It's amazing how the "noncentral fallacy" is rooted deeply into human psychology.
Using "weird" to escape the gravitational pull of a word it's interesting, and suggests a general strategy: Martin Luther King was an heroic criminal, abortion is an ethic murder, etc.
Mmh, better but not the best.

'Weird' seems to work well only for self-identification, though.

I can find plenty of people who report that chakra healing worked for them. There are self-reports for a lot of things working for people. That doesn't mean those things are necessarily good.

In this case it likely works for you in the sense that it produces a disassociation. Disassociating emotions is however generally not a optimal strategy for dealing with emotions. Mainstream psychology is generally against it.

There advantages of becoming a psychopath, but doing disassociative techniques that move in that direction is still not something I would recommend.

I don't think the term "weird" is very conductive to having a healthy self-esteem.

Decent article but pretty basic. Still, a glimmer of reason in the dark pit of Salon.

Didn't know Y Combinator was doing a pilot. They don't mention how many people will be in the pilot in the announcement, but it will be interesting to see.

One thing I never understood is why it makes sense to do cash transfers to people that are already wealthy - or even above average income. A social safety net (while admittedly more difficult to manage) consisting solely of cash income seems to makes more sense. I guess the issue is with the practical implementation details of managing the system and making sure everyone who needs to be enrolled is.

Here's my piece in Salon about updating my beliefs about basic income. The goal of the piece was to demonstrate the rationality technique of updating beliefs in the hard mode of politics. Another goal was to promote GiveDirectly, a highly effective charity, and its basic income experiment. Since it had over 1K shares in less than 24 hours and the comment section is surprisingly decent, I'm cautiously optimistic about the outcome.

Applying probabilistic thinking to fears about terrorism in this piece for the 16th largest newspaper in the US, reaching over 320K with its printed version and over 5 million hits on its website per month. The title was chosen by the newspaper, and somewhat occludes the points. The article is written from a liberal perspective to play into the newspaper's general bent, and its main point was to convey the benefits of applying probabilistic thinking to evaluating political reality.

Edit Updated somewhat based on conversation with James Miller here

I have been asked about something like a carrier advise in field of x-risks prevention deep in EA forum so I will repost my answer here and would like to get any comments or more suggestions to the list

Q: "... it seems like it would be helpful to accompany some maps with a scheme for prioritizing the important areas. e.g. if people could know that safe ai engineering is a useful area for reducing gcrs.." http://effective-altruism.com/ea/10h/the_map_of_global_warming_prevention/#comments

A: So, some ideas for further research, that is fields which a person could undertake if he want to make an impact in the field of x-risks. So it is carrier advises. For many of them I don't have special background or needed personal qualities.

1.Legal research of international law, including work with UN and governments. Goal: prepare an international law and a panel for x-risks prevention. (Legal education is needed)

2.Convert all information about x-risks (including my maps) in large wikipedia style database. Some master of communication to attract many contributors and balance their actions is needed.

3.Create computer model of all global risks, which will be able to calculate their probabilities depending of different assumptions. Evolve this model into world model with elements of AI and connect it to monitoring and control systems.

4.Large research is safety of bio-risks, which will attract professional biologists.

5.Promoter, who could attract funding for different research without oversimplification of risks and overhyping solutions. He may be also a political activist.

1. I think that in AI safety we are already have many people, so some work to integrate their results is needed.

2. Teacher. A professor who will be able to teach a course in x-risks research for student and prepare many new researchers. May be youtube lectures.

3. Artist, who will be able to attract attention to the topic without sensationalism and bad memes.

I tried. I guess it wasn't accepted.

Consider reposting this on the EA Forum, might get more hits that way.

What is the Speed Giving Game?

The text in you photograph is too small to read easily, or perhaps at all.