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?

Following simple ideas or explanations that are mostly right will still give me good outcomes in a plurality of iterations.

I don't have infinite time to carefully consider those ideas. Being a standardly incompetent human at many things, my ability to discern truthiness by looking is subject to error.

What options do I have for differentiating between simple explanations that are correct and simple explanations that are only mostly correct, and then figuring out whether the latter are worth investigating for corner-casery / quackery / etc?

I listened to the ending press conference. Interestingly, Demis Hassabis discusses AI ethics twice, saying that development will be largely open-sourced to ensure that AI "is for the many, not just the few." So, this gives the impression that Google AI ethics is more thinking along the lines of 'AI based economy renders many unemployed' rather than 'hard takeoff destroys humanity', or at least that is what they are publicly discussing at this time.

On a lighter note, one reporter asked IIRC "How many versions of alphago are there, and how long does it take to clone alphago?" as if alphago was a living thing that could be cloned like a plant, but which took time because it had to be grown and nurtured. Perhaps it was an error in translation from Korean, but it really did seem like she thought that alphago was alive. This rather confused the deepmind people answering the question.

The recently posted Intelligence Squared video titled Don't Trust the Promise of Artificial Intelligence may be of interest to LW readers, if only because of IQ2's decently sized cultural reach and audience.

I don't think I need too much data to assign broadly negative values to lives that are unusually brutish, nasty and short compared to either non-existence or a hypothetical natural existence.

The comparison at hand is only to non-existence; you're not proposing any mechanism to improve such lives or to make them similar to a hypothetical nature, only to eliminate any experience of the life while still providing the meat.

As such, you don't need too much data, but you currently have none, nor even a theory about what data you'd want. Trying to determine a preference for non-existince in animals (or vegetables, for that matter, or lumps of vat-meat) when such units don't seem to have the concepts (or at least the communication ability) to make choices for themselves doesn't seem obvious at all to me.

In-vitro meat reduces suffering, but also reduces joy and brain-experienced life in general. I don't know how to evaluate if a current cow or chicken's life is negative value (to the animal) or not.

This is tricky, because if we don't understand (on the technical level) how "qualia" work, we cannot be sure if we are breeding for "less suffering" or merely "less ability to express suffering".

In other words, now the humans could play the role of the unfriendly AI who "would rip off your face, wire it into a permanent smile, and start xeroxing".

There's no reason you should be a pariah accidentally simply because you have clarified your goals or gotten better at implementing them.

One possibility - your estimate of how many people are not friends to you. That sucks, but you can't force another person to be a good person at you.

Remember the right way to approach someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet, and apply the same principle to in-person interactions.

I'd like to find a way to present myself favorably to almost any crowd.

This is a much harder, and dramatically different goal, from not being a pariah.

Without numbers it sounds more like a sales pitch rather a honest analysis.

Other easy wins: The Squatty Potty, magnesium supplements, meditation, and donating blood if you are male.