> BTW. I hope we're not just arguing about whether the word "perfect" was used in the article correctly.
I guess I'm trying to make a point about theory vs. practice. I think theorists tend to be pretty cavalier about writing down models and waving away the fine details, whereas practitioners tend to appreciate how hard it is to get the details right.
As an example, the literature on finance is full of this stuff. There's a whole body of literature on how to create an optimal stock portfolio under various constraints assuming you know the joint distribution of individual stock returns. It turns out that fitting that distribution in a sensible way is extremely difficult to do. The theorists came up with a `clever' model that's mostly useless in practice, but everyone still insists that it has `applications' in finance.
Personally I find theory really interesting, and beautiful in its own right. It just annoys me when the usefulness of that theory gets overstated.
I guess I'm trying to make a point about theory vs. practice. I think theorists tend to be pretty cavalier about writing down models and waving away the fine details, whereas practitioners tend to appreciate how hard it is to get the details right.
As an example, the literature on finance is full of this stuff. There's a whole body of literature on how to create an optimal stock portfolio under various constraints assuming you know the joint distribution of individual stock returns. It turns out that fitting that distribution in a sensible way is extremely difficult to do. The theorists came up with a `clever' model that's mostly useless in practice, but everyone still insists that it has `applications' in finance.
Personally I find theory really interesting, and beautiful in its own right. It just annoys me when the usefulness of that theory gets overstated.