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>When a person says we shouldn't send people to space, is that also an implicit claim they know the ROI to be insufficient? Obviously. My point is that having

by swatow 12y ago

>When a person says we shouldn't send people to space, is that also an implicit claim they know the ROI to be insufficient? Obviously. My point is that having an opinion either way implies knowing the ROI is greater/less than some cutoff. >And insufficient against what measure? According to economic theory, the measure is the ROI of the next best project. But even if you don't subscribe to this theory, I imagine most people implicitly judge projects by some criterion that can be expressed as a cutoff of ROI. E.g. most people don't believe we should be building an interstellar spaceship right now, because the ROI on such a venture would be too low. >Postulation, iteration and testing, re-iteration, re-testing... A bit confused here. From what I can see, exploration with robots is the path of iteration, while sending humans is the grand scheme. Do you see things differently? For example, there have been four successful Mars rovers starting in 1997. Each one has been incrementally bigger and better. Furthermore, improvements in computer and robotics hardware will happen regardless of investment by space exploration (I'm assuming improvements in the Mars rovers largely piggypacked on existing robotics technology, experts feel free to correct me), while improvements in human space travel will require specific investment in these technologies.

digikata 12y ago
The ROI for a given bit of science over a one year span will almost always be a big negative. The ROI for "Science" over the last century is a huge portion of the GDP of the world. I'd assert that for optimizing some mostly known process, building an ROI model for investment decisions is valid, but for long-term exploration of the unknown it's meaningless because you can't build a predictable model for ROI.
- swatow 12y ago
  Where does "one year" come into it? ROI means the total discounted future returns divided by total present investment. Talking about ROI is nothing to do with short vs long term thinking. ROI should always be taken to mean expected ROI. Now I'm not dogmatic when it comes to probability. If you say that the probability distribution of a given projects future returns is not well defined, that's fine. Nonetheless, we implicitly always use something roughly similar to probabilities when evaluating uncertain outcomes. I'm not even saying that doing this explicitly with numbers is even useful. I'm just saying that there is no fundamental difference between saying "we should(n't) do X" and calculating the ROI of X.

by swatow 12y ago

digikata 12y ago

The ROI for a given bit of science over a one year span will almost always be a big negative. The ROI for "Science" over the last century is a huge portion of the GDP of the world. I'd assert that for optimizing some mostly known process, building an ROI model for investment decisions is valid, but for long-term exploration of the unknown it's meaningless because you can't build a predictable model for ROI.

swatow 12y ago
Where does "one year" come into it? ROI means the total discounted future returns divided by total present investment. Talking about ROI is nothing to do with short vs long term thinking. ROI should always be taken to mean expected ROI. Now I'm not dogmatic when it comes to probability. If you say that the probability distribution of a given projects future returns is not well defined, that's fine. Nonetheless, we implicitly always use something roughly similar to probabilities when evaluating uncertain outcomes. I'm not even saying that doing this explicitly with numbers is even useful. I'm just saying that there is no fundamental difference between saying "we should(n't) do X" and calculating the ROI of X.