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Torello comments on Rationality Quotes October 2014 - Less Wrong
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"While there are problems with what I have proposed, they should be compared to the existing alternatives, not to abstract utopias."
Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future (page number not provided by e-reader)
Huh? It would be more fair to compare proposals to other proposals, and existing things to other existing things.
Yes, compare existing proposals to existing proposals, as opposed to showing a flaw in one proposal and claiming that you have proven that it's bad when your alternative also is less than flawless.
That's just an argument for letting the status quo impose the Anchoring Effect on us.
It's an argument against the Nirvana fallacy. It's not saying that we should accept the status quo. Quite the opposite. It's saying that we should reject the status quo as soon as we have a better alternative, rather than waiting for a perfect one.
This depends on whether you are dealing with processes subject to entropic decay (they break apart and "die" without effort-input) or entropic growth (they optimize under their own power). For the former case, the Nirvana fallacy remains a fallacy; for the latter case, you are in deep trouble if you try to go with the first "good enough" alternative rather than defining a unique best solution and then trying to hit it as closely as possible.
Maybe it should. That's what Chesterton's Fence is.