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Comment by ineptech | Hacker News Reader

You left out that they were distributing the book to participants in math and science competitions, and that their reasoning was that they think the book is effective at teaching scientific reasoning. Donating science books to promising students sounds a lot better than distributing fanfiction.

You may disagree that HPMOR is effective at teaching science, but at least they did it openly. That page has a detailed discussion of the pros and cons of this grant, including the possibility that it could cause "reputational risk" (i.e. people like you making fun of them for it). AFAICT they took that seriously, and decided to do it anyway because they really do believe that it's effective at teaching science.

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Ah, but is it the most effective book? In the absence of very real countervailing evidence, choosing that book would be a pretty clear-cut case of systematic bias.

Why? I think it’s perfectly reasonable to think that distributing books about effective altruism would be a very effective use for $30,000 of donations. Most EAs give 10% of their income; if you assume the average EA will make $100,000 a year over a 40 year career (pretty reasonable for people at the IMO), this book only needs 1 of those people to become an EA for this to break even. (In fact, it doesn’t even need one — it just needs to be a 1% chance of producing a single EA!)

My Fermi estimate is probably off, but it’s a pretty sensible argument to me.

Does it make sense given that the book is freely available already?

It is a very fun way to learn about science. It was written with the goal to introduce science / rationality ideas through fiction and I would say it does a pretty good job of it.

I think the snark comes from "30000$" being spent to distribute a "free" book. If you think about it in terms of spending 46$ per person to advertise to a very select group of 650 people it might not sound so stupid.

It is a fun book but I'm really not sure what "science" it teaches.

I said it teaches about science.

From the very first chapter :

> "Mum," Harry said. "If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There's a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation - that you just have to look at the world and report what you see.

Chapter 8 introduces how to think about peculiar phenomenons through children games and so on and so forth.

Those participants are going to mostly become mathematics academics which doesn't seem like the best demographic income-wise of you are trying to get a good return on investment? Especially as HPMOR doesn't directly lead you to the EA movement. I read it and it had some interesting ideas but it didn't make me realise EA existed.

Presumably the idea was that the distribution/content of the book promotes rational thinking, and that rational thinking primes you for EA. And then rather than become a mathematics academic, you decide to become e.g. a quantitative trader and donate lots of money to effective causes, or take some other high-impact career decision.

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