Worthwhile Reading and Viewing
A list of common cognitive biases
Formative experiences persist over long spans of time
The current status of artificial intelligence in medicine
Related: Limitations of neural networks Also: Playing against AI can improve the abilities of human Go players.
The realities of energy storage. I have observed that very few journalists comprehend the difference between a Kw and a Kwh–and why it matters. (And this includes business and technology journalists.)
Paul Graham, at twitter:
Putin’s bungled invasion shows us that democracy’s greatest advantage, in the long term, is simply its “guarantee that leaders are regularly replaced.” He was responding to this article.
Some people create or discover new things. Some enforce social norms. There is little overlap between the two.
Graham (who is one of the very few venture capitalists to have attended art school) also recommends this art history thread.
Done With Disney
I posted a couple of weeks ago on this blog how distressed I was at the turn that the management of Disney’s corporation had gone of late and having made a personal decision to delete Disney from my range of entertainment interests. Now it seems that Disney management is going full woke and full steam ahead … which, OK, is the choice of corporations to make in their sphere. If management of Disney wants to go all-gay all the time, in catering to a bare 2-3% of the public, it’s their company, their choice. Maybe not a good one, but theirs to make.
Now, what isn’t OK is for a corporation to come out full-throated political in the case of Florida’s law limiting what can be construed as sex ed to the elementary school set; this aimed at kids barely aware that there are differences between boys and girls. Believe me, parents and grandparents feel very strongly that such lessons are wildly inappropriate to the point of being construed as sexual grooming. Normal parents (and grandparents) will not put up with lesson materiel which is almost guaranteed to damage children, especially as a fair number of elementary school teachers seem prone to overshare regarding their own sexual conduct.
Russia and Ukraine
Vitaliy Katsenelson, who grew up in Russia and now lives in Colorado (where he works as an investment manager) has written a long 4-part essay on Russia/Ukraine. Includes comments on what he is hearing from old friends back in Russia. Highly recommended reading.
You’ll need to register with an email address, but he only sends an email every 2 weeks or so, and it is usually interesting…hewrites primarily about investing, but also about art and music.
Bearing False Witness
Depending on the version of the Ten Commandments, the eighth or ninth is “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” in simpler terms, you shouldn’t tell lies, especially a lie intended to falsely accuse another person. I was reminded again, of the damage done by malicious accusations, upon reading this horrifying story, linked through Insty because there was such a malicious person in the neighborhood where my family lived for more than a decade a person given to making random and spurious accusations about his neighbors. When I wrote about my family, I called this residence Hilltop House a post-war bungalow perched on the knee of a range of hills, surrounded by similar and rather modest houses on half-acre or quarter-acre lots, spread out along a rambling tangle of narrow roads above Sunland-Tujunga. A good block away from Hilltop house was a cul d sac of about half a dozen houses; one of the residents in the cul d sac was an older couple … and the man, who I will call Felix S. began to go nuts. Like bankruptcy, it happened slowly and then all at once. He became convinced that his neighbors were all part of a vast conspiracy to manufacture drugs and that there were tunnels and pipelines running the drugs between all the houses around him, and that odors from the drug manufacturing were poisoning the air around his house. Eventually, he put up all kinds of industrial fans around his yard, intended to blow the fumes away, and became notorious as the “Fan Man.” But that came later.