Welcome to LessWrong! You may want to introduce yourself in the Welcome Thread (though it’s getting a bit old and huge).
I don’t know what you mean by having “more bias towards the good and less towards the perfect”, so it doesn’t resonate with me :)
(I checked out your blog but it seems to talk an awful lot about the minutae of US politics, as a Frenchman I can’t relate much to those chain emails you seem to talk a lot about :P)
Sort of. Maybe I should have said (“better” instead of “good”) vs perfect. There is an attitude prevalent in many disciplines (and in some indisciplines) “optimization problems, theorems, whatever are always the greatest all purpose tools”, so you have utilitarianism, Pareto optimality, Arrow’s Theorem, or rather attempts to “fix” it, … but my semi-educated guess is in in trying to distil some problem inspired by the real world into an optimization problem, you have to put some of the terms into a Procrustean bed, so they come out stretched, or missing heads or feet, or something like that.
“Better” is the name of a recent book by the way. Anybody read it?
Welcome to LessWrong! You may want to introduce yourself in the Welcome Thread (though it’s getting a bit old and huge).
I don’t know what you mean by having “more bias towards the good and less towards the perfect”, so it doesn’t resonate with me :)
(I checked out your blog but it seems to talk an awful lot about the minutae of US politics, as a Frenchman I can’t relate much to those chain emails you seem to talk a lot about :P)
Practicality, I should think.
Sort of. Maybe I should have said (“better” instead of “good”) vs perfect. There is an attitude prevalent in many disciplines (and in some indisciplines) “optimization problems, theorems, whatever are always the greatest all purpose tools”, so you have utilitarianism, Pareto optimality, Arrow’s Theorem, or rather attempts to “fix” it, … but my semi-educated guess is in in trying to distil some problem inspired by the real world into an optimization problem, you have to put some of the terms into a Procrustean bed, so they come out stretched, or missing heads or feet, or something like that.
“Better” is the name of a recent book by the way. Anybody read it?