If always finding perfection is impossible, striving to find it and moving closer to it at every opportunity isn't.
"Striving to find it" and "moving closer to it at every opportunity" can be very different things.
When the "perfection" in question is something that you know is impossible to achieve (and in any given nontrivial case, you know you'll be unable to establish you've achieved it even if by chance you did), establishing it as your goal - which is what "striving to find it" is - is foolish.
On the other hand, finding simpler models certainly is a good idea. But it's good not because it gets us "closer at every opportu...
Today's post, The Dilemma: Science or Bayes? was originally published on 13 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Failures of Eld Science, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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