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.
For the future: [pollid:778]
Aw carp, how did I forget the media thread? I think that you are right, I'll do that in October's.
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
Rationality Twitter is fun. Twitter's format can promote good insight porn/humor density. It might be worth capturing and voting on some of the good tweets here, because they're easy to miss and can end up seemingly buried forever. I mean for this to have a somewhat wider scope than the quotes thread. If you liked a tweet a lot for any reason this is the place for it.
Agreed, these would be more shareable than lw posts.
I thought you were being a little too fancy with the kinetic style text. The added difficulty in reading it compared to something more linear and clean/minimal was small but enough to make it harder to read it and still watch the illustrations at the same time. That might just be my taste, I am the one asking about attention disorders downthread after all, and I don't want to take away from the fact that it's cool you're actually taking time to do something when it's far more common to just fling ideas out there (which is fine too).
Thanks, clarifies things some, but I don't get why "messed up for [reason]" would be any worse for one's identity than "messed up".
Yeah the question of how we decide what we call legitimate is of interest to me as well. 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.
I could try phrasing it in a couple of ways: "How justified are we in treating this group of symptoms as a cluster?". Do well accepted symptom clusters like depression point to larger causes, or at least narrow it down to a few possibilities?
Are diagnoses "we can tell from [symptoms] you have [cluster] which we define by presence... (read more)
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.
Huh, I'm not sure actually, I had been thinking of consequentialism as being the general class of ethical theories based on caring about the state of the world, and that it's utilitarianism when you try to maximize some definition of utility (which could be human value-fulfillment if you tried to reason about it quantitatively). If my usages are unusual I more or less inherited them from the consequentialism faq I think
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... (read more)