and power relations. For instance, when my piece names and circulates the concept called “land-grabbing”, the term can become a new resource for actors closer to the ground to wield — both to understand where their experiences are located within a larger paradigm and to make claims to which institutions are forced to respond. In this sense, the making of analytical knowledge is more than just to describe something. In fact, even the label “Indigenous peoples” is applied to a particular category of people, together with certain rights, because anthropologists, legal scholars, and political theorists constituted it first through analysis. The third kind of dependence is Foucauldian in that analytical discourse constitutes power relations. For a specific example, how a journalism of ecology treats a community — as a steward rather than as an encroacher, say — will influence how policy ‘sees’ the community as well as how the community must ‘see’ itself in order to be visible to the (e.g. democratic) institutions that govern it. In other words, the language comes first and the bureaucratic practice follows, and analytical knowledge influences the language.

    Now, my audience for the piece was not Indigenous communities themselves and I am not accountable foremost to the forest communities. Claiming otherwise would be presumptuous and in fact dishonest. I am accountable instead to the integrity of my claims, and to the researchers, activists, etc. on the ground whose work I am drawing on (even implicitly) for my synthesis. I am essentially answerable to the voice in my head saying, “Okay, but in this particular district, P is a better abstraction than Q for XYZ reasons”, and now I can be mindful of precisely what depends on it.

    Featured image credit: Gowtham AGM/Unsplash.

  • When is land more valuable — when it hosts a datacentre or a farm?

    Excerpt from ‘Data center land use issues are fake’, by Andy Masley, May 2, 2026:

    Between 2000 and 2024, farmers sold in total a Colorado-sized chunk of land all on their own, 77 times all land on data center property in 2028, and grew more food than ever on what was left. None of this caused any problems for US food access.

    And then, in the middle of all this, a farmer in Loudoun County sells a few acres of mediocre hay field to a hyperscaler for ten times its agricultural value, and the response is that we’re running out of farmland.

    The marginal Virginia hay field is worth more as a data center than as hay. The marginal Iowa cornfield going to ethanol would be much better if it were nothing at all. When a farmer in Loudoun County wants to sell to Amazon for ten times the land’s agricultural value, the correct response is to wish them well. We need way less farmland than we currently use, and it’s fine if data centers buy some.

    I did some reading and it seems Masley’s argument is current in the US context. Farmers there have indeed been producing from less land for a while now. Since the 1930s, the corn yield has increased more than sevenfold. So Masley’s conclusion that converting arable land to land for datacentres is desirable seems reasonable.

    But his post got me thinking about the situation in India — and here it seems his argument would fail (not that he’s expressed any interest in this part of the world).

    Higher yield isn’t the same as higher productivity on the same, capable parcel of land. This is because agricultural researchers and farmers can increase the yield using better agronomy, hybrid breeding, precision planting, and so on. That said, farmers in India and in many places around the world, including in the US, have been more engaged in rendering the land more productive by intensifying the external inputs. For example, US agricutural use of nitrogen fertilisers has increased roughly seven- to tenfold since the 1940s. Together with the expansion of irrigation volume, mass and composition of pesticides applied, and the degree of mechanisation, the land certainly wouldn’t be as productive as it is today.

    Both the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and the US Department of Agriculure’s Land Capability Classification distinguish between land with good natural agricultural potential and land whose productivity depends more heavily on inputs and management. Soil scientists draw a similar line, for similar reasons, between inherent soil fertility — which is the natural endowment of nutrients, capacity to hold water, and biological activity — and effective soil fertility, which is the productivity achieved by escalating the application of inputs. Agricultural economists also keep track of a figure called total factor productivity (TFP): if the yield in a specific hectare rises mainly because farmers are applying disproportionately more water or fertilisers, say, the gains in TFP may stagnate or even decline.

    Against this background, let’s call Masley’s category of lands that stay productive without increasing inputs ‘inherently capable land’ and land rendered productive by applying more and more inputs ‘input-dependent land’.

    Most of the increase in agricultural productivity in India since the Green Revolution has happened on input-dependent land. The Revolution’s heartland in North India, especially Punjab and Haryana, has since been notorious for its fertiliser use and groundwater extraction, supported by state subsidies. Increases in the region’s yield gains have also been flat for two decades or so now — and it’s possible maintaining just the current yield level in many areas requires more and more inputs.

    So the claim that “we need way less farmland than we currently use” works only if the land’s fertility is almost entirely he also assumed the land’s inherent fertility, i.e. that it is inherently capable land. And if the country has already identified and priced that land accordingly, and where production is in surplus relative to domestic demand — so that a temporary drop in the arable area doesn’t threaten access to food. And very rarely do any of these conditions operate simultaneously in any agricultural market in India. The country has around 180 million ha of net sown area for 1.4 billion people (excluding exports). In 2023, according to the World Bank, there was 0.107 ha of arable land per capita, steadily down from 0.359 ha per capita in 1961. Equally, many productive farms in India today are most likely on input-dependent land, and that too only because state governments also subsidise electricity for pump sets and fertiliser costs. The national fertiliser subsidy in 2023-2024 was Rs 1.8 lakh crore, up from Rs 65,971.5 crore in 2013-2014.

    In fact, even converting a parcel of land that has become functionally ‘dead’ following input-heavy cultivation for datacentre use is a bad idea for four reasons: it creates a perverse incentive for landowners to allow the land to degrade; the location will require additional infrastructure, like roads and power transmission equipment, the cost of which has to be added to the overall cost of conversion; ‘dead’ land is difficult to define as a category for administration (more so in a country that has historically used “wasteland” and similar categories of land to acquire ownership of common areas over which local communities have claims); and ‘dead’ land can still recover its ecological value over time.

    So it is not possible to say whether it is okay to acquire arable land in India for use as a datacentre after checking only the current yield. At the least, we must also check the conditions in which the land is productive.

    Second, throughout his post, in order to determine whether X parcel of land could be more valuable as a datacentre or as a farm, Masley has considered land parcels to be independent units. So let’s consider a hypothetical scenario to bring this assumption into the real world (somewhat). Say there is a 4×4 grid of 16 parcels, and the first quadrant of four parcels has been converted for a datacentre’s use. What will that do to the remaining 12 parcels?

    A datacentre drawing from a common subterranean aquifer will create a cone of depression — a conical dip in the local water table that also reduces the water pressure. According to the Central Pollution Control Board, over-exploited aquifer zones cover around 14% of India’s groundwater blocks. In these places, any additional large consumer will push the rate of groundwater extraction closer to or even past the safe yield limit, which is the point beyond which extracting groundwater will have undesirable effects on the surrounding land. The upcoming datacentre corridor in Hyderabad is expanding into just such an area. In this place, the 12 remaining arable parcels are likely to have their yields as well as water table drop and for the marginal water cost to rise.

    Next, all datacentres have a high and fixed minimum power demand, which means the windows in which states currently supply (rationed) electricity could narrow further, and the voltage could also drop. Third, datacentres expel heat of roughly the same magnitude as the electricity they consume. In the semi-arid areas that dominate peninsular India, including Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and parts of Karnataka, plumes of heat from datacentres can further raise the local ambient temperature, disrupting crops’ evapotranspiration and local heat stress limits. Note here that the thermal and microclimate effects vis-à-vis agricultural performance are understudied in India. In fact when Masley discussed the example of Morrow County in Oregon, he dismissed the Amazon datacentre’s water demand as only 0.4% of the local irrigation demand. But the more important question is whether the new water demand will push the water table beyond the safe yield threshold. (FWIW, Morrow County had declared an emergency in 2022 over nitrate levels in drinking water drawn from the groundwater.)

    Taken together, Masley’s arguments yield sensible conclusions when they come with surplus land and independent land parcels but insensible ones otherwise. And in India, the conditions are mostly otherwise.

    Featured image credit: Naren Marthandan/Unsplash.

  • ‘Hidden’ voting preferences

    On May 4, former Tamil film actor C. Joseph Vijay and his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) emerged in the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections as the single largest party. The magnitude of the victory was widely unexpected, and dislodged the Dravidian duopoly in the State since 1959.

    While the reasons for this win are still falling in place — a need for change and reform and fatigue with corruption seem to have been decisive forces — it also appears more than a few voters expected the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) to win even as they wished to shrink the size of its majority, to send a message of sorts.

    Eventually, of course, the TVK won, securing 108 seats in the 234-seat Assembly and with almost 35% of the vote share.

    A rational choice

    While the complete political psychology of Mr. Vijay’s win is still developing, we know the TVK did subtract more from the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam vote base. The erstwhile actor also had many vocal supporters, especially among the State’s youth. Many parents were even cowed by their starstruck and adamant children, often well below voting age, insisting they vote for the TVK irrespective of their own inclinations.

    In the mix of possibilities, the idea that one would vote for another party assuming a second party would win anyway stands out as a self-negating, even unpredictable, proposition.

    However, this way of deciding is actually rational and well-documented in political science and economics. The basic idea comes from the fact that people do not just vote for whom or which ideology they prefer. They also vote based on whom they believe ‘can’ win, how they believe others will vote, and what social rewards (or punishments) they associate with each choice. As a result, if voters believe one party is ‘destined’ to win, they could also believe they can defect to another party — i.e. voting for different reasons while not changing their expectations. When that idea becomes sufficiently widespread, the party they actually voted for could win.

    Of course, psychology alone cannot explain what happened in Tamil Nadu. But the way psychologists, sociologists, and economists have explored these possibilities may describe a part of why the State voted the way it did.

    Mediated by the media

    In the 1920s, the U.S. social psychologist Floyd Allport described a concept called pluralistic ignorance. It says that if each person in a group privately believes something but incorrectly assumes most other people do not believe that as well, they can behave on the basis of a collective opinion that they have failed to read. Scholars have also found that any society whose people think like this is actually less stable than it looks. When private preferences diverge far enough from the public one, even a small trigger — like a rupture in the appearance of consensus — can cause people to quickly and progressively reveal their true choices as they see others doing so.

    The TVK’s 34.92% vote share could suggest a reservoir of suppressed private preferences that did not always surface in mainstream discourse — or could it? Since the verdict on May 4, many reporters have recalled people on the ground telling them they would vote for the TVK — even as many in the media reported the DMK would emerge victorious.

    They may have struggled to reconcile two conflicting impressions. On the one hand, they encountered enthusiasm for a two-year-old party and its charismatic leader. On the other, they weighed the DMK’s formidable organisational machinery and its entrenched presence in Tamil Nadu politics, plus the common assumption that parties with deep cadres and alliances generally prevail. Many observers may have resolved this contradiction in favour of what they already ‘knew’ about how elections usually work. After all, if such intuitions prove unreliable in one major election, they could unsettle the observers’ confidence in others as well.

    Ultimately, those declarations in the press supporting a DMK victory could also have lowered the perceived cost of voting for an alternative. In Tamil Nadu, one popular media narrative of the TVK — that it was a celebrity vanity project, different in spirit from the campaigns of M.G. Ramachandran and J. Jayalalithaa — could also have made Mr. Vijay et al. seem like an alternative through whose bid to power individual voters could send a ‘message’.

    Diverging preferences

    Voters do not always infer information directly. They also survey the (apparent) behaviour of others. Each voter’s confidence in the DMK’s invincibility could have been abetted partly by observing what seemed to be confidence among others, leading some people to discount their own private impressions. This then could have created a feed-forward loop in which the strength of the private preference diverges significantly from that of the public one, until a voter reaches the ballot.

    Scholars have sometimes modelled this as a phenomenon called a threshold effect: each voter has a personal point at which they will act on their private preference. When enough people cross that threshold at the same time, the electoral outcome can shift nonlinearly, meaning it could appear sudden and disproportionate to what people have been seeing around them until then.

    In a 1995 book titled Private Truths, Public Lies, the Turkish-American economist Timur Kuran argued that individuals routinely misrepresent their private preferences in order to conform with public preferences, which he called preference falsification. And as falsified preferences accumulate over time, they could stabilise a misleading public consensus.

    The political scientist Anthony Downs helped put together a rational explanation of voting in which people weigh the expected value of their vote, including the small chance that it could be decisive. In a political climate where the DMK’s victory could have seemed like a given, for example, voters might try to improve the value of their vote, as they see it. Based on this idea, around three decades later, Australian economist Geoffrey Brennan and his American peer Loren Lomasky argued that because the chance of any one vote being pivotal is really small in a large election, voters also use the (private) ballot as a place where they can express themselves — an interpretation some scholars have also applied to the Brexit referendum.

    Defect without consequence

    In fact, the duo contended that the lower a person perceives the value of their vote to be, the more sincerely they will vote for whom they actually want to vote for. In this reading, some of TVK’s voters could be said to have voted expressively. Some scholars have described similar situations in terms of the ‘wasted vote’ — in Tamil Nadu, not wasted because it went to the TVK but because it would have been of ‘little use’ to the DMK.

    In his noted work on public goods and collective action, the economist Mancur Olson found that individuals who are all interested in a common collective good will still also under-contribute towards the goal as long as they can benefit from the contributions of others. So for instance, if a group of DMK supporters believed that the DMK was set to win, one individual in the group may have also believed that as long as the others voted for the DMK, she alone could vote to ‘send a message’ without consequence. The defector’s decision is actually rational because, according to the information that she had, the cost of defection was zero.

    As analysts continue to make sense of the TVK’s unprecedented victory, it will be interesting to watch whether any of these reasons match what played out on the ground on April 23.

  • A political direction in life

    Note to readers: Root Privileges is now Slightly Acidic.

    Daily writing prompt
    What gives you direction in life?
    View all responses

    I’m a political creature. I didn’t think that I’d be one but I am. I believe this is a response to India’s present historical moment. Since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Narendra Modi, assumed power in the national government, the quality of the national political discourse has consistently declined. Communalism has become overt. Majoritarian policymaking has become the norm. The national government has become synonymous with manipulation, deception, and duplicity. Political leaders openly spread misinformation and pseudoscience. The foreign policy is indistinguishable from opportunism.

    Political ideologies come and go; why should that direct one’s life? When the BJP assumed power in 2014, its leaders, including Modi, bolted out from their cages misinformation-first. For some time after, I assumed that whenever they’d next lose power and exit the government, good language, decorum, civility, and communication in good faith would all be restored. But I was wrong, I realised. The BJP and its allies (i) have kept up their conduct without suffering electorally for it, (ii) have fomented, rather than healed, social divisions to divide and conquer with considerable success, (iii) have undercut the democratic and constitutional machinery that counter-narratives need for sustenance, such as public data and reports, and (iv) have passed laws centralising their control of information as well as empowering them to silence dissenting voices. In effect, the more polite and more forgiving India of the pre-2014 era has rapidly faded, replaced with a nation that has constantly surprised me with every new depth it plumbs. In fact, I wonder if perhaps the India of old didn’t realise exist that it was a veneer that obscured the resentment and xenophobia that feeds mainstream political discourse today.

    Most of all, I’m now certain most of the changes the BJP has made are not easily reversible. People at large, but especially the middle class and the elites, have become emboldened to discuss and spread divisive ideas without fear of sanctions and deride, if not dismiss, efforts by journalists and activists to seek facts and data. More than a few opposition parties have also sought and won power by responding to the BJP with communalist politics in favour of a different social/religious group. Beating this irreversibility is what gives me direction in life today. I will most certainly fail in my lifetime, but I have to live well and do the right thing at all times. This might be a cliché but I have a particular way of doing it that I’m proud of — and which has been my personal antidote to the way Modi et al. have governed.

    The first step is to have a well-reasoned political ideology to abide by. (I’m a democratic socialist.)

    Second, I must cultivate myself to be the kind of person who understands why that ideology over any other as well as mitigate the extent to which I pretend it is superior, e.g. by reading about other positions, the histories of how they came to be, where and why they persist today, and what they do well that my ideology of choice can’t.

    Third, I must continue learning. I believe we’re all on learning curves, and at different points on different matters. The only things we can do is keep moving up the curve and at the least not get in the way of others doing the same thing.

    Fourth, I must strive to be a good person and to do the right thing. This is of course subjective: it is guided by a shared common sense as well as by an individual’s, or at least a particular community’s, social and cultural values. While the former is benign, if also increasingly uncommon, the latter is why my extended family believes creating social mobility for Hindus alone, to the exclusion of Muslims, is doing the right thing. However, I also believe making a habit of points two and three could militate against insular worldviews.

    In fact, these four points are not independent of each other but, to my mind, can come together to create an individual whose personal growth and aspirations become increasingly synonymous over time with the needs of the ideology while keeping the ideology from accruing (socially) evil overtones, especially as one practices it. The very first thing we can do is to lead by example. As a next step, we can translate our precepts and personal rules for society at large, trimming that which departs from the Constitution, honing that which enhances it, and engaging with our compatriots with civility and fraternity.

    This can be everything from allowing domestic workers to use the apartment elevators, complaining to the State Pollution Control Board when a contractor forces construction workers to work in the heat without protection, and rationalising the household water demand to standing in the path of an illegal demolition, protesting when the state adopts violent means against another community to bulldoze a project through, and raging against the dying of the light.

    Just do what you can, at least to start with.

  • Let’s discuss, with conditions

    Writing prompt: What topics do you like to discuss?

    I like to discuss everything under the Sun. However, I’m also wary of people who waste time talking about something in a way that couldn’t possibly lead to a useful insight or a changed mind but are in fact discussing in order to discuss — or of course are sealioning, dogpiling, catfishing, astroturfing, etc. Granted, we don’t know what we don’t know, and it’s rarely possible to say where a conversation could lead. But I think that the moment I find that an engagement is going to lead nowhere, I rapidly lose interest.

    On a related note, there’s a line from American journalist Gideon Lewis-Krauss’s essay in The New Yorker in 2020 about Scott Alexander Siskind and the NYT-versus-SSC fracas that has stayed with me:

    The rationalists regularly fail to reckon with power as it is practiced, or history as it has been experienced, and they indulge themselves in such contests with the freedom of those who have largely escaped discrimination.

    I think of myself as a mostly rational person but I’m also keen to avoid this trap. So I suppose I’m saying that I’m prepared to discuss anything under the Sun unless I’m aware that such a discussion is designed to waste my time, which isn’t or doesn’t turn into the rationalist’s performative circus, and of course which is contrary to my understanding of the world as a rationalist. By that last point, I mean I’m okay to discuss, say, why homeopathy is pseudoscience but not to discuss the pros and cons of homeopathy.