Comment by simplyluke

I've never understood this hyper-utilitarian perspective. It just seems divorced from what emotionally inspires most people.

Most of what people find inspiring doesn't directly provide a lot of objective utility, and is often quite dangerous for the individuals who choose to participate. Reaching the highest peaks in the last century, antarctic expeditions, pushing the limits of racing vehicles, attempting a sub two hour marathon, and athletes defining new tricks and styles in extreme sports are all objectively pretty useless in terms of their direct outputs -- and yet I find it all a whole lot more inspiring than my computer getting twice as fast, even if the latter is of way more objective utility to my life.

Min-maxing ROI in a spreadsheet just doesn't do it for me in the same way. There's absolutely a place for that and in a world of limited resources it should be how we spend most of our effort, and it is! The amount of money spent on efforts like this is _tiny_ at the scale of nations, and is certainly a much smaller and better use of funds than wars and corruption.