Americans lack "civic scientific literacy." Take that from us Indian-Americans!

It is not an every day happening when the New York Review of Books features a piece by an author with an Indian name.
And that too a South Indian name.
And, a Tamil name at that.

So, even before I got to reading that piece, I clicked on the author byline, which was darn impressive:

Priyamvada Natarajan is a Professor in the Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale. She is the author of a forthcoming book on the acceptance of radical scientific ideas.
 (October 2014)

Naturally, to this curious guy, the next step was to do a Google search, which pulled up her Wikipedia page.  She has to be somebody, right, to have Wiki page?  I mean, do you have a Wiki page? ;)

There it was on Wikipedia:

Priya Natarajan was born in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu in India to academic parents. She is one of three children. Natarajan grew up in Delhi, India and studied at Delhi Public School, R. K. Puram. 

From Coimbatore to Yale! A female scientist.  Awesome!  You read her bio at the Yale page and, if you are like me, you will wonder how people like her and Atul Gawande do all those things they do when I think it is a big achievement when I boil eggs!

Her photo at the Wiki page made me do a double-take, because she looks so much like the comedian/actress Mindy Kaling:

This is not Mindy Kaling ;)

More material to support my "the Indians are coming! the Indians are coming!!!" joke ;)

Anyway, back to the original point of departure: the NYRB piece itself.  What is it about?  On science, scientific method, and why the public, especially Americans, don't seem to understand what science is and what scientists do.  Natarajan writes that the public seems to have a problem with the "provisionality" that accompanies scientific findings.

the general public has trouble understanding the provisionality of science. Provisionality refers to the state of knowledge at a given time. 

Natarajan defines provisionality as:

a slow and gradual honing and growing sophistication of our understanding, driven by accumulating data enabled by the invention of ever-newer instruments.

I suppose it can be difficult to grasp the idea that what is held as "scientific" today could be thrown out a few years from now if it is found to be incorrect or an incomplete explanation.  So, what can be done?  Anything in the education process itself?

The biologist Jon D. Miller of the University of Michigan has been advocating a new standard of “civic scientific literacy,” by which he means a basic level of scientific understanding that would be necessary to make sense of public policy issues involving science or technology. He proposes the teaching of scientific concepts rather than the retention of information. Since the old model is ill-suited to the current pace of scientific and technological progress, the public needs to learn how to reason in the evidence-based manner that is central to science.

Did you catch that? "the teaching of scientific concepts rather than the retention of information."

Isn't that what I have been harping on all the time?  I repeatedly tell students, blog here, that teaching is not about factoids, and that tests and exams should not be focused on the ability of students to recall information from memory within that defined time.  Instead, education ought to be about concepts and how to think with them.  Feels great to find validation for my approach in an essay by a fellow Tamil-Indian-American!

What if you knew how your t-shirt is made? By Sumangali Girls?

Another take on "there comes a point when you don't want to know."

I often tell students that one of the wonderful aspects of the market is that it will deliver as long as we are ready to pay up.  I remind them that in a liberal democracy, we not only get to exercise preferences in the political arena but also via the market transactions that we engage in.  It is the aggregation of such preferences that then feed into shaping not only how we humans live but also how we interact with the natural environment.

Most of us tend to think that we can be active only via the political process--by voting for a party or a candidate, or by organizing community action, or any of the possible political approaches.  But, we can equally, and perhaps more forcefully, cast our preferences via the market too.  Well, a variation of that old expression "put your money where your mouth is" can do wonders via the market, as opposed to the relatively no cost approach of signing on to petitions, for instance, to Free Tibet!

While I don't quite agree with the entire philosophy presented by Anna Lappe, the idea that I get across to students is no different from the succinct way she has put it:

Source

When we spend money to buy the atrociously inexpensive widget that is made in China, well, we are also voting for the labor and environmental conditions there.  On the other hand, if we truly valued the labor and environmental conditions, then we could bypass those widgets, or offer to pay more for products that were manufactured while treating the labor and the natural environment a lot more responsibly to our liking.  Like how I pay more for the coffee that I buy--the premium goes towards better labor conditions and a more environmentally responsible coffee-growing.

The market will deliver if we exercised such preferences to create the kind of world that we want.  It is just that more often than not we don't put our money where our mouth is.  Talk is bloody cheap, right?

And, what if we dug deeper into how those widgets are made in some corner of the world?

Dana Liebelson writes in Mother Jones about trying to see where t-shirts are made.  Of course, the publication being Mother Jones is an immediate give-away on what to expect in the piece.  Yet, it is a must read.

Leibelson goes to my old country, India.  To my old part of the world there, Tamil Nadu.  And she goes to Coimbatore, which was another old stomping ground of mine.

The details that she writes about are troubling, indeed.  Will make most of us squirm in our seats and wish that we didn't know anything about all those.  Life is easier when we don't know.  Denial is a marvelous mechanism to have a blissful life.  But, attempting to understand the world means getting to know the atrocities all around that, ironically, seem to make our daily lives that much more comfortable.

So, how much at ease is Liebelson when she returns to the comforts of life in the US after finding out how the t-shirt is made?

A few months after I return from India, I go out to drinks with some friends, one of whom is wearing a rad pair of black tights with stripes up the sides. When I ask her where they came from, she proudly tells me that they cost just $20 at H&M. I don't push for details, because who am I to judge? I'm wearing a made-in-India Urban Outfitters shirt I bought before my trip. I looked at the label when I returned home, for the very first time. This is a thing I do now, even though it won't tell me what I want to know: Somewhere down the supply chain, did Aruna or Selvi make parts of my shirt?

Who am I to judge is a variation of "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone," right?

Liebelson concludes that essay recalling her meeting with, and interviewing, Lakshmi.  I wish Liebelson had pointed out the tragic irony of the name: Lakshmi is the name of the Hindu goddess of wealth, and here was a real life Lakshmi struggling for her very existence.

At 25, she was a year older than me, all of 4-foot-10, and wearing a beautiful orange dress covered with flowers that she had embroidered herself. Beginning at age 16, she worked at a spinning mill for five years, in conditions she called "torture." Supervisors offered her vacations in return for sex, and when she declined, she says they denied her lunch breaks. She was dyeing yarn with chemicals that burned her hands and gave her boils. Supervisors would only give girls gloves occasionally, deducting the cost from their pay. Her hands would go numb for days. After five years, she left with about $620—half of one month's rent on my studio apartment—and crippling ulcers. She has since spent her wages on doctors' bills, and there is nothing left for a dowry.

Caption at the New Yorker:
Lakshmi, 25, developed burns and boils on her hands from dyeing chemicals. "No man is going to marry me now," she says.

Lakshmi is trapped in circumstances that are beyond are her control.

I interviewed her in her room, which was filled with embroidered blankets. It was night, and the stars were as numerous as they are in the big sky of Montana, where I grew up. Through the open windows we could hear a chorus of insects. We took a photograph together, sitting on her cot, and she put her arm around me and grinned. A calico cat jumped from the dirt floor onto the bed. For that second, we were just two young women—unmarried, drinking tea, tired from a long day. But after we stood up, I knew that I would soon get on a plane to Washington, DC, where stores selling cheap leopard-print pumps and skinny jeans line the streets and no one expects me to give my entire salary to my parents for a dowry. And Lakshmi would still be here in this room, knowing—as she told me right after the photo was taken—that "no man is going to marry me now."

Perhaps another case of "there comes a point when you don't want to know."

From the Neyveli "hill" to Cotopaxi. The mountain man, I am

With the exception of the ten weeks that I lived in Calcutta, and the few months in Madras, for the rest of my life I have always lived close to mountains.  And, in Ecuador, I enjoyed the Buena vistas of the peaks and hills even more than I have anywhere else.

In Neyveli, where I spent the first 17 years of my life, it was not mountains that resulted from millennia of geological activity though.  Instead, the sandy hills were the overburden cleared in order to get to the lignite buried under the surface.   

But, to a kid that I was, it didn’t make any difference how old those “hills” were.  All I had to do was to walk up a little and spot the light brown hills.   And be transfixed at the sight of huge machines spreading the overburden and the hills gaining height.  It almost felt as if those hills down the road and I grew up together.  Of course, as an older person, and a tide wiser, I worry about the tremendous impacts on the environment such a strip mining caused, and continues to have.

Almost every summer during those school days in Neyveli, we went to visit with the grandmas, whose respective villages were about forty miles apart.  While Pattamadai had unimpressive hills far away in the horizon, Sengottai had the lovely hills of the Western Ghats.  From the rooftop of grandma’s home, the hills were always inviting.   

As a kid, I always hoped that our train journey would extend beyond Sengottai because of the tunnels through which the train passed on its way to Trivandrum.  

The undergraduate years were at Coimbatore, where too hills were always visible from the campus and the dorm.  It was only a couple of hours of a bus ride to go up those Nilgiris with tea estates and verdant trees and shrubs, and end up in Ooty and Coonoor.  

In Los Angeles, whenever the rains cleared up the smog, it was an amazing treat to look at the San Gabriel Mountains and immediately understand the powerful dynamics that draw hundreds of thousands to Southern California every year, many of them settling down for good in the region.  After a few years there, and past the Grapevine, I lived and worked in Bakersfield which was at the southern end of a valley with mountains ringing around on all sides but the north.  What a pleasure it was to see the snow dusted Tehachapi Hills from the bedroom window!

It has been almost nine years in Oregon and hills and mountain ranges are a daily aspect of my life.  A few days ago, I had driven to the massive Fern Ridge Reservoir lake just a few miles from home, and it was one of those fantastically clear skies where it seemed like one could see forever into the distance.  And, all of a sudden, I spotted the Sisters—as much as I am ignorant about details on the physical geography and the flora and fauna here, I am confident it was those peaks that I saw.  I parked the car, and stood there for a long time, and gained a new insight into why people all over the world worshiped mountain peaks.

Against, such a background of mountains in my life, I thought I had died and gone to heaven in Ecuador.  The city of Quito itself is all ups and downs, and buildings dominate the hillsides by the valley.  Mountains all around.  And many of them volcanic peaks.

When I went to the monument that marks the equator, La Mitad del Mundo (the middle of the world) it only seemed that the mountains made the monument that much more beautiful.   

And from there, I went with a five other tourists for a short hike around the crater rim of Pululahua.   During the short, and sometimes steep climb, I paused to take a look around.  The valley of Quito was off at a distance, and various hills were strung around like a necklace to celebrate the equator.

It was a sheer 300-meter drop into the lush green crater down below and a part of me worried that I would slip and fall.  But the better part of me prevailed and enjoyed the scenery, and was humbled by the powerful forces of nature that carved out the landscape, and continues to reshape this beautiful pale blue dot.

The guide book pointed out the need to schedule this trip early in the day, because otherwise the clouds roll in.  And what a sight it was to watch the clouds literally roll in through the gap, as if somebody was pumping in dry ice from the other side.

I stood mesmerized looking at “Taita”  (daddy) Imbabura and “Mama” Cotacahi.  Imbabura from across the waters of San Pablo.  And later the snow capped summit of Cotopaxi.

As the vacation drew to an end, and as the plane started its descent into Portland, I saw Mount Hood through the window.  It was so reassuring to look at this familiar peak, and I wondered whether it was Taita or Mama!