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It seems like there may be a more general takeaway from what Hossenfelder is saying, which is that fields that should be driven principally by empiricism can b

It seems like there may be a more general takeaway from what Hossenfelder is saying, which is that fields that should be driven principally by empiricism can be led astray by the development of a set of shared aesthetic preferences that is used as a barometer of a theory or technique's attractiveness. Such ideas of "beauty" may begin as a useful shorthand, in that they initially incorporate experienced practitioners' intuition of what theories are more reasonable, based on the history of their field and their collective knowledge. But they are only useful for so long as they remain subordinate to actual empirical evidence in the ultimate judgement of a theory or technique's truthfulness. But when the actual application of strong empiricism is difficult or expensive (or becomes so, as has been the case in theoretical physics over the past half-century), or just impossible, the aesthetic barometer can gradually supplant evidence entirely. This may be the true measure of a science's softness or hardness. In the field of software engineering, there are concepts of "clean" and "beautiful" code and languages. But how rigorously are such terms defined? How closely does our subjective impression of a codebase's aesthetics mirror its actual quality on those metrics that should matter most, such as its performance, maintainability, quantity of defects, etc.?

hliyan 8y ago
For me, "beauty" is an inverse function of entropy or disorder. The fewer the arbitrary constructs in a system (or theory), the more "beautiful" (or more accurately, elegant) it is. After all, the laws of physics are about finding recurring patterns in a mass of random observations. So I think it's reasonable to prefer theories that can explain a large number of random observations with a fewer number of laws. However, I suppose the argument of the book is that when we try to make our theories more simpler than reality actually is, we have a problem? Edit: to try to answer your question, the goal of elegance/beauty in code is entirely about comprehensibility and not utility, is it not?
- okket 8y ago
  "As simple as possible, but not simpler." (often credited to Einstein) See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor That said, the whole field of science journalism and popular science book writing lives from violating these rules, making things much simpler than they actually are. But then again, the average person is a) not in charge of the physics experiments and b) tries to use these as a reference in a scientific paper is up for a surprise.
- aj7 8y ago
  Experimental physics is not “a mass of random observations.”
  - hliyan 8y ago
    I wasn't referring the experimental physics. I was referring to how we perceive the wold in the absence of physical laws.
sgt101 8y ago
>In the field of software engineering, there are concepts of "clean" and "beautiful" code and languages. Anyone who has sat in a code review with two "true believer" "software engineers" will know how subjective and poorly justified, yet fanatically defended these positions are - in fact anyone recruiting will know how damaging having a true believer in your team can be (two is a genuine disaster). Software isn't engineering because we can't measure anything much about it apart from compression, speed and detected defects so far. Speed and compression don't matter for 99% of modern software; we have laptops with 32Gb memory, servers with 1/2 Tb and scores of Ghz cores - the need to write in C has disappeared for almost everyone. Detected defects is problematic because as soon as you start counting them people stop submitting stuff to the code repository until they have removed everything that they can find. That's a problem because they hold onto it for weeks and meanwhile if it had been in the repo everyone would have found twice as much. Also the team stop reporting the stuff they have found and just talk about refactoring; also the team gets less keen on testing.. So what do we measure ? We can't tolerance it; we can't deduce structural properties; we can't deduce lifecycle (recycling, onward development) properties. We don't know why the core engineering decisions got taken because often the core decisions happen at 3:17 on Tuesday and no one even notices at the time, or remembers later. It's not engineering, not close.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  I don't agree with the argument that measurement is the soul of engineering. Even if I did, the argument that we can "only" measure 3 things is itself silly: there is a boundless sea of measurements one can take about everything and anything. Engineering is the selection of technological solutions to social and business problems, made after some analytical process rooted in mathematical and physical laws, from a set of defensible alternatives, under economic and ethical constraints. Regardless of what our gatekeeping cousins might wish to believe, software engineering fits this definition. That many people working on software do not behave like engineers does not change the fact that it exists. That there is rarely any legally-enforced guild structure to regulate the membership of the profession does not change the fact that it exists. Civil engineering existed thousands of years before the word engineering was even invented.
sriku 8y ago
This article [2015] is of relevance in this context. It refers to the work of Richard Dawid who's apparently laying out an expanded view of science beyond the commonly accepted Popperian perspective centered on falsifiability. In his 2013 book "String Theory and the Scientific Method" he apparently identifies "three kinds of “non-empirical” evidence that Dawid says can help build trust in scientific theories absent empirical data." Of course, this is not an accepted view yet, but it can lend some balance to the conundrum resurfacing today. [2015] https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-and-philosophers-debate-the-boundaries-of-science-20151216 https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-and-philosophers-d...
Koshkin 8y ago
Beauty is in the eyes of the developer.

hliyan 8y ago

For me, "beauty" is an inverse function of entropy or disorder. The fewer the arbitrary constructs in a system (or theory), the more "beautiful" (or more accurately, elegant) it is. After all, the laws of physics are about finding recurring patterns in a mass of random observations. So I think it's reasonable to prefer theories that can explain a large number of random observations with a fewer number of laws. However, I suppose the argument of the book is that when we try to make our theories more simpler than reality actually is, we have a problem? Edit: to try to answer your question, the goal of elegance/beauty in code is entirely about comprehensibility and not utility, is it not?

okket 8y ago
"As simple as possible, but not simpler." (often credited to Einstein) See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor That said, the whole field of science journalism and popular science book writing lives from violating these rules, making things much simpler than they actually are. But then again, the average person is a) not in charge of the physics experiments and b) tries to use these as a reference in a scientific paper is up for a surprise.
aj7 8y ago
Experimental physics is not “a mass of random observations.”
- hliyan 8y ago
  I wasn't referring the experimental physics. I was referring to how we perceive the wold in the absence of physical laws.

sgt101 8y ago

>In the field of software engineering, there are concepts of "clean" and "beautiful" code and languages. Anyone who has sat in a code review with two "true believer" "software engineers" will know how subjective and poorly justified, yet fanatically defended these positions are - in fact anyone recruiting will know how damaging having a true believer in your team can be (two is a genuine disaster). Software isn't engineering because we can't measure anything much about it apart from compression, speed and detected defects so far. Speed and compression don't matter for 99% of modern software; we have laptops with 32Gb memory, servers with 1/2 Tb and scores of Ghz cores - the need to write in C has disappeared for almost everyone. Detected defects is problematic because as soon as you start counting them people stop submitting stuff to the code repository until they have removed everything that they can find. That's a problem because they hold onto it for weeks and meanwhile if it had been in the repo everyone would have found twice as much. Also the team stop reporting the stuff they have found and just talk about refactoring; also the team gets less keen on testing.. So what do we measure ? We can't tolerance it; we can't deduce structural properties; we can't deduce lifecycle (recycling, onward development) properties. We don't know why the core engineering decisions got taken because often the core decisions happen at 3:17 on Tuesday and no one even notices at the time, or remembers later. It's not engineering, not close.

jacques_chester 8y ago
I don't agree with the argument that measurement is the soul of engineering. Even if I did, the argument that we can "only" measure 3 things is itself silly: there is a boundless sea of measurements one can take about everything and anything. Engineering is the selection of technological solutions to social and business problems, made after some analytical process rooted in mathematical and physical laws, from a set of defensible alternatives, under economic and ethical constraints. Regardless of what our gatekeeping cousins might wish to believe, software engineering fits this definition. That many people working on software do not behave like engineers does not change the fact that it exists. That there is rarely any legally-enforced guild structure to regulate the membership of the profession does not change the fact that it exists. Civil engineering existed thousands of years before the word engineering was even invented.

sriku 8y ago

This article [2015] is of relevance in this context. It refers to the work of Richard Dawid who's apparently laying out an expanded view of science beyond the commonly accepted Popperian perspective centered on falsifiability. In his 2013 book "String Theory and the Scientific Method" he apparently identifies "three kinds of “non-empirical” evidence that Dawid says can help build trust in scientific theories absent empirical data." Of course, this is not an accepted view yet, but it can lend some balance to the conundrum resurfacing today. [2015] https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-and-philosophers-debate-the-boundaries-of-science-20151216 https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-and-philosophers-d...

Koshkin 8y ago

Beauty is in the eyes of the developer.