They are usually people who suffer not only from addiction, but also from additional psychiatric disorders; in particular, anxiety, mood and personality disorders. These disorders all involve living with intense, enduring negative emotions and moods, alongside other forms of extreme psychological distress... They are unlikely -- even if they were to overcome their addiction -- to live a happy, flourishing life, where they can feel at peace with themselves and with others.

From the confession subreddit, I'm a skydiver with over 500 jumps... What I don't tell them is that I would be relieved if I threw out my pilot chute and nothing happened.

And Procrastination Is Not Laziness, in which the author discovers that he procrastinates because he's afraid of failure.

I can't relate to any of this. I procrastinate because retiling my shower is a painful chore and playing video games is so much more fun. The closest I come to depression is when everything I do feels like walking uphill and I just want to sleep all day. When that happens, I bite the bullet, force myself to do stuff I hate in the service of my future self, and in a few days I feel good again.

But I'm wondering if some of my writing is harmful to people who are not like me. Some people have a much harder time forcing themselves to do stuff, and they dream of a magical world in which they can just do what they feel like all day and everything works out. These people need more external structure, not less. They should not try to drop out of society -- they should get a job where they are surrounded by other people to motivate them.

This is related to Monday's final link, about giving money directly to the poor. There is a movement to give everyone a guaranteed basic income, and a reader sends a new article about it: Helicopter money: Federal Reserve should print money and give it directly to households. I support this, and I expect it to happen as soon as corporations realize that they no longer need people as workers (because of automation) but still need them as consumers. Economically it's perfect, but psychologically it could be a terrible ordeal for ordinary people who are not yet able to create their own structure and meaning.

Investments in common goods such as roads, schools and wells are critical in helping people out of poverty. But GiveDirectly has a new concept: What if cash transfers are used as a standard benchmark against which to measure all development aid? What if every nonprofit that focused on poverty alleviation had to prove they could do more for the poor with a dollar than the poor could do for themselves?

He regularly runs all day eating only wild berries and drinking only from streams. On summer mornings he will set off from his apartment door at the foot of Mont Blanc and run nearly two and a half vertical miles up to Europe's roof -- over cracked glaciers, past Gore-Tex'd climbers, into the thin air at 15,781 feet -- and back home again in less than seven hours, a trip that mountaineers can spend days to complete.

Is one lonely calf, raised in captivity and without the context of its herd and environment, really a mammoth? ... Perhaps the best course of action is to first demonstrate that we can effectively manage living rhinos and elephants before resurrecting their woolly counterparts.

Swallows may be evolving to dodge traffic. The evidence is that fewer birds are being killed by cars, their wings are getting shorter, and birds that are killed by cars have longer wings than birds caught in nets.

Ten predictions for the future of your microbial health, speculating that coming research will show that having a high diversity of good bacteria -- on your skin, in your gut, etc. -- is better than aiming for total sterility and ending up with an environment that favors bad bacteria.

And an excellent reddit comment about how bees swarm.

Because the human brain very often fails to grasp all these difficulties involving our values, we tend to think building an awesome future is much less problematic than it really is. Fragility of value is relevant for building Friendly AI, because an AGI which does not respect human values is likely to create a world that we would consider devoid of value.

'The basic problem is that the strong realisation of most motivations is incompatible with human existence,' Dewey told me. 'An AI might want to do certain things with matter in order to achieve a goal, things like building giant computers, or other large-scale engineering projects. Those things might involve intermediary steps, like tearing apart the Earth to make huge solar panels. A superintelligence might not take our interests into consideration in those situations, just like we don't take root systems or ant colonies into account when we go to construct a building.'

It is tempting to think that programming empathy into an AI would be easy, but designing a friendly machine is more difficult than it looks. You could give it a benevolent goal -- something cuddly and utilitarian, like maximising human happiness. But an AI might think that human happiness is a biochemical phenomenon. It might think that flooding your bloodstream with non-lethal doses of heroin is the best way to maximise your happiness. It might also predict that shortsighted humans will fail to see the wisdom of its interventions. It might plan out a sequence of cunning chess moves to insulate itself from resistance. Maybe it would surround itself with impenetrable defences, or maybe it would confine humans in prisons of undreamt of efficiency.