Health
🤔
I had my Remicade infusion on Tuesday to manage my ulcerative colitis. Thanks mostly to my insurance, I’d had a two-week gap in my treatments, and my condition had declined noticeably. I’d say my symptoms have improved only 40-50%, so I’m still doing some extra doses of my supplementary medicine. I might make an appointment to see what my gastro doctor has to say.
Politics
🤔
Last week my distraction topic of choice was the rationalist community and its associates. Reddit hooked me with another post criticizing people linked with the LessWrong website. I ended up at some interesting critiques of Bayesianism.
After descending down that rabbit hole for a while, I decided to take a closer look at a community that tends to hang around the rationalists, the neoreactionary movement, which, roughly speaking, is part of the alt-right. They basically want to bring back old societal values and institutions such as racism and monarchy.
I find their viewpoint distasteful enough that I usually avoid reading about it. But since my own ignorance annoys me and I was procrastinating on other things, it seemed like the right time to dive in. Luckily the good people at RationalWiki had done the research for me, so I read their overview article, and then I read Scott Alexander’s two posts explaining the movement and rebutting it. Very enlightening.
TV
🙂
To make use of my new HD TV, I’ve been catching up on Star Trek: Discovery. The new season starts on Thursday. After the first episode or two, back when the first season came out, I wasn’t sure what I’d think. The dialogue’s quality was very lacking. But I’m impressed with how good the show became over the course of the season. I’m especially enjoying Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham and Doug Jones as Saru.
Gift labels
😐
My remaining task on this project is the retrospective, where I analyze how it went. I meant to finish it two weeks ago. Last week I managed to stop procrastinating enough to outline it. Maybe I’ll make even more progress this week!
