Reviews
Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill
rumbledethumps's review against another edition
3.0
MacAskill aims for something big in this book: convincing people to consider his logical argument when they are making emotional decisions.
*Doing Good Better* is a manifesto of sorts, aimed at launching the idea of Effective Altruism. He defines the term as "asking, 'How can I make the biggest difference I can?' and using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer." (p 11)
The first half of the book is dedicated to exploring five key questions: How many people benefit, and by how much? Is this the most effective thing you can do? Is this area neglected? What would happen otherwise? What are the chances of success, and how good would success be? The second half of the book is about using these questions in specific ways to figure out which organizations one should contribute to, how one should live, and what types of career options one should pursue.
His argument is very convincing, and he makes a compelling point. He might even have convinced me to rethink where I send my charitable donations. But, though he has a solid grasp of classic economics, he gives very little consideration to behavioral economics. He acknowledges that people want to give themselves to organizations that are dear to them. "If a family member died of cancer, isn't it natural to want to direct your energies to fighting cancer?" (pp 40-41) But, he argues, we shouldn't. Instead, "we should focus that motivation on preventing death and improving lives, rather than preventing death and improving lives in one very specific way. Any other decision would be unfair to those whom we could have helped more." (p 42)
In the second half of the book he argues that being a high-paid stockbroker could actually be more effective at saving lives than being a foreign aid worker, in that having more disposable income and donating large amounts of money to the right organizations (several of which he lists) does more for the world than any individual working in the trenches.
He might be right. but there's a larger problem: Most people feel better about themselves by being face to face with the people they are helping than by writing a check and mailing it off. Most people feel more strongly about problems that affect them directly than about abstract concepts on the other side of the world.
MacAskill acknowledges this problem, but basically believes we should just over-ride these impulses and logically evaluate all of our options. As Benjamin Franklin wrote, "If you would persuade you must appeal to interest rather than intellect."
]Until he can figure out a way to appeal to our interest (emotional or otherwise) instead of just our intellect, MacAskill might have trouble getting Effective Altruism accepted by most of the world.
*Doing Good Better* is a manifesto of sorts, aimed at launching the idea of Effective Altruism. He defines the term as "asking, 'How can I make the biggest difference I can?' and using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer." (p 11)
The first half of the book is dedicated to exploring five key questions: How many people benefit, and by how much? Is this the most effective thing you can do? Is this area neglected? What would happen otherwise? What are the chances of success, and how good would success be? The second half of the book is about using these questions in specific ways to figure out which organizations one should contribute to, how one should live, and what types of career options one should pursue.
His argument is very convincing, and he makes a compelling point. He might even have convinced me to rethink where I send my charitable donations. But, though he has a solid grasp of classic economics, he gives very little consideration to behavioral economics. He acknowledges that people want to give themselves to organizations that are dear to them. "If a family member died of cancer, isn't it natural to want to direct your energies to fighting cancer?" (pp 40-41) But, he argues, we shouldn't. Instead, "we should focus that motivation on preventing death and improving lives, rather than preventing death and improving lives in one very specific way. Any other decision would be unfair to those whom we could have helped more." (p 42)
In the second half of the book he argues that being a high-paid stockbroker could actually be more effective at saving lives than being a foreign aid worker, in that having more disposable income and donating large amounts of money to the right organizations (several of which he lists) does more for the world than any individual working in the trenches.
He might be right. but there's a larger problem: Most people feel better about themselves by being face to face with the people they are helping than by writing a check and mailing it off. Most people feel more strongly about problems that affect them directly than about abstract concepts on the other side of the world.
MacAskill acknowledges this problem, but basically believes we should just over-ride these impulses and logically evaluate all of our options. As Benjamin Franklin wrote, "If you would persuade you must appeal to interest rather than intellect."
]Until he can figure out a way to appeal to our interest (emotional or otherwise) instead of just our intellect, MacAskill might have trouble getting Effective Altruism accepted by most of the world.
dbt_11's review against another edition
5.0
The principles set forth by this book have reshaped the way I view charitable giving. Any individual or organization looking to make the most effective impact for their money, be it large or small scale, should read this book.
applekern's review against another edition
5.0
Simply for the key message this book transports, it has to get 5 stars. There‘s some uncomfortable truths in here and loads of advice, research and facts. For someone who has always been looking at non profits & charities from a distance, this has opened a new understanding for me. I am looking specifically into ‚Cool Planet‘ and ‚ICAN‘ (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons). The key message is not which charities to give to, but how to scan for the right ones - which is tremendously important.
rick2's review against another edition
2.0
This book is a joke, right? Like y’all got together and found this dude and decided to pretend that he knows what he’s talking about as a laugh, and I just missed the memo?
I finished this book and found myself lost for words. Thankfully to you dear reader, a temporary ailment, but in my muteness, I felt like I had to invent a phrase to describe this book, and I think the best thing would be to call it “mathematical laundering” of ideas. A “greed is good” idealism with the footnote that you should donate. A hint of “Ayn Rand apologist” crept in around the edges, but I mostly squished that thought. The real problem with both of the books I’ve read from this dude is that he uses mathematics in a way that doesn’t make any sense in order to try to give himself more credibility. So, “mathematical laundering” it is.
Let me share an example. I’m going to say that every time my girlfriend does the dishes she gets plus 1 point in the good girlfriend book. And every time that I do the dishes, because I’m such a busy and important anonymous reviewer of Internet literature, well I get +100 points every time I do the dishes. So when we compare notes at the end of the year and add it all up in the great game of who is the best boyfriend/girlfriend, well I’m going to come out ahead. And it’s now quite obviously mathematically proven that I’m a better boyfriend. And definitely not because I made up some self beneficial rules to some made up game.
That scenario is bad, and so is this book which engages in the same type of tomfoolery, except at a less obvious level. Frankly, I think the best way to interact with his book is to just Google a summary and to never actually read any of the book itself. The high-level structure is decent. It’s when we start getting into the points that I find myself wanting to asphyxiate myself in a garage somewhere.
This is what effective altruism is based on? This book, that has the same energy as dudes explaining jokes about Rick and Morty on Reddit. This book, that’s like someone took the naked grift of Grant Cardone and wrapped it in an Oxford diploma. This guy and Robin DiAngelo need to get together to form a support group for people who couch stupid ideas in obtuse language. Seriously? This is the book? I had to check halfway through to make sure I didn’t accidentally pick up a parody of the ideas. Maybe I was supposed to read a book by Mill Wickaskill. Sadly no. This is apparently the book.
Alright, so I’ll start with the positives. Like “wwotf” I agree with most of the high level claims. It’s good to have some sort of structure around giving. Charity can be done better. There’s plenty of grift in the system. If we think more systematically about our careers and lives, we can make a positive impact on the world. Sure, I’ll take that at face value. Earn to Give strikes me as pretty hollow however and there’s a bit of a struggle to bite back the desire to point out that a lot of the problems inherent in modern life are because of those who endorse the status quo. Not to put too absurd a point on it, but couldn’t we justify most terrible systems of organization under this ideal?
“lets not get away from serfdom, the king makes sure we all have food and donates to alchemical research so it really is best for us all”
Earn to Give It isn’t a novel concept. Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth speaks to how “the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; entrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself.” How is that any different? Are we plagiarizing from Robber Barons now? Lets not.
I do think it’s positive that people are trying to think about these ideas. If I am to assume good intent, I think this is just a flawed view of how to structure your career and ideals in life. A misguided attempt at metacognition. There’s a level of ownership and accountability in the idea of looking to do good better that I think the reader of a book like this should be commended for. I love that.
And while parts of that may be true, after two of this guys books I can’t shake the feeling that his positioning is actually a bit worse than that. Rather than an “oops, made some mistakes and can improve” this author seems to have made a career out of serving mediocre advice to impressionable young folk. He’s built a community around it with himself at the center. A Ramit Sethi for the Harvard class. Robert Kiyosaki for the WASPs. And through that lens I struggle to see this as anything more than a nakedly ambitious self-serving nonsense book.
So, granted the good ideals, lets dig into the execution that makes this a laugh out loud bad book. There’s a point where McCaskill‘s says, “go into a high impact career, what can those be?” He names like five or six high status careers. Banking, consulting, PM at FAANG etc. Then rambles on about some researcher who helped improve the genetics of wheat plants, talking about how “oh, but if you’re super smart, you could maybe go into research and impact billions of people.” And this more or less just kind of comes across as him stroking himself off. It’s like this guy was in a competition who can think of the most obscure reference. As if there’s some competition in this book where we’re trying to find some unknown genius who change the course of the world due to his unrecognized toil. And at its core it represents unorganized thinking. Throwing out some mainstream ideas then a few obscure references is just a form of autofellatio. It’s not particularly helpful to the reader and it’s basically just hedging on saying anything of consequence or giving any sort of real advice. This is how he likes to impart ideas. Generic advice, followed by obscure reference so you can appreciate how smart he is. Like if John Roberts Jr. gained sentience, instead of being three raccoons in a trenchcoat determined to take away your personal freedoms.
Another example: there’s a line in the book that goes “if you can develop a cheap treatment for cancer or malaria. You should choose cancer because it impacts more people“ I’m sorry what? I want to formally apologize to every person who had cancer and malaria in the past, thousand years because apparently I’ve just been sitting on a quick and easy remedy for both of them.
So, trying to extrapolate on this logic, in a reduced version of the thesis. On one hand you have a cash incinerator that saves someone’s life every like ten to twenty days. And you just gotta keep shoveling small piles of cash into the furnace to keep the thing running.
On the other hand, you have a small hand press that makes antimalarial pills. And the pills save a life every time someone uses them and they cost couple cents to make the pill, and some guy named Frank just punches a couple of them every minute or so.
What should you dedicate your money to?
No arguments here I think most reasonable people would agree with the malaria pill. Problem with this book and what I see with the theory in general. Is that real life is not this cut and dry. Sure there’s some very blatant nonprofits that mostly exist to raise marketing and pay for salaries of the board members. Autism speaks, most of the cancer “awareness” bids. Frankly anything that brands itself as “awareness“ that every reasonable high schooler would be aware of seems life a grift. The nonprofit space can be just as predatory as crypto when you start getting into the weeds.
It makes sense to have some sort of structure that makes you feel better about giving, but the pedantic line by line examination of each nonprofit makes us read this like a sort of copy pasted version of the give well thesis. And again looping back to the mathematical laundering, it’s basically just trying to have “rigor” around something that are these us. Just look at the financials. It’s not crazy
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around EA for a while, like a couple years at this point. I’ve been adjacent to it. I’ve read a lot of books in the space. But every time I start to try to dig in I’m always kind of repulsed by it, there’s something robotic, Spock like, reptilian about the whole endeavor.
And I think ultimately, I’m probably on the losing side of this argument, but it’s a removal of the humanness that I think is so valuable in a lot of these spots. It’s an attempt to entirely remove the emotions from the process of trying to help your fellow man. And what I think is difficult about a book like this is that there is a need for this type of thought process. People don’t conceptualize large numbers very well. And so when we start getting into billions and billions of people it’s hard to come up with a framework that says “hey this will be a net positive.” And again I come back to the failures of execution here. It’s like trying to design Burj Khalifa with a crayon. Its fat handed
Like, can you imagine giving a handful of the smartest people dominion over all of North America, and expecting them to make sense of, and improve the quality of living there? If your answer is yes, we will probably fight if we ever meet at a cocktail party. I think there’s enough examples of failure there to justify my prickliness. The problem I see is that top down thinking doesn’t usually work in the situations. The failures of the Soviet union, Mao’s great leap forward, we just aren’t good at, and usually fail spectacularly at, trying to do a single sweeping thing. Why were the Mongols the most successful raiding party in history? Because they formed small groups and let them go solve problems with an overall goal in mind. No joke.
But this book thinks that we should just apply a single framework to charity and improving the world? I don’t buy it.
And ultimately what is book proposes, is a sort of mathematical laundering of the biases that lead to catastrophic failure. Boeing crashed because the engineers booted risk into the future until they couldn’t anymore. And don’t get me wrong, coming up with accurate metrics for all this shit is really hard. I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of “economists who don’t believe a GDP is an accurate representation of economic output” and eventually you just end up throwing your hands up and saying I guess just everyone else uses GDP, so Ill continue using it for communications sake despite its failings. I have been beaten into submission there. Unlike the GDP, though, this book is trying to propose that we use its metrics, instead of what the base line or idea around a charity is. And it doesn’t stop at like “think about this is a rough framework, which I would even buy, and think is probably useful. Noah wants to calculate a single life Theo 56 qualities and therefore becoming a doctor is worth saving X number of qualities in the pediatrics realm and so on and so forth.
I think the best model I have for sweeping changes are people who struggle for a long time, develop domain expertise, and then seize upon a moment of opportunity. Often times their backgrounds make them slightly antagonistic to the prevailing model, but when the model shifts to the right person in the right time. I think Churchill‘s great example of this, I think the creation of a national health service in Canada in the UK are examples of this. I think there’s far fewer examples of someone air dropping in to a domain after being a consultant for 20 years and making a large impact. They’re just less familiar with in solving problems in a prosocial or net positive way. I just finished a book about Mckinsey looked at how Mckinsey has led to sweeping change insurance industry. Basically the trend of “make it as hard as possible to claim anything“ is their doing. And the book pointed to this trend leading lack of a safety net from insurance as part of the erosion of the middle class in the past 40 years. This book thinks it’s a net positive to go do the Mckinsey thing if you donate to bug nets though. And profits are up for Allstate. So who knows who the real winners are?
And I guess maybe that’s what I’m sensing and frustrated with is that this book is sort of bait for a type of person. There’s no shortage of ambitious, eager young people. And I remember how frustrated I was at Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
that it was the most popular elective for MBA students at Harvard, when the book was more or less the intellectual equivalent of a toddler using a Crayola to carve “let’s all play nice” onto a piece of construction paper.
I’ve really struggled at times in my life trying to balance what feels like the pressures to have a job in tech, make money, go places you can take pictures of for Instagram, and this contradicting, overwhelming desire to feel like I’m actually doing something with my life other than moving a few pixels around. That’s a big part of why I continue to read, I want to engage with these ideas. To find solutions to the things that ail us. The idea from this book that you can have your cake and eat it too is incredibly alluring. I’ve spent time on 80 K hours. I think I’m not alone when I say I want to feel like I’m doing something with my life.
But I worry that this isn’t the North star to shoot for. It’s a façade of rationality, cover it up by the same heuristics and bad decision making that everyone falls victim to, but it’s just harder to tell you’ve made mistake when you start calling your assumptions Qualia and all these other nonsensical words. Like this idea really seems like a laundering of guilt in some ways, and combined with this assumed rigorousness that you’re somehow really putting effort into what you’re going through. Like I don’t know that it helps. If anything it can lead us astray in false security due to a sort of puritanical work redemption arc.
How much of a blind eye are we turning to than the harms caused by the perpetuation of the system?
I finished this book and found myself lost for words. Thankfully to you dear reader, a temporary ailment, but in my muteness, I felt like I had to invent a phrase to describe this book, and I think the best thing would be to call it “mathematical laundering” of ideas. A “greed is good” idealism with the footnote that you should donate. A hint of “Ayn Rand apologist” crept in around the edges, but I mostly squished that thought. The real problem with both of the books I’ve read from this dude is that he uses mathematics in a way that doesn’t make any sense in order to try to give himself more credibility. So, “mathematical laundering” it is.
Let me share an example. I’m going to say that every time my girlfriend does the dishes she gets plus 1 point in the good girlfriend book. And every time that I do the dishes, because I’m such a busy and important anonymous reviewer of Internet literature, well I get +100 points every time I do the dishes. So when we compare notes at the end of the year and add it all up in the great game of who is the best boyfriend/girlfriend, well I’m going to come out ahead. And it’s now quite obviously mathematically proven that I’m a better boyfriend. And definitely not because I made up some self beneficial rules to some made up game.
That scenario is bad, and so is this book which engages in the same type of tomfoolery, except at a less obvious level. Frankly, I think the best way to interact with his book is to just Google a summary and to never actually read any of the book itself. The high-level structure is decent. It’s when we start getting into the points that I find myself wanting to asphyxiate myself in a garage somewhere.
This is what effective altruism is based on? This book, that has the same energy as dudes explaining jokes about Rick and Morty on Reddit. This book, that’s like someone took the naked grift of Grant Cardone and wrapped it in an Oxford diploma. This guy and Robin DiAngelo need to get together to form a support group for people who couch stupid ideas in obtuse language. Seriously? This is the book? I had to check halfway through to make sure I didn’t accidentally pick up a parody of the ideas. Maybe I was supposed to read a book by Mill Wickaskill. Sadly no. This is apparently the book.
Alright, so I’ll start with the positives. Like “wwotf” I agree with most of the high level claims. It’s good to have some sort of structure around giving. Charity can be done better. There’s plenty of grift in the system. If we think more systematically about our careers and lives, we can make a positive impact on the world. Sure, I’ll take that at face value. Earn to Give strikes me as pretty hollow however and there’s a bit of a struggle to bite back the desire to point out that a lot of the problems inherent in modern life are because of those who endorse the status quo. Not to put too absurd a point on it, but couldn’t we justify most terrible systems of organization under this ideal?
“lets not get away from serfdom, the king makes sure we all have food and donates to alchemical research so it really is best for us all”
Earn to Give It isn’t a novel concept. Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth speaks to how “the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; entrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself.” How is that any different? Are we plagiarizing from Robber Barons now? Lets not.
I do think it’s positive that people are trying to think about these ideas. If I am to assume good intent, I think this is just a flawed view of how to structure your career and ideals in life. A misguided attempt at metacognition. There’s a level of ownership and accountability in the idea of looking to do good better that I think the reader of a book like this should be commended for. I love that.
And while parts of that may be true, after two of this guys books I can’t shake the feeling that his positioning is actually a bit worse than that. Rather than an “oops, made some mistakes and can improve” this author seems to have made a career out of serving mediocre advice to impressionable young folk. He’s built a community around it with himself at the center. A Ramit Sethi for the Harvard class. Robert Kiyosaki for the WASPs. And through that lens I struggle to see this as anything more than a nakedly ambitious self-serving nonsense book.
So, granted the good ideals, lets dig into the execution that makes this a laugh out loud bad book. There’s a point where McCaskill‘s says, “go into a high impact career, what can those be?” He names like five or six high status careers. Banking, consulting, PM at FAANG etc. Then rambles on about some researcher who helped improve the genetics of wheat plants, talking about how “oh, but if you’re super smart, you could maybe go into research and impact billions of people.” And this more or less just kind of comes across as him stroking himself off. It’s like this guy was in a competition who can think of the most obscure reference. As if there’s some competition in this book where we’re trying to find some unknown genius who change the course of the world due to his unrecognized toil. And at its core it represents unorganized thinking. Throwing out some mainstream ideas then a few obscure references is just a form of autofellatio. It’s not particularly helpful to the reader and it’s basically just hedging on saying anything of consequence or giving any sort of real advice. This is how he likes to impart ideas. Generic advice, followed by obscure reference so you can appreciate how smart he is. Like if John Roberts Jr. gained sentience, instead of being three raccoons in a trenchcoat determined to take away your personal freedoms.
Another example: there’s a line in the book that goes “if you can develop a cheap treatment for cancer or malaria. You should choose cancer because it impacts more people“ I’m sorry what? I want to formally apologize to every person who had cancer and malaria in the past, thousand years because apparently I’ve just been sitting on a quick and easy remedy for both of them.
So, trying to extrapolate on this logic, in a reduced version of the thesis. On one hand you have a cash incinerator that saves someone’s life every like ten to twenty days. And you just gotta keep shoveling small piles of cash into the furnace to keep the thing running.
On the other hand, you have a small hand press that makes antimalarial pills. And the pills save a life every time someone uses them and they cost couple cents to make the pill, and some guy named Frank just punches a couple of them every minute or so.
What should you dedicate your money to?
No arguments here I think most reasonable people would agree with the malaria pill. Problem with this book and what I see with the theory in general. Is that real life is not this cut and dry. Sure there’s some very blatant nonprofits that mostly exist to raise marketing and pay for salaries of the board members. Autism speaks, most of the cancer “awareness” bids. Frankly anything that brands itself as “awareness“ that every reasonable high schooler would be aware of seems life a grift. The nonprofit space can be just as predatory as crypto when you start getting into the weeds.
It makes sense to have some sort of structure that makes you feel better about giving, but the pedantic line by line examination of each nonprofit makes us read this like a sort of copy pasted version of the give well thesis. And again looping back to the mathematical laundering, it’s basically just trying to have “rigor” around something that are these us. Just look at the financials. It’s not crazy
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around EA for a while, like a couple years at this point. I’ve been adjacent to it. I’ve read a lot of books in the space. But every time I start to try to dig in I’m always kind of repulsed by it, there’s something robotic, Spock like, reptilian about the whole endeavor.
And I think ultimately, I’m probably on the losing side of this argument, but it’s a removal of the humanness that I think is so valuable in a lot of these spots. It’s an attempt to entirely remove the emotions from the process of trying to help your fellow man. And what I think is difficult about a book like this is that there is a need for this type of thought process. People don’t conceptualize large numbers very well. And so when we start getting into billions and billions of people it’s hard to come up with a framework that says “hey this will be a net positive.” And again I come back to the failures of execution here. It’s like trying to design Burj Khalifa with a crayon. Its fat handed
Like, can you imagine giving a handful of the smartest people dominion over all of North America, and expecting them to make sense of, and improve the quality of living there? If your answer is yes, we will probably fight if we ever meet at a cocktail party. I think there’s enough examples of failure there to justify my prickliness. The problem I see is that top down thinking doesn’t usually work in the situations. The failures of the Soviet union, Mao’s great leap forward, we just aren’t good at, and usually fail spectacularly at, trying to do a single sweeping thing. Why were the Mongols the most successful raiding party in history? Because they formed small groups and let them go solve problems with an overall goal in mind. No joke.
But this book thinks that we should just apply a single framework to charity and improving the world? I don’t buy it.
And ultimately what is book proposes, is a sort of mathematical laundering of the biases that lead to catastrophic failure. Boeing crashed because the engineers booted risk into the future until they couldn’t anymore. And don’t get me wrong, coming up with accurate metrics for all this shit is really hard. I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of “economists who don’t believe a GDP is an accurate representation of economic output” and eventually you just end up throwing your hands up and saying I guess just everyone else uses GDP, so Ill continue using it for communications sake despite its failings. I have been beaten into submission there. Unlike the GDP, though, this book is trying to propose that we use its metrics, instead of what the base line or idea around a charity is. And it doesn’t stop at like “think about this is a rough framework, which I would even buy, and think is probably useful. Noah wants to calculate a single life Theo 56 qualities and therefore becoming a doctor is worth saving X number of qualities in the pediatrics realm and so on and so forth.
I think the best model I have for sweeping changes are people who struggle for a long time, develop domain expertise, and then seize upon a moment of opportunity. Often times their backgrounds make them slightly antagonistic to the prevailing model, but when the model shifts to the right person in the right time. I think Churchill‘s great example of this, I think the creation of a national health service in Canada in the UK are examples of this. I think there’s far fewer examples of someone air dropping in to a domain after being a consultant for 20 years and making a large impact. They’re just less familiar with in solving problems in a prosocial or net positive way. I just finished a book about Mckinsey looked at how Mckinsey has led to sweeping change insurance industry. Basically the trend of “make it as hard as possible to claim anything“ is their doing. And the book pointed to this trend leading lack of a safety net from insurance as part of the erosion of the middle class in the past 40 years. This book thinks it’s a net positive to go do the Mckinsey thing if you donate to bug nets though. And profits are up for Allstate. So who knows who the real winners are?
And I guess maybe that’s what I’m sensing and frustrated with is that this book is sort of bait for a type of person. There’s no shortage of ambitious, eager young people. And I remember how frustrated I was at Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
that it was the most popular elective for MBA students at Harvard, when the book was more or less the intellectual equivalent of a toddler using a Crayola to carve “let’s all play nice” onto a piece of construction paper.
I’ve really struggled at times in my life trying to balance what feels like the pressures to have a job in tech, make money, go places you can take pictures of for Instagram, and this contradicting, overwhelming desire to feel like I’m actually doing something with my life other than moving a few pixels around. That’s a big part of why I continue to read, I want to engage with these ideas. To find solutions to the things that ail us. The idea from this book that you can have your cake and eat it too is incredibly alluring. I’ve spent time on 80 K hours. I think I’m not alone when I say I want to feel like I’m doing something with my life.
But I worry that this isn’t the North star to shoot for. It’s a façade of rationality, cover it up by the same heuristics and bad decision making that everyone falls victim to, but it’s just harder to tell you’ve made mistake when you start calling your assumptions Qualia and all these other nonsensical words. Like this idea really seems like a laundering of guilt in some ways, and combined with this assumed rigorousness that you’re somehow really putting effort into what you’re going through. Like I don’t know that it helps. If anything it can lead us astray in false security due to a sort of puritanical work redemption arc.
How much of a blind eye are we turning to than the harms caused by the perpetuation of the system?
amberinbookland's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Moderate: Cancer, Dementia, Drug abuse, Animal cruelty, Terminal illness, War, Addiction, and Drug use
sharonmm's review against another edition
An eye-opening read and good introduction to the philosophy/rationales used in E.A.