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AspiringKnitter comments on Rationality Quotes March 2012 - Less Wrong
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If Eliezer Yudkowsky, the author, is lauding this statement, I think we can rule this out as Harry's solution.
As previously stated, Harry is not a perfect rationalist.
Neither is Eliezer Yudkowsky.
My philosophy is that it's okay to be imperfect, but not so imperfect that other people notice.
I propose that it's okay to be imperfect, but not so imperfect that reality notices.
Reality* notices everything.
*and Chuck Norris
No way! Chuck Norris <died 20 years ago/collided with a semi-trailer/stood on a claymore mine/accidentally swallowed a black hole> and didn't notice!
This is a cool-sounding slogan that doesn't actually say anything beyond "Winning is good."
No, it says that practical degrees of excellence are just fine and you don't actually have to achieve philosophically perfect excellence to be sufficiently effective.
It's the difference between not being able to solve an NP-complete problem perfectly, and being able to come up with pretty darn close numerical approximations that do the practical job just fine. (I think evolution achieves a lot of the latter, for example.)
I agree with your version, but "not getting caught" as a proxy for "good enough" is, at least to humans, not just wrong but actively misleading.