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Re:Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than an... by datsci_est_2015 on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @03:48PM (#50371293)
> And I also think there's motivation for why scientists care so much about elegance.

It's an intuition you build pretty early on in science courses in undergrad, somewhat related to Occam's Razor. It's why the optimal packing of 11 squares[1] is so unsatisfying. It flies in the face of all the intuition we've built that simple (and symmetric) solutions are more likely to be true. Machine learning practitioners use this intuition when doing model selection as well: the simpler model (i.e. with fewer free parameters) is less likely to be overfit to the data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_packing#/media/File:Pac...

Re:Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than an... by godelski on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @04:25PM (#50371793)

  > It's an intuition you build pretty early on in science courses in undergrad
I think this intuition is much harder to reach than many think, which causes the frequent over confidence [0]

  > It's why the optimal packing of 11 squares is so unsatisfying.
Idk, maybe one of those "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" kinda things?[1]

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hV41QEKiMlM

[1] https://pingyou.com/papers/eleven-squares.pdf

Re:Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than an... by datsci_est_2015 on Friday November 06, 2026 @07:41AM (#50391651)
Does your [1] link not simply prove my point that humans will search for something satisfying symmetric given a result that is less satisfying and less symmetric?

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" - but let me just quickly find an alternative representation of the solution that is much more symmetric and satisfying. There, "beautiful"!

Re:Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than an... by godelski on Friday November 06, 2026 @11:42AM (#50394741)
Yes, but that "satisfying symmetric" (I'd say elegant since symmetry isn't required) is meaningful and finding these elegant solutions has been shown to be important for solving further problems. Math and physics aren't as concerned with the answer as they are with understanding