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)
The hypothetical still applies, I think. Suppose minimizing K-complexity happened to be one's goal, then there are probably some steps that can be taken in its pursuit, and in any case it wouldn't be right to call it "foolish" if it's indeed the goal, even in the unlikely situation where nothing whatsoever can predictably advance it (maybe one should embark on a quest to find a Turing oracle or something). It might be foolish to think that it's a human (sub)goal though, where it would clash with what we actually seek.
Today's post, The Dilemma: Science or Bayes? was originally published on 13 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
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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