4 ms·
elegant is fine. beauty and elegance aren't the same thing. >Characterizing this appreciation as perverse and inhuman is essentially taking offense to someone
by mlevental 7y ago
elegant 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.