No, it says that practical degrees of excellence are just fine and you don’t actually have to achieve philosophically perfect excellence to be sufficiently effective.
It’s the difference between not being able to solve an NP-complete problem perfectly, and being able to come up with pretty darn close numerical approximations that do the practical job just fine. (I think evolution achieves a lot of the latter, for example.)
thatguythere47, enunciating an important general principle.
Naturally not. Harry would only do something that reckless if it was to save a general of the Dark Lord on the whim of his mentor. ;)
I of course agree with thatguy, with substitution of ‘the most viable immediate’ in there somewhere. It is a solution to all sorts of things.
If Eliezer Yudkowsky, the author, is lauding this statement, I think we can rule this out as Harry’s solution.
As previously stated, Harry is not a perfect rationalist.
Neither is Eliezer Yudkowsky.
My philosophy is that it’s okay to be imperfect, but not so imperfect that other people notice.
I propose that it’s okay to be imperfect, but not so imperfect that reality notices.
Reality* notices everything.
*and Chuck Norris
No way! Chuck Norris and didn’t notice!
This is a cool-sounding slogan that doesn’t actually say anything beyond “Winning is good.”
No, it says that practical degrees of excellence are just fine and you don’t actually have to achieve philosophically perfect excellence to be sufficiently effective.
It’s the difference between not being able to solve an NP-complete problem perfectly, and being able to come up with pretty darn close numerical approximations that do the practical job just fine. (I think evolution achieves a lot of the latter, for example.)
I agree with your version, but “not getting caught” as a proxy for “good enough” is, at least to humans, not just wrong but actively misleading.
This variant of when all you have is a hammer is seen often enough to merit a name.
“When all you have is a powered-up Patronus, every problem looks like storming Azkaban is the answer”?
I meant something along the lines of “When your hammer is too darn impressive, everything begins to look like a nail.”