Dealing with this is relatively simple:
1) Hold the trim wheel. Autopilots are designed so that humans can easily override just by holding the control.
2) Disable the autopilot / M.C.A.S. via switch.
3) Pull the circuit breaker. Even if they pull the wrong breaker(s), flying with a partial panel is safer than flying without controls.
The version of the article that I read says:
"The pilot of Flight 610 appears to have [pressed that switch] repeatedly to bring the nose up, but the MCAS reactivated each time, as it was designed to do, forcing the nose back down, and the pilot had to repeat the process again and again."
This is getting quite wierd. The captain had 6000 hours of experience, the pilots knew what the problem was, they had ten minutes to solve it, and they had started to do the right things. All good so far. Then, something went wrong. But what?
I wonder if the system showed a warning that was active to give the pilots a hint of why the aircraft behaved the way it did. Even if they didn't know about MCAS, a warning that it is active would've at least triggered further responses (e.g. cut off power to the systems to return to manual control).
There's still more to learn about this disaster played out. But if what we've learned so far holds up -- that Boeing added a significant feature without proper communication or obvious way to override it -- I hope Lion Air 610 becomes part of the ethics curriculum in engineering classes, along with Therac-25 and the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse