Shannon Love

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Shannon Love, who passed away in 2021, was a popular and always interesting contributor to this blog between 2004 and 2013.

He was a great guy with a brilliant mind that saw connections other people missed and generated an endless stream of insights on all kinds of topics.

Shannon’s daughter, Ripleigh Degenhardt (rdvirtualsolutions@gmail.com), recently contacted Instapundit about her father and about her project to collect stories about COVID hospital stays and deaths.

Shannon published more than 900 posts on Chicago Boyz. You can find them all here.

RIP

Worthwhile Reading and Viewing

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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

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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.

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Russia and Ukraine

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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.

Link