… seems to have this belief that there is some perfect cure for any problem.
There may not be a single strategy that is perfect on it’s own, but there will always be an optimum course of action, which may be a mixture of strategies (eg dump $X into nanotech safety, $Y into intelligence enhancement, and $Z into AGI development). You might never have enough information to know the optimal strategy to maximise your utility function, but one still exists, and it is worth trying to estimate it.
I mention this because previously I have heard “there is no perfect solution” as an excuse to give up and abandon systematic/mathematical analysis of a problem, and just settle with some arbitrary suggestion of a “good enough” course of action.
It isn’t just that there is no “perfect” solution, to many problems there is no solution at all; just a continuing difficulty that must be continually worked through. Claims of some optimal (or even good enough) solution to these sorts of social problems is usually a means to advance the claimants’ agendas, especially when they propose using gov’t coercion to force everybody to follow their prescriptions.
That claims of this type are sometimes made to advance agendas does not mean we shouldn’t make these claims, or that all such claims are false. It means such claims need to be scrutinised more carefully.
I agree that more often than not there is not a simple solution, and people often accept a false simple solution too readily. But the absence of a simple solution does not mean there is no theoretical optimal strategy for continually working through the difficulty.
There may not be a single strategy that is perfect on it’s own, but there will always be an optimum course of action, which may be a mixture of strategies (eg dump $X into nanotech safety, $Y into intelligence enhancement, and $Z into AGI development). You might never have enough information to know the optimal strategy to maximise your utility function, but one still exists, and it is worth trying to estimate it.
I mention this because previously I have heard “there is no perfect solution” as an excuse to give up and abandon systematic/mathematical analysis of a problem, and just settle with some arbitrary suggestion of a “good enough” course of action.
It isn’t just that there is no “perfect” solution, to many problems there is no solution at all; just a continuing difficulty that must be continually worked through. Claims of some optimal (or even good enough) solution to these sorts of social problems is usually a means to advance the claimants’ agendas, especially when they propose using gov’t coercion to force everybody to follow their prescriptions.
That claims of this type are sometimes made to advance agendas does not mean we shouldn’t make these claims, or that all such claims are false. It means such claims need to be scrutinised more carefully.
I agree that more often than not there is not a simple solution, and people often accept a false simple solution too readily. But the absence of a simple solution does not mean there is no theoretical optimal strategy for continually working through the difficulty.