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Comment by kevindamm | Hacker News Reader

I think there were some benefits that are difficult to quantify. I'm not talking about progress with technology, instead I am mostly thinking about the psychological effect that seeing Earth from the surface of the Moon provided. I believe it altered the perspective of almost everybody at the time.

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I think when one has to reach for this sort of vague, magical stuff it's time to pause and reconsider what one is trying to defend.

I don't think it altered much of anything. I don't think most people cared or gave any thought to it. I doubt it changed even the space fans. This sounds like wishful thinking from a group looking for an easy way to alter intractable human nature.

If you want something concrete, the development of GPS is directly linked to the space race

It was linked to unmanned space activities. We'd have had it without a manned space program.

And even more specifically, military spending. Similarly, development in rocketry was mostly focused around the V2 and the race to ICBMs. Similarly, jet engines were originally developed for fighter aircraft.

In a way, the manned space program was a way to try to whitewash the technology that was actually coming from cold war military spending.

I think you may enjoy reading about Mcnamara’s fallacy, coincidentally also related McNamara of the Vietnam war: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

I hope it makes you reconsider your position about disregarding non-quantifiable benefits.

> But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fo[u]rth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide. — Daniel Yankelovich, "Interpreting the New Life Styles", Sales Management (1971)

The McNamara fallacy is about inappropriate metrics against real, objective measures like "have we actually won the war?", not competition against vague considerations that aren't even objectively definable.

The "Overview Effect" thing also struck me as self-serving bullshit. It didn't seem to reflect anything I ever saw in the real world. It was something a space fan would like to be true, and so motivated reasoning took hold.

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