Well, I'm not buying K-complexity goal in particular, which is why I said only "perfection"; I'm making a different point. The thing about goals is that they are not up for grabs, they can't in themselves be foolish, only actions or subgoals can be foolish. Foolishness must follow from incongruity with some higher goal (that cares nothing for efficiency or probability of success, mere instrumental drives), so if one's goal is to optimize some hard-to-optimize quality whose level of optimality is also hard to gauge, that's still what one should do, if only by taking hard-to-arrange accidental opportunities for improvement.
I guess we're talking past each other then, because I (plausibly, I think, given the context) took your original reply to still refer to the Kolmogorov complexity goal. My beef is with that particular formulation, because I find it sometimes to be illegitimately overused for (what amounts to merely) emotional effect. I'm all for working on optimizing imperfectly-defined, hard-to-pin-down goals! Been doing that for a while with my life. (the results are mixed)
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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