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?
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?