David_Gerard comments on Rationality Quotes March 2012 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Thomas 03 March 2012 08:04AM

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Comment author: David_Gerard 30 March 2012 10:55:14AM 1 point [-]

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.)

Comment author: Pavitra 31 March 2012 03:20:17PM 1 point [-]

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.