DARPA Selects Aurora Flight Sciences for Phase 2 of Active Flow Control X-Plane

February 13th, 2023

DARPA has selected Aurora Flight Sciences to move into the detailed design phase of the Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program:

This follows successful completion of the project’s Phase 1 preliminary design, which resulted in an innovative testbed aircraft that used active flow control (AFC) to generate control forces in a wind tunnel test. Phase 2 will focus on detailed design and development of flight software and controls, culminating in a critical design review of an X-plane demonstrator that can fly without traditional moving flight controls on the exterior of the wings and tail.

The contract includes a Phase 3 option in which DARPA intends to fly a 7,000-pound X-plane that addresses the two primary technical hurdles of incorporation of AFC into a full-scale aircraft and reliance on it for controlled flight. Unique features of the demonstrator aircraft will include modular wing configurations that enable future integration of advanced technologies for flight testing either by DARPA or potential transition partners.

“Over the past several decades, the active flow control community has made significant advancements that enable the integration of active flow control technologies into advanced aircraft. We are confident about completing the design and flight test of a demonstration aircraft with AFC as the primary design consideration,” said the CRANE Program Manager Richard Wlezien. “With a modular wing section and modular AFC effectors, the CRANE X-plane has the potential to live on as a national test asset long after the CRANE program has concluded.”

The AFC suite of technologies enables multiple opportunities for aircraft performance improvements, such as elimination of moving control surfaces, drag reduction and high angle of attack flight, thicker wings for structural efficiency and increased fuel capacity, and simplified high-lift systems.

There are few details available now about how CRANE will stay stable in the air, Elizabeth Howell at Space.com notes, but a 2021 presentation by Alexander “Xander” Walan, program manager of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, provides some hints:

Active flow control (AFC) uses a variety of methods such as jets of air or even electric discharges to shape or sculpt the flow of air over the aircraft, the presentation notes. DARPA seeks to use commercial parts where possible to provide affordable alternatives and to “fully explore the AFC trade space,” meaning to seek technologies that could provide viable alternatives.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

Hermeus designed, built, and tested Chimera in 21 months for $18 million

February 12th, 2023

Hermeus, a startup developing hypersonic aircraft, demonstrated turbojet-to-ramjet transition within its Chimera engine:

Chimera is a turbine-based combined cycle engine (TBCC) — which basically means it’s a hybrid between a turbojet and a ramjet. The ability to switch between these two modes allows Hermeus’ first aircraft, Quarterhorse, to take off from a regular runway and then accelerate up to high-Mach speeds.

The cost and speed at which the Hermeus team achieved this milestone is notable. Hermeus designed, built, and tested Chimera in 21 months for $18 million.

“This achievement is a major technical milestone for Hermeus,” said CEO AJ Piplica. “But more than that, it’s a proof point that demonstrates how our small team can rapidly design, build, and test hardware with budgets significantly smaller than industry peers.”

The testing took place at the Notre Dame Turbomachinery Laboratory which provides heated air to simulate high-Mach temperatures and pressures.

[…]

At low speeds Chimera is in turbojet mode — just like any jet aircraft. But as the temperature and the speed of the incoming air increase, turbojets hit their performance limit. This happens at around Mach 2.

[…]

At around Mach 3, Chimera begins to bypass the incoming air around the turbojet and the ramjet takes over completely.

A ramjet is a simple propulsion system which “rams” the incoming high-pressure air to create compression. Fuel is mixed with this compressed air and ignited for thrust. Ramjets are optimal between Mach 3 and Mach 5.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 6 Comments »

There is no greater counterargument to a system than to see it destroy itself

February 11th, 2023

The use of TikTok as an accelerant is a whole new scale of accelerationism, one much closer to Land’s original, apocalyptic vision:

Liberal capitalism is about making people work in order to obtain pleasurable things, and for decades it’s been moving toward shortening the delay between desire and gratification, because that’s what consumers want.

Over the past century the market has taken us toward ever shorter-form entertainment, from cinema in the early 1900s, to TV mid-century, to minutes-long YouTube videos, to seconds-long TikTok clips. With TikTok the delay between desire and gratification is almost instant; there’s no longer any patience or effort needed to obtain the reward, so our mental faculties fall into disuse and disrepair.

And this is why TikTok could prove such a devastating geopolitical weapon. Slowly but steadily it could turn the West’s youth — its future — into perpetually distracted dopamine junkies ill-equipped to maintain the civilization built by their ancestors.

We seem to be halfway there already: not only has there been gray matter shrinkage in smartphone-addicted individuals, but, since 1970 the Western average IQ has been steadily falling. Though the decline likely has several causes, it began with the first generation to grow up with widespread TVs in homes, and common sense suggests it’s at least partly the result of technology making the attainment of satisfaction increasingly effortless, so that we spend ever more of our time in a passive, vegetative state. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

And even those still willing to use their brains are at risk of having their efforts foiled by social media, which seems to be affecting not just kids’ abilities but also their aspirations; in a survey asking American and Chinese children what job they most wanted, the top answer among Chinese kids was “astronaut,” and the top answer among American kids was “influencer.”

If we continue along our present course, the resulting loss of brainpower in key fields could, years from now, begin to harm the West economically. But, more importantly, if it did it would help discredit the very notion of Western liberalism itself, since there is no greater counterargument to a system than to see it destroy itself. And so the CCP would benefit doubly from this outcome: ruin the West and refute it; two birds with one stone (or as they say in China, one arrow, two eagles.)

Ironically, it looks like watching TV makes you smarter.

Posted in Policy, Technology | 4 Comments »

He said he was going to do it, and he did

February 10th, 2023

Back in September, when the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were blown up, I saw, in my corner of Twitter, many explanations that the US was behind it. Now, Seymour Hersh — the 85-year-old investigative journalist who made his name in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up — has written his own unaffiliated piece explaining how America took out the Nord Stream pipeline:

There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership — the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.

President Biden and his foreign policy team — National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy — had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.

[…]

As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.

[…]

Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”

Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”

What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades…there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

[…]

Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack.

“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”

Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity. According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”

The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it — but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”

The Agency working group members had no direct contact with the White House, and were eager to find out if the President meant what he’d said — that is, if the mission was now a go. The source recalled, “Bill Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”

Posted in Policy, War | 11 Comments »

Land’s own life followed the same course he envisioned for the West

February 9th, 2023

I was not expecting this recent piece on TikTok to segue from Wang Huning to Nick Land:

Wang rose to prominence by being dour, discreet, and composed, while Land rose to prominence by ranting about cyborg apocalypses while out of his mind on weed and speed. In the late 1990s Land moved into a house once owned by the Satanist libertine Aleister Crowley (half a mile from where I grew up), and there he apparently binged on drugs and scrawled occult diagrams on the walls. At nearby Warwick University where he taught, his lectures were often bizarre (one infamous “lesson” consisted of Land lying on the floor, croaking into a mic, while frenetic jungle music pulsed in the background.)

Wang and Land were not just polar opposites in personality; they also operated at opposite ends of the political spectrum. While Wang would go on to be the top ideological theorist of the Chinese Communist Party, Land would become the top theorist (with Curtis Yarvin) of the influential network of far-right bloggers, NRx.

And yet, despite their opposite natures, Land and Wang would develop almost identical visions of liberal capitalism as an all-commodifying, all devouring force, driven by the insatiable hunger of blind market forces, and destined to finally eat Western civilization itself.

Land viewed Western liberal capitalism as a kind of AI that’s reached the singularity; in other words, an AI that’s grown beyond the control of humans and is now unstoppably accelerating toward inhuman ends. As Land feverishly wrote in his 1995 essay, “Meltdown:”

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.”

Land’s drug-fueled prose is overwrought, so to simplify his point, Western capitalism can be compared to a “paperclip maximizer,” a hypothetical AI programmed by a paperclip business to produce as many paperclips as possible, which leads it to begin recycling everything on earth into paperclips (i.e. commodities). When the programmers panic and try to switch it off, the AI turns them into paperclips, since being switched off would stop it fulfilling its goal of creating as many paperclips as possible. Thus, the blind application of short term goals leads to long term ruin.

Land believed that, since the runaway AI we call liberal capitalism commodifies everything, including even criticisms of it (which are necessarily published for profit), it cannot be opposed. Every attack on it becomes part of it. Thus, if one wishes to change it, the only way is to accelerate it along its trajectory. As Land stated in a later, more sober writing style:

“The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.”

—A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism (2017)

This view, that the current system must be accelerated to be transformed, has since become known as accelerationism, and it’s become popular among anti-liberal revolutionaries of all stripes, but particularly among the far-right NRx, who follow Land due to his embrace of neo-fascism (he came to believe that authoritarian regimes can accelerate nations toward prosperity, but all democracies accelerate toward ruin.)

Land’s own life followed the same course he envisioned for the West; following years of high productivity, he fell into nihilism and the decadence of rampant drug use, which drove him to a nervous breakdown. Upon recovering in 2002, he moved to Shanghai and began writing for Chinese state media outlets like China Daily and the Shanghai Star.

Posted in Policy, Technology | 4 Comments »

One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder

February 8th, 2023

Sharpe’s Tiger by Bernard CornwellWhen I started listening to the audiobook version of Sharpe’s Tiger, the first novel of the series that inspired the show starring Sean Bean (Boromir), I was surprised — and a bit embarrassed — to learn that “loot” was one of many words the British plundered from India. How did I not know that?

I recently read William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy, which offers a nonfiction account of “The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire,” and it opens with just this fact:

One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot.

It certainly seems appropriate. Sharpe’s Tiger felt quite a bit like an old-school pulp swords-and-sorcery novel or an early Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and The Anarchy had some of that feel, too.

Anarchy by William DalrymplPowis Castle in Wales houses a treasure horde worthy of a dragon:

There are more Mughal artefacts stacked in this private house in the Welsh countryside than are on display in any one place in India – even the National Museum in Delhi.

The riches include hookahs of burnished gold inlaid with empurpled ebony; superbly inscribed Badakhshan spinels and jewelled daggers; gleaming rubies the colour of pigeon’s blood, and scatterings of lizard-green emeralds. There are tiger’s heads set with sapphires and yellow topaz; ornaments of jade and ivory; silken hangings embroidered with poppies and lotuses; statues of Hindu gods and coats of elephant armour.

Posted in Linguistics, Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Eliminating decadent TikTok content is a matter of survival

February 7th, 2023

Chinese President Xi’s governance strategy has emphasized “core socialist values” like civility, patriotism, and integrity to ward off nihilism and decadence:

The creator of TikTok and CEO of Bytedance, Zhang Yiming, originally intended for the content on TikTok and its Chinese version, Douyin, to be determined purely by popularity. As such, Douyin started off much like TikTok is now, with the content dominated by teenagers singing and dancing.

In April 2018, the CCP began action against Zhang. Its media watchdog, the National Radio and Television Administration, ordered the removal from Chinese app stores of Bytedance’s then-most popular app, Toutiao, and its AI news aggregator, Neihan Duanzi, citing their platforming of “improper” content. Zhang then took to social media to offer a groveling public apology, stating: “Our products took the wrong path, and content appeared that was incommensurate with socialist core values.”

Shortly after, Bytedance announced it would recruit thousands more people to moderate content, and, according to CNN, in the subsequent job ads it stated a preference for CCP members with “strong political sensitivity.”

The CCP’s influence over Bytedance has only grown since then. Last year, the Party acquired a “golden share” in Bytedance’s Beijing entity, and one of its officials, Wu Shugang, took one of the company’s three board seats.

The CCP’s intrusion into Bytedance’s operations is part of a broader strategy by Xi, called the “Profound Transformation”, which seeks to clear space for the instituting of core socialist values by ridding China of “decadent” online content. In August 2021, a statement appeared across Chinese state media calling for an end to TikTok-style “tittytainment” for fear that “our young people will lose their strong and masculine vibes and we will collapse.”

In the wake of that statement, there have been crackdowns on “sissy-men” fashions, “digital drugs” like online gaming, and “toxic idol worship.” Consequently, many online influencers have been forcibly deprived of their influence, with some, such as the movie star Zhao Wei, having their entire presence erased from the Chinse web.

For Xi and the CCP, eliminating “decadent” TikTok-style content from China is a matter of survival, because such content is considered a herald of nihilism, a regression of humans back to beasts, a symptom of the West’s terminal illness that must be prevented from metastasizing to China.

Posted in Policy, Technology | 3 Comments »

Intentional and unlawful spraying of water on and around a woman experiencing homelessness

February 6th, 2023

Gallery owner Collier Gwin will be “charged with misdemeanor battery for the alleged intentional and unlawful spraying of water on and around a woman experiencing homelessness on January 9, 2022.”

He said this confrontation was the result of multiple attempts to get the woman help, after he spent days cleaning up her mess and letting her sleep in his doorway. He added that she often knocks over trash cans, and her behavior has scared off his clients.

Gwin said he and other business owners in the area have called SFPD and social services more than two dozen times in the last two weeks.

“I said she needs psychiatric help,” Gwin said. “You can tell, she’s pulling her hair, she’s screaming, she’s talking in tongues, you can’t understand anything she says, she’s throwing food everywhere.”

Gwin said on Monday, he’d had enough.

“I’ve been down here 40 years. I’ve seen tons of homeless people, we’ve helped the ones that we could, and I have not had any issues with people,” he said. “But in this case, I was very upset, that the city could not help, and their hands are tied too.”

Posted in Crime | 5 Comments »

Western liberalism leads to decadence and authoritarianism is the cure

February 5th, 2023

China has been suspicious of Western liberal capitalism since the 1800s:

The epidemic of addiction, combined with the ensuing Opium Wars, accelerated the fall of the Qing Dynasty and led to the Century of Humiliation in which China was subject to harsh and unequal terms by Britain and the US.

Mao is credited with eventually crushing the opium epidemic, and since then the view among many in China has been that Western liberalism leads to decadence and that authoritarianism is the cure. But one man has done more than anyone to turn this thesis into policy.

His name is Wang Huning, and, despite not being well known outside China, he has been China’s top ideological theorist for three decades, and he is now member number 4 of the seven-man Standing Committee — China’s most powerful body. He advised China’s former leaders Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, and now he advises Xi Jinping, authoring many of his policies. In China he is called “guoshi” (literally, “teacher of the nation”).

Wang refuses to do press or to even speak with foreigners, but his worldview can be surmised from the books he wrote earlier in his life. In August 1988, Wang accepted an invitation to spend six months in the US, and traveled from state to state noting the way American society operates, examining its strengths and weaknesses. He recorded his findings in the 1991 book, America Against America, which has since become a key CCP text for understanding the US.

The premise of the book is simple: the US is a paradox composed of contradictions: its two primary values — freedom and equality — are mutually exclusive. It has many different cultures, and therefore no overall culture. And its market-driven society has given it economic riches but spiritual poverty. As he writes in the book, “American institutions, culture and values oppose the United States itself.”

For Wang, the US’s contradictions stem from one source: nihilism. The country has become severed from its traditions and is so individualistic it can’t make up its mind what it as a nation believes. Without an overarching culture maintaining its values, the government’s regulatory powers are weak, easily corrupted by lobbying or paralyzed by partisan bickering. As such, the nation’s progress is directed mostly by blind market forces; it obeys not a single command but a cacophony of three hundred million demands that lead it everywhere and nowhere.

In Wang’s view, the lack of a unifying culture puts a hard limit on the US’s progress. The country is constantly producing wondrous new technologies, but these technologies have no guiding purpose other than their own proliferation. The result is that all technological advancement leads the US along one unfortunate trajectory: toward more and more commodification.

Posted in Policy | 8 Comments »

Egalitarianism is an uneasy compromise

February 4th, 2023

For most of human history we have been egalitarian, Rob Henderson explains, with status equivalency among the decision-makers of a group and no powerful group leaders:

Behavior in these societies is maintained by “moral communities.” Both men and women are quick to judge the misdeeds of others, and compare such actions to how people should behave.

For upstarts, awareness of predictable and swift punishment tends to modify their behavior. And if they don’t adhere to moral norms, they get eliminated.

A band will use social control against any adult, usually male, who behaves too assertively in an aggressive way.

Generally, both sexes get to contribute to the decision of whether a person has been socially deviant. For severe infractions, people were either ostracized or killed. Though women have some say in the decisions, the executions were typically carried out by men.

Within the groups, adult men tend to treat one another as equals, and women and children are treated as subordinate.

The book describes the indigenous Yanomamo tribe in Brazil. They have chiefs—leaders selected for their skill or bravery. But they cannot give direct orders to other men. They can simply make suggestions, which tend to hold more weight than the suggestions of others.

But this egalitarianism doesn’t apply within families, where men beat their wives without consequence. “On one occasion, though,” Boehm writes, “when a man was beating his wife so brutally that he was likely to kill her, a chief did intervene physically.”

Generally speaking in hunter-gatherer communities, if there was a conflict of interest between men and women, rules typically favored the men.

For example, male hunter-gatherers throughout Australia used women as political pawns. Wives could be required to have sex with multiple men at special ceremonies. They could also be loaned to a visiting man, or ordered by their husbands to have sex with another man in order to erase a debt or make peace. In 1938, the anthropologist A.P. Elkin reported that Australian Aboriginal women lived in terror of the expectations others had of them during ceremonies.

Generally speaking, across hunter-gatherer societies, status equivalency appears to apply only to adult males. Strict egalitarianism in making decisions for the community is practiced only among men.

[…]

The book [Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior] states that both egalitarianism (status equivalency) and hierarchy are “natural conditions of humanity.” Everyone wants to dominate others, and everyone doesn’t want to be dominated by others.

Egalitarianism is an uneasy compromise.

As the anthropologist Harold Schneider puts it: “All men seek to rule, but if they cannot rule they prefer to be equal.”

[…]

But even with the power of norms and social pressure, violence is far more common in hunter-gatherer bands than in modern societies. Bands and tribes strongly favor peace, cooperation, and despise conflict, but violent outbreaks are not infrequent.

Perhaps the most important reason for this is that there is no formalized authority.

There is no strong leader or council of elders who have the power to arbitrate disputes. In fact, those who attempt to broker peace are often killed. As a consequence, once a serious conflict arises, there is no truly effective means of settling the dispute.

The most common cause of murder in hunter-gatherer communities involves matters of sex, adultery, or jealousy.

Posted in Policy, Science | 2 Comments »

The recommendation algorithm is the core product

February 3rd, 2023

TikTok is the most successful app in history:

It emerged in 2017 out of the Chinese video-sharing app Douyin and within three years it had become the most downloaded app in the world, later surpassing Google as the world’s most visited web domain.

[…]

Other platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, use recommendation algorithms as features to enhance the core product. With TikTok, the recommendation algorithm is the core product. You don’t need to form a social network or list your interests for the platform to begin tailoring content to your desires, you just start watching, skipping any videos that don’t immediately draw your interest. Tiktok uses a proprietary algorithm, known simply as the For You algorithm, that uses machine learning to build a personality profile of you by training itself on your watch habits (and possibly your facial expressions.) Since a TikTok video is generally much shorter than, say, a YouTube video, the algorithm acquires training data from you at a much faster rate, allowing it to quickly zero in on you.

[…]

In order to develop and maintain mental faculties like memory and attention span, one needs to practice using them. TikTok, more than any other app, is designed to give you what you want while requiring you to do as little as possible. It cares little who you follow or what buttons you click; its main consideration is how long you spend watching. Its reliance on machine learning rather than user input, combined with the fact that TikTok clips are so short they require minimal memory and attention span, makes browsing TikTok the most passive, uninteractive experience of all major platforms.

If it’s the passive nature of online content consumption that causes atrophy of mental faculties, then TikTok, as the most passively used platform, will naturally cause the most atrophy. Indeed many habitual TikTokers can already be found complaining on websites like Reddit about their loss of mental ability, a phenomenon that’s come to be known as “TikTok brain.”

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

This form of capital punishment domesticated us

February 2nd, 2023

Rob Henderson explains the self-domestication hypothesis, discussed by Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham in The Goodness Paradox:

The idea is that humans domesticated each other. Within hunter-gatherer communities, whenever aggressive or disagreeable males attempted to exert unwelcome dominance, other males would conspire to kill them.

Early human communities selected against reactive aggression: arrogance, bullying, random violence, and the monopolizing of food and females.

Over time, early humans eliminated those who were overtly aggressive. They killed or ostracized upstarts hungry for power; men with aggressive political ambitions. Other men would quietly conspire to collectively murder troublesome males.

They were good at this, because they were well-practiced at killing large-bodied mammals during a hunt. Humans are large-bodied mammals.

This form of capital punishment domesticated us.

Wrangham compared the level of within-group conflict among hunter-gatherer humans to that of chimpanzees. Chimps are 150 to 550 times more likely than humans to commit violence against their peers.

Humans are far gentler to members of their own community than chimps are, thanks to our ancestors and their ability to plan organized murder.

Posted in Policy, Science | 10 Comments »

When mainstream media speaks, it is reality that gets mugged

February 1st, 2023

Richard Hanania recently decided to argue that everyone is wrong, and the media is actually good and honest. Bryan Caplan agrees that Hanania zeroes in on the right question — “Compared to what?” — and answers, the mainstream media is awful compared to silence:

The problem isn’t limited to race, gender, and sexual orientation, where Richard agrees that the media is crazy. The problem isn’t specific factual errors, either. The central problem is that the mainstream media’s standard operating standard is to use selective presentation to spread absurd views about practically everything that matters.

Nor is this a recent failing! Mainstream media has been deplorable for as long as I can remember. Let me list some of its chief sins against the Big Picture.

Endlessly complaining about alleged social problems. Poverty, the environment, racism, Covid, Ukraine, terrorism, immigration, education, drugs, Elon… Even if all of the coverage were true, the media is still — per Huemer — aggressively promoting the absurd view that life is on balance terrible and reliably getting worse.

Painting government intervention as the obvious solution to social problems. Often the media openly asks loaded questions to this effect, like “Why isn’t the government doing more about this?!” with an exasperated tone. The rest of the time, they rely on heavy-handed insinuation, like “The people of Flint, Michigan feel like they’ve been forgotten.” Forgotten by who? Government Our Savior, of course. Mainstream media barely considers whether past government policies have worked, or how much they cost, or whether they have important downsides.

Spreading innumeracy. The media endlessly shows grotesque stories about ultra-rare problems like terrorism, plane crashes, police murdering innocents, school shootings, toddlers dying of Covid, and the like. They show almost nothing about statistically common problems like car crashes or death by old age. The media doesn’t just spread paranoia; it spreads inverted paranoia.

Promoting Social Desirability Bias. The media standardly talks as if stuff that superficially sounds good is reliably good, and stuff that superficially sounds bad is reliably bad. As a result, they foment hostility to good stuff that sounds bad, and engender support for bad stuff that sounds good. If a firm downsizes due to technological change, what are the odds that the media chides, “This is how progress works! Tractors put a lot of farmers out of work, too, you know”? If the government cuts spending, what are the odds that the media muses, “We could interview the visible losers, but that’s hardly fair unless we interview the invisible winners. Which we can’t do, so let’s just move on.”
Whipping up support for the latest crusade. Like me, Hanania wasn’t happy with the media’s Covid coverage. But I say the problem goes way back. Just in my living memory, the media has promoted mass hysterias about Islamist Iran (“the hostage crisis”), the War on Drugs, “Free Kuwait,” the War on Terror, the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, Covid, Black Lives Matter, and now the Ukraine War. The mere fact that they keep these topics in the news for months or years, with almost no skeptical or apathetic voices, is a thinly-veiled declaration that “These are the most important problems on Earth – and we should all enthusiastically be on the bandwagon to solve them.” Yet in hindsight, the problems the media deems important are highly arbitrary, and the bandwagon usually turns out to be a major problem in itself.

An old joke talks about being “mugged by reality.” When mainstream media speaks, it is reality that gets mugged. Truly, mainstream media is the great Mugger of Reality. Even when its individual stories are rock solid, it promotes a deeply false Big Picture of the world. And unless you have the intellectual steel to constantly remind yourself, “This is a horribly misleading perspective,” consuming media tends to make you believe this deeply false Big Picture.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 3 Comments »

Our ancestors were polygynous until about three hundred thousand years ago

January 31st, 2023

Rob Henderson opens his piece on Reverse Dominance Hierarchies with a quote from Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, by Nicholas A. Christakis:

Our ancestors were polygynous until about three hundred thousand years ago, primarily monogamous until about ten thousand years ago, primarily polygynous again until about two thousand years ago, and primarily monogamous since then.

Henderson continues:

Homo sapiens in our current form arose around 300,000 years ago. Out of 300,000 years, only about 8,000 of those years were humans in primarily polygynous arrangements.

So for 97% of our history, humans have primarily been monogamous.

Posted in Policy, Science | 11 Comments »

Name, Image, and Likeness

January 30th, 2023

The world of “amateur” college sports is going through its biggest change since the inception of the NCAA in 1905, thanks to NIL:

Since state laws and NCAA rule went into effect on July 1, 2021, student-athletes can profit off their Name, Image and Likeness for the first time in the history of college athletics.

[…]

Players can profit off endorsements, signing autographs, selling apparel, corporate partnerships, charitable appearances, teaching camps and starting their own businesses, among other things. They can also hire professional service providers for NIL activities.

The NCAA released updated NIL guidance in early May, stating collectives – groups of boosters and businesses – are not to be involved in the recruiting process or in the transfer portal. However, there are a number of states that have recently passed legislation that remove the prohibition of schools from directly or indirectly arranging for a third party to provide compensation to a student-athlete through NIL.

The origin of NIL traces back to the late 2000s when former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon and 19 others sued the NCAA, arguing the organization violated United States antitrust laws by not allowing athletes to make a share of the revenues generated from the use of their in broadcasts and video games. A judge later ordered the NCAA to pay $44.4 million in attorney fees along with another $1.5 million in costs to lawyers for the plaintiffs in O’ Bannon’s class-action lawsuit.

California then pushed the NCAA to make a move in 2019 when state legislators enacted the Fair Pay to Play Act. Similar legislation started to pop up in other states across the nation.

The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously upheld a district court’s rule on the NCAA v. Alston, delivering a major blow to amateurism in June 2020. The ruling stated the NCAA was violating antitrust law by placing limits on the education-related benefits schools can provide to athletes. The decision made it known NCAA restrictions — including on NIL activity — could face serious legal challenges in the future.

And in the summer of 2021, the NCAA’s Board of Directors adopted an interim rule opening the opportunity for NIL activity.

Players across college athletics have tapped into the potential to pocket cash off of their Name, Image and Likeness since last summer. There have also been plenty of untraditional deals made. The On3 NIL Deal Tracker lists all partnerships across the NCAA for college and high school athletes being reported by players, collectives, agents and media.

A protein bar company in Utah, which is a large supporter of BYU athletics, agreed to pay the tuition of all 36 football walk-ons. McKenzie Milton and D’Eriq King signed on as co-founders of Dreamfield, an NIL-based platform focusing on booking live events for student athletes.

Quinn Ewers enrolled at Ohio State a year early to land a deal with GT Sports Marketing worth $1.4 million because the state of Texas does not allow high school players to be compensated off NIL. LSU gymnast Oliva Dunne, who has over five million social media followers, inked a mid six-figure deal with activewear brand Vuori.

The role of NIL in college athletics has completely changed the transfer portal, especially with the one-time transfer rule. Following his commitment to Miami, Nijel Pack signed the largest LifeWallet NIL deal to date – a two-year deal worth $800,000 which includes a car. Isaiah Wong’s agent gave an ultimatum to Miami, threatening to enter the transfer portal if his NIL compensation was not increased. He ultimately decided to stay and walked back his agent’s comments.

And NIL has created major ramifications in recruiting. An unnamed five-star prospect in the Class of 2023 has signed a contract with an unnamed school’s collective that could pay him more than $8 million by his junior year of college. It’s widely believed that Tennessee quarterback commit Nico Iamaleava is the recruit.

There is also a multi-million market rate for blue-chip quarterback recruits since the deal, too.

If you glance at the On3 NIL 100, you’ll see that the fifth most valuable college athlete is a female gymnast named Livvy Dunne:

Olivia Dunne is known as the “most followed NCAA athlete on social media” with more than 9 million followers, including 330,000,000 likes on her TikTok account. Dunne is originally from Hillsdale (New Jersey) Abeka Academy and trained at Eastern National Academy of Paramus. She qualified for the 2020 Nastia Liukin Cup and competed at the 2016 and 2017 P&G Championship and 2017 U.S. Classic before arriving at LSU in 2021. During her freshman season at LSU, she earned All-America honors on the uneven bars, including a 9.90 score at the NCAA championships and a career-best 9.925 on the event. She is also quite successful on the NIL front with big sponsorships from Vuori Clothing, American Eagle, Plant Fuel, Bartleby and others.

They estimate her annual value at $3.2 million. Judging by her Instagram account, her appeal might not be purely athletic.

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