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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

I'd be careful with the inference you're making here. Tbh we could easily conclude that neither Newton nor Einstein explained "why". One could argue we still don't know and won't even after we have a TOE.

I'd take Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong" here. And I also think there's motivation for why scientists care so much about elegance.

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> 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 performing 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...

  > 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

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"!

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

> I'd be careful with the inference you're making here. Tbh we could easily conclude that neither Newton nor Einstein explained "why". One could argue we still don't know and won't even after we have a TOE.

Why be careful? What would be wrong with that conclusion (if it's true)? I'm comfortable with arriving at ambiguity:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_sufficient_reason

* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2023/04/what-is-law-of-natu...

I think Feser makes part of the argument for me (though it is clear he isn't a physicist) though I'd encourage you to read Asimov's argument.

There's the metaphysics problem in that all models are wrong. There's more than one competing version of physics (as will help you read Asimov's argument/rant). There's many valid ways to interpret "why" something happens. Physics is trying to understand the causal change of events so that we can generate a model that makes strong and accurate counterfactual predictions. Were that type of model "complete" would we have answered "why" things happen? Depends which "why" you're asking. You could still proclaim, as Fesser notes, "that's the rules God made", which isn't meaningfully different than "that's the way it is".

As for the PSR I'd claim everything does happen for "a reason". But is that reason always knowable? Certainly not. And arguably my namesake proved that there can't ever be any fully complete physics model.

So why be careful? Because my responses are limited, you must ask the right questions. ;)

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