Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Still Nil

The Supreme Court ruling that allowed college athletes to profit on their name, image, or likeness (NIL) was supposed to help top players get their due compensation. It hasn’t worked out that way, especially for women. Louis Moore, a sports historian, finds that “the first ones who were getting deals were the blonde girls.” The Free Press elaborates:

The [Cavender] Twins—Haley and Hanna, age 22, 5-foot-6—are not really two separate human beings as much as a single, self-contained brand with 6.4 million followers across all platforms, including 4.5 million on TikTok. As of early 2023, the former college basketball-players-turned-full-time-influencers had earned north of $2 million. Since then, they’ve signed endorsements and agreements with companies whose values, they say, align with theirs—including YouTuber Jake Paul’s sports-gambling outfit Betr.

2. Driver Beware

Bosch has started looking far beyond autonomous cars to find new ways that software can change what cars do. Motortrend shares a few of the ideas:

Occupant Out of Position: This could disable passenger-side frontal airbag when some moron is riding with their feet out the window.

Drunk Driver Detection: This tech is further out, but Bosch is optimistic that these sensors can reliably detect an impaired driver.

Hands on Wheel: A fisheye camera typically placed above the inside rear-view mirror can see the driver's hands, blessedly eliminating cars' penchant for periodic hectoring us to jiggle the wheel.

3. No One Understands Consciousness

Nature describes a 25-year-old wager between David Chalmers, a philosopher, and Christof Koch, a neuroscientist. Koch wagered that, by 2023, humans would have unlocked the mystery of human consciousness. The philosopher won and Koch paid up. But the neuroscientist defends his early confidence.

At the time Koch proposed the bet, certain technological advancements made him optimistic about solving the mystery sooner rather than later. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures small changes in blood flow that occur with brain activity, was taking laboratories by storm. And optogenetics — which allowed scientists to stimulate specific sets of neurons in the brains of animals such as nonhuman primates — had come on the scene. Koch was a young assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena at the time. “I was very taken by all these techniques,” he says. “I thought: 25 years from now? No problem.”

4. Not for Nervous Flyers

Popular Mechanics has published a searing, hard-to-read account of the deadliest airplane crash in history that killed 505 passengers and crew. The plane ripped apart after takeoff because of a simple repair made several years earlier:

By comparing what was found on the ground with the repair records, the team in Japan identified the problem: A splice plate had been cut in two when it was being installed, and only one row of rivets was taking most the stress over the length of the repair. Someone calculated how long that would hold. Lo and behold, they came up with the number that was close to the number of flights when the plane crashed.

5. Offensive to Investors

 Harry Markowitz, the Nobel winner who invented “modern portfolio theory,” died this month. In one tribute, Aaron Brown describes Markowitz’s once-radical approach to investing:

The hardest part about teaching Markowitz’s Modern Portfolio Theory, or MPT, today is explaining to students why there was ever any competing idea about securities prices. Markowitz focused on the statistical properties of portfolios of securities. In plainer language, he treated investing as gambling. This was deeply offensive to traditional investment experts.

6. Bored

HLG’s Daniel Casse argues in HBR why so many Board presentations go wrong. One solution: don't arrive to the Boardroom only with slides. Come with a thesis and point of view:

A “thesis mindset” forces the presenter to confront the future rather than just reciting the facts of the past. The thesis-driven board presentation doesn’t need to be an audacious proposal or a request for more funding. But it ought to frame an issue that requires board attention. At a minimum, the governing thesis tells directors: This is where I see my part of the company going. That idea can’t be slipped into slide 19. It has to be stated unambiguously and boldly at the outset. At the very least, it provides insurance against off-topic interruptions or mid-presentation dozing.

Websites Worth Reading

Lessons of a Life in Intel: Video discussion on American intelligence and special ops

Read Something Wonderful: Wonderful stuff to read

Journal of the History of Ideas: A longtime journal, now a blog

Feeds We Follow

@khodorkovsky_en: Putin opponent’s take on Russian coup

@ATRightMovies: Thread on The Bourne Identity, released 21 years ago

@extremetemps: Hot and cold temperatures