{"id":1120,"date":"2019-01-15T08:54:17","date_gmt":"2019-01-15T14:54:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/?p=1120"},"modified":"2019-01-15T08:54:17","modified_gmt":"2019-01-15T14:54:17","slug":"update-for-1-13-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2019\/01\/15\/update-for-1-13-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Update for 1\/13\/2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Health<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n<p>I had my Remicade infusion on Tuesday to manage my ulcerative colitis. Thanks mostly to my insurance, I&#8217;d had a two-week gap in my treatments, and my condition had declined noticeably. I&#8217;d say my symptoms have improved only 40-50%, so I&#8217;m still doing some extra doses of my supplementary medicine. I might make an appointment to see what my gastro doctor has to say.<\/p>\n<h2>Politics<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n<p>Last week my distraction topic of choice was the rationalist community and its associates. Reddit hooked me with another <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/SneerClub\/comments\/ad7ewr\/in_which_ssc_readers_reprise_an_idea_which\/\">post<\/a> criticizing people linked with the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/LessWrong\">LessWrong<\/a> website. I ended up at some interesting <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20140221090455\/http:\/\/plover.net\/~bonds\/cultofbayes.html\">critiques<\/a> of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pitt.edu\/~jdnorton\/homepage\/research\/ind_crit_Bayes.html\">Bayesianism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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 <a href=\"https:\/\/rationalwiki.org\/wiki\/Neoreactionary_movement\">overview article<\/a>, and then I read Scott Alexander&#8217;s two posts <a href=\"https:\/\/slatestarcodex.com\/2013\/03\/03\/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell\/\">explaining<\/a> the movement and <a href=\"https:\/\/slatestarcodex.com\/2013\/10\/20\/the-anti-reactionary-faq\/\">rebutting<\/a> it. Very enlightening.<\/p>\n<h2>TV<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>To make use of my new HD TV, I&#8217;ve been catching up on <em>Star Trek: Discovery<\/em>. The new season starts on Thursday. After the first episode or two, back when the first season came out, I wasn&#8217;t sure what I&#8217;d think. The dialogue&#8217;s quality was very lacking. But I&#8217;m impressed with how good the show became over the course of the season. I&#8217;m especially enjoying Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham and Doug Jones as Saru.<\/p>\n<h2>Gift labels<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude10<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;ll make even more progress this week!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Health \ud83e\udd14 I had my Remicade infusion on Tuesday to manage my ulcerative colitis. Thanks mostly to my insurance, I&#8217;d had a two-week gap in my treatments, and my condition had declined noticeably. I&#8217;d say my symptoms have improved only &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2019\/01\/15\/update-for-1-13-2019\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111,188,115],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-politics","category-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1120"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1122,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120\/revisions\/1122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}