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.

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?