Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Say Not "Complexity" - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 August 2007 04:22AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 August 2007 12:42:18AM 8 points [-]

Programming is not forgiving to the kind of errors Eliezer is talking about.

But it's a lot better to be unforgiving of yourself than to wait for reality to hit you over the head with it. It's better to notice in 10 seconds that you don't understand something, than to realize this only after 20 people spend 5 years and $10 million of venture capital and the "emergent behavior" you pinned your hope on fails to materialize. It's all too easy to program "chaos", "complexity", or "emergence", so long as you tell yourself that you need to program more of it before you reach Step 3 and Profit.