Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: Brian Skinner

  • Can we ‘redistribute’ prestige?

    Pudding.cool has a good visual essay on the yard-sale model of economics, which shows that wealth has a tendency to accumulate more in the hands of people who are already wealthier. This is because a richer person has more opportunities to regain lost wealth than a poorer person. The wheels of the model turn every time someone somewhere spends money on something, to the extent that, in Pudding.cool’s words, “our economy [could be] designed to create a few super rich people”.

    The model is reminiscent of one that physicist Brian Skinner set out in a preprint paper in December 2019, to describe the effects of “prestige bias” in the path of an individual who is going through successive rounds of evaluation. In his model, each candidate could belong to one of two classes: “prestigious” or “non-prestigious”. They are sorted into a class based on an evaluation that includes an examination. One of the two cases considered in the model is when the “evaluators acquire no new knowledge about the candidates after the evaluation”, including the very realistic possibility that the examination is too non-specific vis-à-vis some trait or aptitude that it is supposed to measure. In this case, they base some part of their decision – on the class to which a candidate belongs – on the results of evaluation that came before.

    So if a candidate has been classified as “prestigious” (or “non-prestigious”) once before, the odds of their being classified as “prestigious” (or “non-prestigious”) in future increase as well.

    The Pudding.cool article concludes by considering one well-known remedy to wealth being concentrated in the hands of a few: wealth redistribution. That is, taking some fraction of the tax collected from the people and splitting it between all of them. A simple simulation embedded on the page found that while the measure wouldn’t prevent wealth accumulation altogether, it could significantly lower wealth inequality.

    Could a similar period ‘prestige redistribution’ exercise mitigate the difference between “prestigious” and “non-prestigious” candidates?

    Perhaps – an inchoate answer based on the outcomes of affirmative action policies in India, which ‘redistributed’ some components that accrue to people with prestige, such as access to education in state-run schools and colleges, jobs in offices, etc. They were grounded in sound principles of social justice. By some measures, they have succeeded. However, their goals have become endangered of late with the government’s decision to admit economic disadvantages in the criterion of backwardness, allowing groups not facing social discrimination to also reap the programme’s benefits while masking India’s inability to meet its promises of growth.

    This said, and as we often witness in educational and professional settings in India itself, simply moving around the material consequences of prestige wouldn’t change people’s convictions and attitudes, and could in fact brew resentment.

  • A question about India’s new science prizes

    really deserving candidates

    In a meeting chaired by Union home secretary Ajay Bhalla on September 16 and attended by senior members of the various science departments of the national government (DST, DBT, etc.), the Union government eliminated hundreds of awards given to the country’s scientists for achievements on various fronts and fields. Governing a country the size of India is bound to result in bloat, so it wouldn’t be possible to dismiss this move by the government out of hand. However, the three words above make an appearance among Bhalla’s many utterances in the meeting and they are worthy of suspicion.

    The Indian government under Narendra Modi has regularly used vague adjectives to accommodate a diversity of possibilities instead of committing to one course of action over another. Perhaps the best known example is its use of the “national security” excuse to refuse answers to questions under the RTI Act, such as what the scientific payloads of the Chandrayaan 2 and 3 missions were or why the FCR Act was amended. Other examples include any assurance made by Prime Minister Modi, such as on the occasion he was forced to repeal the regrettable farm laws.

    In December 2019, physicist Brian Skinner uploaded a preprint paper to the arXiV server in which he quantified the effect of a “prestige bias” on the professional trajectories of scientists who are subjected to multiple rounds of evaluation. I’ve had occasion to return to this analysis on multiple occasions because, to me, it arrives at an essential, irreducible truth of the world: that keeping the conditions of entry to some space vague doesn’t just allow for arbitrary decision-making but inevitably causes such decision-making. As Skinner wrote:

    For example, two applicants for graduate school may have similar grades and exam scores, but if one candidate comes from a more prestigious university then their application will, in general, be evaluated more highly. This ‘prestige bias’ arises naturally, since metrics like grades and exam scores are imprecise measures of a student’s ability, and thus the evaluator looks for any other information available to help with their decision. Belonging to a prestigious group suggests that the candidate was ranked highly by some other evaluator in the past, and this provides a prior expectation (like a second opinion) that biases the decision in their favor.

    Vagueness when the stakes are high can’t be innocent, especially once it has been identified, because the more powerful can and will use the resulting uncertainty to their advantage. Here as well, when Bhalla has determined that a small number of new prizes should replace the plethora of the now-extinct prizes and that they ought to be given to “really deserving candidates”, it brings to mind the “really deserving” corporations that are winning contracts for mines, ports and defence manufacturing, the “really deserving” businessmen whose wealth has increased disproportionately to that of their peers, and the “really deserving” ministries and departments that are receiving an increasing fraction of the Union government’s budgetary allocations.

    Granted, drafting and holding a fixed definition of the term ‘deserving’ can only be bad for the people and the government both. But when any doubts or uncertainties about its ambit are likely to be abused by the government – awarding India’s top honour for scientific work to, say, Appa Rao Podile or M. Jagadesh Kumar over Gagandeep Kang or Rakesh Mishra – our options are limited to a meaningless science prize that represents, above all else, the BJP’s successful subversion of another science-related space (after the IITs) for the nationalist project versus a prize that is much more meaningful but whose terms are rigid and unresponsive to the times.