Perfection is a point on the horizon — a direction in which to travel. It is not a destination, not a place you will reach. It can be useful as a guiding principle or hope, but that should not be confused with reality.
The messiness, the incomprehensible complexity of the real world is a wonderful thing in its own right, just as perfection can be a wonderful thing. The problem arises when we try to judge one by standards of the other.
Usually, we judge reality by our notions of perfection, because the perfection is much simpler for us to conceive. It is a useful exercise to instead judge perfection by the standards of reality.
We are infected with the notion of the ideal, of perfection being a single, definitive, pure thing — the statue in Plato's cave. But our observations never quite match up. We think of reality as some crude approximation of the ideal, but I think the ideal is a crude approximation of reality. The smooth graph never quite matches the data because the graph is wrong.
Generalizations are useful, certainly. If reality agrees with some mathematical model much of the time with minimal error, then that model could be good for making predictions. But that doesn't mean the model is Truth. There is nothing stopping new data appearing which contradicts our precious model.
That's what a good scientist seeks — not confirmation of existing theory, but contradiction demanding a new explanation. We want our models to be wrong, because that provides an opportunity to learn.
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