Year: 2023
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What’s the Most Important Scientific Research?
Post-facto rationalization. That’s something human beings are good at. If you decide to do research in a specific field, you’ll come up with hundred ways to justify why that research is important, if not the most important. I have been listening to Ravikant Kisana the last couple of days. In the podcast episode about Chandrayaan,…
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What Ails India’s approach to Universal Health Coverage is Elite Solutions That Have No Basis in Reality
“Poorly maintained registers of doctors”. That’s the first five words of the article What ails India’s approach to Universal Health Coverage in Times of India by four people from Vidhi Centre for Lobbying Legal Policy. Let’s talk about that after we look at universal health coverage. “Universal health coverage (UHC) means that all people have…
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Imaginary Heroes and Why A Radical Commitment to Truth is the Only Solution to Inequity
In my post about truth and Gandhi, I wrote about how a radical commitment to truth is the missing ingredient in the world today. In this post I will elaborate on that. To do this, I’ll first recap what it means, then talk about the “inverted iceberg” model of savarna mediocrity, and finally illustrate what…
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Being Comfortable With the Non-Binary: A Code of Conduct Case Study
Today morning I woke up to this message in FSCI‘s chat room: What happens here when a member reveals themselves to be a transphobe in another room? 🤔 I immediately said “COC applies”. The FSCI code of conduct, which I have contributed to the making of, is very clear about keeping FSCI an inclusive space.…
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How To Talk With People
It was just yesterday that I read a book on behaviour change through positive reinforcement. Today I put aside all work and read another book: How to Talk with People: A Program for Preventing Troubles that come when People Talk Together by Irving J. Lee. It was recommended by Parth Sharma in response to my…
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Don’t Shoot Your Colleagues
Over the course of my life a realization slowly dawned on me about feedback. Negative feedback rarely worked. And positive feedback worked magically! I started noticing this in myself first. I was learning rapidly and growing in environments where all I received was positive feedback. And wherever people were very cynical, I was just lost…
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Everyone is Everything (To Varying Degrees) – How Binaries Suck
Yesterday in a journal club at SOCHARA, we were faced with many challenging classification questions. The paper we were discussing was titled “Metabolic non-communicable disease health report of India: the ICMR-INDIAB national cross-sectional study (ICMR-INDIAB-17)“. The second classification question was in the title. What is a “metabolic NCD”? Are there non-metabolic NCDs? The paper was…
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Ambedkar and Gandhi — They Couldn’t Have Been Friends
For plenty of reasons, Ambedkar never considered Gandhi as “Mahatma”. And “naturally”, Gandhi rarely understood Ambedkar. In my experience of understanding how my privileges influence how I act, I believe that I’ve been able to appreciate where the difference between Ambedkar and Gandhi arise from. This is perhaps obvious to many scholars. But it was…
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Repeated Names in NSQ Manufacturing
There’s a 2014-2016 survey of drugs. That’s followed up with smaller surveys by CDSCO. We will compare with March 2023 report. Let’s look for repeated offenders. Skymap Pharmaceuticals Uttarakhand. In the old survey they had 14.04% samples NSQ. In March 2023, they’re NSQ again in 2 samples. (We do not know how many samples from…
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Engaging with the System – A Visit to IISc
When Prasanna heard John and I were leaving Hari’s farewell party to join Ravi in the trip to Indian Institute of Science, PS let out a characteristic sigh and said “all the best”. It probably comes from experience of how incorrigible people in elite institutions are when it comes to thinking about broader determinants of…