Thursday, March 7, 2019

What used to be called the Show Me State

Via the comment section, Virgin Hyperloop One is finding a receptive audience for its pitch. [emphasis added]

With the feasibility of a high-speed Missouri Hyperloop route connecting Kansas City to St. Louis in about 30 minutes now established, the conversation has shifted tracks to ergonomics, said Diana Zhou.
Perhaps even more than Mars One, the hyperloop narrative illustrates the power of ignoring irrefutable criticism. Since long before Elon Musk coined the term (still his only real intellectual contribution to the project), the obstacle that has prevented maglev vactrains from catching on has been the enormous costs of major construction with tolerances that tight, followed by the still unsolved problem of high speed stability.

Other than some hand waving and a few unsupported and comically unrealistic numbers, it does not appear that there has been any substantial progress toward addressing those challenges. Instead, proponents have simply kept changing the subject to trivial issues like ergonomics and video screens, before going back to the literal pipe dreams of a world with all of our transportation problems solved.

The key here is that the journalists covering the claims really want to believe them and that makes it all too easy to go along.















4 comments:

  1. The link to "the results of the feasibility study" in that article leads to another article headlined "Talent pipeline: Missouri Hyperloop could be a light at the end of the tech jobs tunnel." As far as I can make out, from the study itself (penned by a large Kansas engineering firm) boils down to "if you're going to build one of these things, it would be feasible to hire us to do it."

    What "political engineering" in the defense industry is to actual engineering, this study is to actual feasibility.

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  2. Jeff:

    Interesting comment. This suggests that the news article that Mark linked to is not really a news article at all, but rather public relations. And this in turn relates to the decline of journalism and the rise of public relations; see for example our discussion here from a few years ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/03/11/the-decline-of-journalism-and-the-rise-of-public-relations/

    That is, the story is not lazy/credulous/misinformed reporting, so much as reporting being replaced by public relations. OK, this doesn't explain the poor NYT hyperloop reporting which Mark pointed out recently---yes, there's poor journalism too---but I think the public relations thing is a big part of the story.

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  3. Sure. And then it gets distorted and amplified through the same mechanisms you've talked about on your blog. The actual Virgin Hyperloop "feasibility study" press release is of course super bullish on the Hyperloop but doesn't really pretend to be much more than it is. Okay.

    Then it gets reported on a site like The Verge, with a headline like "A hyperloop in Missouri? A new study says it’s feasible, but not necessarily affordable," which is misleading but at least still honors the press release's framing of "feasibility" as site-scouting by mentioning Missouri in the headline.

    Then Fortune writes an article that does nothing but cover The Verge's coverage, with the shorter headline "A Hyperloop Is Feasible and Could Save Commuters Millions, Study Finds" (omit needless words!) and suddenly the Hyperloop is just plain feasible.

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  4. Jeff:

    I guess Fortune's a big place (or a thinly-spread brand name).

    Here's Fortune from 2017: "Why Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Is Mostly Hype": http://fortune.com/2017/07/31/elon-musk-hyperloop-the-boring-company/

    Here's Fortune from 2018: "A Hyperloop Is Feasible and Could Save Commuters Millions, Study Finds":
    http://fortune.com/2018/10/18/missouri-hyperloop-concept/

    Here's Fortune's page of stories tagged Hyperloop:
    http://fortune.com/tag/hyperloop/
    Oddly enough, the "Why Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Is Mostly Hype" story isn't there. But that seems more like incompetence on Fortune's part than anything else; that earlier study is not tagged "hyperloop," it's tagged "elon musk hyperloop."

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