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by Cacti 3017 days ago
I hear this sentiment a lot lately, and I do not agree with it at all, you're basically just hand-waving the issue away and retroactively deciding what is a real world, practical problem or not after we've already found a solution to those problems. The NFL theorems are not inherently worthless, you are making them worthless because you are throwing away nearly all of the possible problem space, under the assumption that space is not relevant, but that is just a guess, you don't actually know.

I mean, yeah, sure, not knowing if we've hit the global minimum on some optimization problem may not matter as humans, because no one gives a damn, but that is a completely arbitrary line, not a mathematical one. Too often I hear people say "well, NFL is irrelevant" as an argument for why they are mathematically correct, or why their results are mathematically significant, and that's simply a load of crap. Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong, but you're basically just throwing darts at a dartboard.