t;dr how do you cope with death?

My dog has cancer in his liver and spleen, and learning this has strongly exacerbated some kind of predisposition towards being vulnerable to depression. He's an old dog so it probably wouldn't have changed his life expectancy THAT much, but it's still really sad. If you're not a pet person this might be counterintuitive, but to me it's losing a friend, and the things people say to me are mostly unhelpful. Which is why I'm posting it here specifically: the typical coping memes about doggy heaven or death as some profoundly important part of Nature are ruined for me. So I wanted to ask how people here deal with this sort of thing. Especially on the cognitive end of things, what types of frames and self talk you used. I do already know the basics, like exercise and diet and meditation, but I sure wouldn't mind a new insight on getting myself to actually do that stuff when I'm this down.

I've thought about cryopreserving him, but even if that were a good way to use the money I just don't think I can afford it. All I'll have is an increasingly vague and emotionally distant memory, I guess, and it sucks. I've been regretting not valuing him more during his peak health, as well, although maybe I'd always feel guilty for anything short of having been perfect.

I've been thinking a lot about chapter 12 of HPMOR, and trying play with and video and pamper him while I can. I don't want to say "fuck, it's too late" about anything else. It's the best thing I can think of right now.

This whole business with seeking Slytherin's secrets... seemed an awful lot like the sort of thing where, years later, you would look back and say, 'And that was where it all started going wrong.'

And he would wish desperately for the ability to fall back through time and make a different choice...

Wish granted. Now what?

Books (edited to include reasons)

Perfect Health Diet (dense, persuasive, hundreds of citations)

How to Fail at Almost Everything And Still Win Big (its very rational seeming for a self help book, his systems approach is interesting, the book includes some counter arguments to common memes (like questioning the direction of causality in the whole passion/success thing), he mentions other research and memes that will sound familiar to anyone who reads lukeprog self help posts, he assumes he and the readers are moist robots, it's self skeptical and cautious about naively assuming he knows why something seems to work)

Podcasts:

Zen Habits, Tim Ferriss Experiment, Conversations From the Pale Blue Dot

You might also find it worthwhile to search youtube for Ted Talks, lectures, interviews etc, and rip out their audio. If there is a popular book there is often a shorter free video of the author explaining and summarizing its basic gist.

Meta discussion goes here. Things like discussion of the medium, whether short sentences could have much usefulness besides sounding witty, whether this thread should actually exist or if favorites lists are good enough, etc

I think this should be merged with the Media Thread.

Feel free to add a Twitter top level comment to the Media Thread.

ADDED: Ooops. Sorry, should have gone into the Meta comment.

Meta discussion goes here. Things like discussion of the medium, whether short sentences could have much usefulness besides sounding witty, whether this thread should actually exist or if favorites lists are good enough, etc

As I understand the situation, converting the main Sequences into a long series of short, well presented online videos would be awesome and a valuable resource (examples of the imagined format of such videos include the Youtube channels CGP Grey and CrashCourse) . I'm currently working on turning a Less Wrong post (The 1st 3rd of The Useful Idea of Truth) into one such video, and had a thought. Is it within the interests of either MIRI or CFAR to fund the production of video versions of Less Wrong posts? It's something I'm interested in starting dialogue about, as I'm significantly constrained by my existing position, and employment would be a huge help in getting better videos done faster.

Edit: Because I love teasers and hype, and I want to get some evidence out there that I do know what I'm doing, Here's a little taste of what I've got done already, in soundless HTML5 form. Just the 1st 14 seconds of the section of the video that explains the Sally-Anne Task.

Apparently (according to a wikipedia page that says at the top it needs cleanup) there's some debate over whether SCT is a real disorder, and I'm not sure what the criteria would be among its critics.

In that debate a disorder is something that reduces effectiveness in daily life for people who are diagnosed with it. Fixing a disorder should improve people's daily lives. "Real" also means that it's not just an edge case of an existing disorder that's already in the book.

You also want the concept to pass some sanity checks. People diagnosed with the recently made up disorder of "internet addiction" for example didn't use the internet more than people without "internet addiction".

"What is a cognitive tempo, what does it mean for one to be sluggish?" The more clearly you can reduce it to brain function, the more "legitimate" it might be?

For that idea of "legitimate" our current way of diagnosing mental illnesses isn't legitimate. We made the categories we use today at a time before we knew much about the brain. Different people have different views about causes and the current system of labeling purposefully avoids focusing of causation. The DSM doesn't cite any studies that investigated real world causation to justify it's disease categories.

Are diagnoses "we can tell from [symptoms] you have [cluster] which we define by presence of [symptoms]" type tautologies or can you get any information out of them that you didn't already put in?

In practice that means that a psychologist gets payed by an insurance company to treat the disorder. Psychologist don't get payed for fixes something that's not in the DSM.

Drug are also tested on whether or not they treat a disease or disorder. Drugs only get FDA approval when the improve disorders.

If you take a drug to be happy and improve something that isn't a disorder that's illegal. If you take a drug to fix something that's recognized as a disorder, you are within the bounds of the law. At least that's the general idea.

I can remember venting to a psychiatrist that "depression is a description not an explanation and we still don't know what's wrong with me do we?"

Yes. But it's not clear that an explanation centered approach is helpful anyway. You don't get any benefit from having an explanation for being messed up. It might even be harmful because of self identity issues.

What do you mean with "legitimate"?

A diagnosis of a mental illness is just a clustering of symptoms. There nothing with makes one clustering inherently more "legitimate" than another.

You could call clusters of symptoms published in the DSM-V legitimate if you believe that the authority of the APA can give something legitimacy.

You could also say that tests for diagnosis that have high sensitivity and specificity where different doctors are going to give the same diagnosis, give that diagnosis legitimacy. Non expert diagnosis by someone who reads a Wikipedia page likely doesn't score well for that metric.

I learned the phrase "sluggish cognitive tempo" recently and thought that the wikipedia seemed to described me. So I'm turning to the lw crowd wisdom to ask how legitimate of a diagnosis sct really is, and what I should be doing to try and meliorate these types of symptoms.

That would normally be referred to as consequentialism, not utilitarianism.