I recently came across an article arguing that NASA's budget should be cut.

With apologies to Dwight Eisenhower, the cost of one modern space shuttle is this: one and a half million lives lost for wont of anti-malarial bed nets. It is electricity to power a U.S. city of two million people for a year. It is nine hundred billion gallons of fresh drinking water produced by desalination...

Certainly appears to be a cut-and-dry decision, but it reminded me of another article:

I’ve realized why pessimism sounds smart: optimism often requires believing in unknown, unspecified future breakthroughs—which seems fanciful and naive. If you very soberly, wisely, prudently stick to the known and the proven, you will necessarily be pessimistic. No proven resources or technologies can sustain economic growth. The status quo will plateau. To expect growth is to believe in future technologies. To expect very long-term growth is to believe in science fiction. No known solutions can solve our hardest problems—that’s why they’re the hardest ones. And by the nature of problem-solving, we are aware of many problems before we are aware of their solutions. So there will always be a frontier of problems we don’t yet know how to solve.

Perhaps people fall on an optimism/pessimism spectrum.

The argument that we can give millions of people mosquito nets instead of launching a rocket is a difficult one to argue with. You mean to suggest that we don't save millions of people? The person refuting such an attack (an attack on NASA's budget for example) will require many more words to defend himself than the person making the assault. In politics, where your audience has a limited attention span and you have finite air time, the person who requires fewer words wins.

The moral decision is framed as a simple choice between two clear alternatives. If though, by induction, we carry this argument to every fiscal policy or personal financial decision it starts to sound a lot less reasonable. Why? Reality is much more complex than rockets or nets and morality is more sincere than just throwing resources at the less fortunate.

Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.

Two people may be equally concerned about impoverished individuals but depending on where they fall on the optimist-pessimist spectrum they may disagree on how to best expend their resources.

Some may not agree with NASA's budget but don't allow that specific example to spoil a general concept. Obviously, it requires faith to invest in unknown future technologies, especially when there is a more immediately beneficial alternative.

The intelligent facade of pessimism can easily be extrapolated into a weaponized 'holier than thou' reductionist morality. ______________________________________________________

https://rootsofprogress.org/why-pessimism-sounds-smart https://thetech.com/2010/04/09/nasap-v130-n18 https://bearblog.dev/studio/posts/24438/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUfjOTY0Fz8