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this is a pet peeve of mine - the use and abuse of humanist terms in stem. you see this a lot in a math - beautiful proofs, beautiful formulas, etc. I think it'
by mlevental 7y ago
this is a pet peeve of mine - the use and abuse of humanist terms in stem. you see this a lot in a math - beautiful proofs, beautiful formulas, etc. I think it's a really weird perverse even thing to look at something purely formal (mechanical) and call it beautiful - like brutalist architecture - I think it says something about the person making the claim (that they appreciate structure to an inhuman extent).
- cstpdk 7y agoThis is quite an elitist position to take. Why is it inhumane to find beauty in structures? Human society is riddled with structure
- sweeneyrod 7y agoI think the exact opposite; an aesthetic sense for proofs/code is usually required to be a good mathematician/ programmer.
- jlg23 7y agoHow should it have been phrased?
- tmountain 7y agoHumans naturally associate aesthetic qualities with all sorts of things. An appreciation for the things around you makes life richer. Maybe you don't like the word beautiful in this context (or feel like it's overused), but I wonder if you'd argue with using the word elegant to describe something like quicksort or a cleverly composed fibonacci function? Beauty takes many forms, and getting hung up on nomenclature seems silly TBH. Characterizing this appreciation as perverse and inhuman is essentially taking offense to someone else's enjoyment in something they appreciate. Seems pointless.
- mlevental 7y agoelegant is fine. beauty and elegance aren't the same thing. >Characterizing this appreciation as perverse and inhuman is essentially taking offense to someone else's enjoyment in something they appreciate. Seems pointless. it's a humanist critique of the use of language for rhetorical purposes...? the purpose is exactly to investigate what the significance of that particular word choice is.
- fnordsensei 7y agoDoes elegance describe well-defined observable properties that are independent of the observer? The point being, that if not, we're still within the domain of the subjective. It seems arbitrary to allow one set of subjective descriptions and disallow another.
- mlevental 7y agoelegant: "the quality of being pleasingly ingenious and simple; neatness." definitely less subjective than beautiful. and it's not arbitrary - i've alluded to an argument that can be made. i'm not going to spell it out because as usual no one on here is receptive anything that doesn't valorize stem.
- jjuel 7y agoBeauty: "a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight." So I cannot like the shape or form when I look at a proof or function? I cannot have my aesthetic senses pleased by looking at STEM field things?
- mlevental 7y agoi'm sorry but what is the shape or form of a proof? a function maybe - and calligraphy is certainly an art but what's wholly different from what the function encodes.
- tempWinHater 7y agoProofs have structure, i.e., shape or form.
- mlevental 7y agothey have a logical structure (claim, lemma, lemma, proof, etc.). they do not have a shape in the sense that the person i responded to intends.
- jakeinspace 7y agoSoftware is written and maintained by humans. Buildings are designed and lived in by humans (I happen to like many brutalist buildings). They are not purely formal, they need to have psychological appeal; pathos + logos.
- TrackerFF 7y agoI like elegance. Beauty is highly subjective, but I think elegance is more focused on simplicity and efficiency - though still tied up to beauty. Basically; If someone says that something is beautiful, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder. If someone shows that something is very simple but effective, it's much harder to argue against. If a line of code can replace a block of code efficiently, while still maintaining readability and cleanness, then that's something I would call elegant code.
- mlevental 7y agoelegant is a fine word: "the quality of being pleasingly ingenious and simple; neatness."
- ashtonbaker 7y agoI don't think it's clear at all that the natural grouping or division should be "STEM" vs "humanities". I think that mathematics belongs much closer to the humanities, especially philosophy and aesthetics, than to science or engineering.
- mruts 7y agoMost colleges give you a BA for mathematics not a BS, btw (to reinforce your point). Which I think makes sense. Conputer science for some reason usually nets you a BS though, despite not being related to science in the least bit (and almost the same as math).
- mruts 7y agoWait, so according to you, what can be called beautiful? Only people and maybe animals I guess?
- BasDirks 7y agoIsn't appreciation of structure _precisely_ human?