dlthomas comments on How to Not Lose an Argument - Less Wrong
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I don't know, there's a general sense in which ideals are almost never reached.
yeah. I interpreted it closer to "impossible to do better" than "impossible to be perfect". Looking back, the former is the more charitable interpretation.
I get this distinct feeling of having fallen for the fallacy of gray (cant be perfect == can't do better).
Idiomatically speaking, I think you can usually parse "can't be perfect" as a proxy for "should not aspire to the ideal, even if you accept that it can only be approached asymptotically".