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fiddlemath comments on Rationality Quotes: February 2011 - Less Wrong
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Actually, that seems kind of fair. Something is a "failure to X" if it doesn't achieve X; something is a "failure" if it doesn't achieve some implicit goal. You can rhetorically relabel something a "failure" by changing the context.
Vision works well in our usual habitat, so we should expect it to break down in some corner cases that we can construct: agreed. For me to argue further would be to argue the meaning of "failure" in this context, when I'm pretty sure I actually agree with you on all of the substance of our posts.
I really do not want to argue about semantics either, but our agreed interpretation makes Niel's statement equivalent to "our visual system is not optimal for non-ancestral environments", which is highly uninteresting. I think the Dawkin's larengyal nerve example is much more interesting in this sense, since it points out body designs do not come from a sane Creator, at least in some instances (which is enough for his point).
Since we do not live in the ancestral environment now, I think the quotation could be just underlining how we should viscerally know our brain is going to output sub-optimal crud given certain inputs. Upvoted original.