Links 9
Sarah Constantin: “There are people with gripes about the current state of the world, there are proposals to make it better, but we are not at a point yet where a critical mass of intellectually honest people would say ‘this alt institution really is what the CDC and the WHO were supposed to be.’ Establishment institutions are still the most canonical institutions around even if you don’t trust them very much; there is no new thing that has taken up their mantle.”
“In the NBA, predominantly Black players play in front of predominantly non-Black fans. Using the 'NBA bubble', a natural experiment induced by COVID-19, we show that the performance of Black players improved significantly with the absence of fans vis-à-vis White players. This is consistent with Black athletes being negatively affected by racial pressure from mostly non-Black audiences. […] Beyond hurting individual players, racial pressure causes significant economic damage to NBA teams by lowering the performance of top athletes and the quality of the game.” Paper here.
Matthew Ball: “Professional gamers are relatively few. The average income is not particularly high. The number of employees is not very high, but I’ll tell you, most of them treat it like a job. It’s hard. Ninja, for example, used to stream 8 to 10 hours per day, 6 days a week on Twitch. If he stopped streaming for 48 hours, he’d lose tens of thousands of subscribers. He’d see, essentially, minute-by-minute income drops. Counter-strike players, I’ve seen, will sit in a room for five hours doing drills, not unlike Ronaldo on a soccer pitch. They will constantly turn virtual corners. Then, in milliseconds, shoot with a mouse a specific brick on a wall, 12 feet high, and they will just do drills over and over, incredibly intensive. Are they happy? Well, if they can make ends meet, and they’re pleased with their performance, and they’re happy they’re doing what they’re doing, yes. But it’s a toll, like any professional athlete.”
