A Common Sense Guide to Doing the Most Good

by Alexander Wales

This book is published on archiveofourown

16 pages, Unknown Binding

Published March 30, 2021

Reviews

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didactic, but I’m not sure I could do any better, manage to have less exposition, while writing for a general audience. I liked the details, like asteroid minerals crashing the market, or monopolism as a response to price gouging, or how structurally dangerous it’d be for Supes to lift a plane, and the infinite energy crank actually being a relatively low yield project with extremely high plant costs.

People made jokes about Superman endlessly turning a crank at a constant speed in a basement somewhere. The problem was that the real issues in the world of energy were ones of transmission and distribution. MoSI had spent tens of thousands of manhours on what was internally dubbed “The Crank Problem”, trying to make sense of the math and engineering, some of which wasn’t just engineering, but theoretical engineering, and some of the theoretical engineering was meta-theoretical engineering, where the engineers were trying to figure out what kind of costs would be involved in doing enough research that there would be a practical underpinning necessary to try doing something that worked in theory but had never actually been tried.

The implicit critique of EA is dramatically satisfying but not in my top 5 critiques: that naively focussing on first-order consequences makes you manipulable by bad actors bearing silly extremist cost-benefit analyses.

[Mark Sidarous · Rating 3 out of 5]

Best thought of as a companion to The Metropolitan Man as a "What if?" A Superman primer to effective altruism that felt a bit like a mild argument against extreme EA.