By focusing on what is, you get a lot of convex losses on your theories that makes it very easy to converge. This is what prevents people from going funny in the head with that focus.
But the value of what is is long-tailed, so the vast majority of those constraints come from worthless instances of the things in the domain you are considering, and the niches that allow things to grow big are competitive and therefore heterogenous, so this vast majority of constraints don’t help you build the sorts of instances that are valuable. In fact, they might prevent it, if adaptation to a niche leads to breaking some of the constraints in some way.
One attractive compromise is to focus on the best of what there is.
By focusing on what is, you get a lot of convex losses on your theories that makes it very easy to converge. This is what prevents people from going funny in the head with that focus.
But the value of what is is long-tailed, so the vast majority of those constraints come from worthless instances of the things in the domain you are considering, and the niches that allow things to grow big are competitive and therefore heterogenous, so this vast majority of constraints don’t help you build the sorts of instances that are valuable. In fact, they might prevent it, if adaptation to a niche leads to breaking some of the constraints in some way.
One attractive compromise is to focus on the best of what there is.