I think that it’s not always possible to check that a project is “best use, or at least decent use” of its resources. The issue is that these kinds of checks are really only good on the margin. If someone is doing something that jumps to a totally different part of the pareto manifold (like building a colony on Mars or harnessing nuclear fission for the first time), conventional cost-benefit analyses aren’t that great. For example a standard post-factum justification of the original US space program is that it accelerated progress in materials science and computer science in a way that payed off the investment even if you don’t believe that manned space exploration is worthwhile. Whether or not you agree with this (and I doubt this counterfactual can be quantified with any confidence), I don’t think that the people who were working on it would have been able to make this argument convincingly at the time. I imagine that if you ran a cost-benefit analysis at the time, it would have found that a better investment would be to put money into incremental materials research. But without the challenge of having to develop insulators, etc., that work in space, there would have plausibly been fewer new materials discovered.
I think that here there is an important difference between SpaceX and facebook, since SpaceX is an experiment that just burns private money if it fails to have a long-term payoff, whereas facebook is a global institution whose negative aspects harm billions of people. There’s also a difference between something like Mars exploration, which is a simple and popular idea that’s expensive to implement, and more kooky vanity projects which consist of rich people imagining that their being rich also makes them able to solve hairy problems that more qualified people have failed to solve for ages (an example that comes to mind, which thankfully doesn’t have billions of dollars riding on it, is Wolfram’s project to solve physics: https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/04/14/the-wolfram-physics-project-a-one-year-update/). I think that many big ambitious initiatives by billionaires are somewhere in between kooky ego-trip and genuinely original/pareto-optimal experiment, but it seems important to recognize that these are different things. Given this point of view, along with the general belief that large systems tend to err on the side of being conservative, I think that it’s at least defensible to support experiments like SpaceX or Zuckerberg’s big Newark school project, even when (like Zuckerberg’s school project) they end up not being successful.
I imagine that if you ran a cost-benefit analysis at the time, it would have found that a better investment would be to put money into incremental materials research.
Space is a particularly complicated area with respect to EV. I imagine that a whole lot of the benefit came from “marketing for science+tech”, and that could be quantified easily enough.
For the advancements they made in materials science and similar, I’m still not sure these were enough to justify the space program on their own. I’ve heard a lot of people make this argument to defend NASA, and I haven’t seen them refer to simple cost/benefit reports. Sure, useful tech was developed, but that doesn’t tell us that by spending the money on more direct measures, we couldn’t have had even useful tech.
SpaceX is an experiment that just burns private money if it fails to have a long-term payoff
It also takes the careers of thousands of really smart, hard-working, and fairly altruistic scientists and engineers. This is a high cost!
along with the general belief that large systems tend to err on the side of being conservative
VCs support very reckless projects. If they had their way, startups would often be more ambitious than the entrepreneurs desire. VCs are trying to optimize money, similar to how I recommend we try to optimize social impact. I think that prioritization can and should often result in us having more ambitious projects, not less.
I think that it’s not always possible to check that a project is “best use, or at least decent use” of its resources. The issue is that these kinds of checks are really only good on the margin. If someone is doing something that jumps to a totally different part of the pareto manifold (like building a colony on Mars or harnessing nuclear fission for the first time), conventional cost-benefit analyses aren’t that great. For example a standard post-factum justification of the original US space program is that it accelerated progress in materials science and computer science in a way that payed off the investment even if you don’t believe that manned space exploration is worthwhile. Whether or not you agree with this (and I doubt this counterfactual can be quantified with any confidence), I don’t think that the people who were working on it would have been able to make this argument convincingly at the time. I imagine that if you ran a cost-benefit analysis at the time, it would have found that a better investment would be to put money into incremental materials research. But without the challenge of having to develop insulators, etc., that work in space, there would have plausibly been fewer new materials discovered.
I think that here there is an important difference between SpaceX and facebook, since SpaceX is an experiment that just burns private money if it fails to have a long-term payoff, whereas facebook is a global institution whose negative aspects harm billions of people. There’s also a difference between something like Mars exploration, which is a simple and popular idea that’s expensive to implement, and more kooky vanity projects which consist of rich people imagining that their being rich also makes them able to solve hairy problems that more qualified people have failed to solve for ages (an example that comes to mind, which thankfully doesn’t have billions of dollars riding on it, is Wolfram’s project to solve physics: https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/04/14/the-wolfram-physics-project-a-one-year-update/). I think that many big ambitious initiatives by billionaires are somewhere in between kooky ego-trip and genuinely original/pareto-optimal experiment, but it seems important to recognize that these are different things. Given this point of view, along with the general belief that large systems tend to err on the side of being conservative, I think that it’s at least defensible to support experiments like SpaceX or Zuckerberg’s big Newark school project, even when (like Zuckerberg’s school project) they end up not being successful.
Space is a particularly complicated area with respect to EV. I imagine that a whole lot of the benefit came from “marketing for science+tech”, and that could be quantified easily enough.
For the advancements they made in materials science and similar, I’m still not sure these were enough to justify the space program on their own. I’ve heard a lot of people make this argument to defend NASA, and I haven’t seen them refer to simple cost/benefit reports. Sure, useful tech was developed, but that doesn’t tell us that by spending the money on more direct measures, we couldn’t have had even useful tech.
It also takes the careers of thousands of really smart, hard-working, and fairly altruistic scientists and engineers. This is a high cost!
VCs support very reckless projects. If they had their way, startups would often be more ambitious than the entrepreneurs desire. VCs are trying to optimize money, similar to how I recommend we try to optimize social impact. I think that prioritization can and should often result in us having more ambitious projects, not less.