[mwint]

This is somewhat pedantic. With this logic, you could say that the purpose of a car is to get somewhere, and therefore the optimal speed is c.

But that would be a completely useless thing to say, because we can’t get your Camry to c. There is a whole system of tradeoffs that we all know exists.

Google could easily lower ”bad things” to 0 by shutting down tomorrow. The government could easily eliminate racism by nuking everyone. None of those are interesting or intellectually stimulating discussions.

“Optimal” is different than “perfect”. Everyone else here is talking about it from a system view.

[Sai_]

How is it pedantic? The framing is fully wrong.

We can't eliminate murders but do we say the optimal amount of murders is non-zero? Instead, the right framing is "we live with some numbers of murders in aggregate because eliminating all murders is impossible". It's not like we need some number of murders for society to survive.

The use of the word optimal implies some murders (or fraud) is necessary for society (or financial transactions).