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GabrielDuquette comments on Rationality Quotes August 2011 - Less Wrong
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Comments (176)
Paul Graham
What's that bias called again ?
Are you implying those are not beautiful?
That was the intention, yes, and I expect that significantly less than 0.1% of humans would classify all of those examples as neutral or better in appearance if asked in a context with no significant priming on the matter.
It seems surprising that this is true. Why are functional things beautiful, even when they serve only their own purposes?
Perhaps a better word would have been 'elegant'.
Because beauty in design isn't some arbitrary metric different than the good design metric. It's what it feels like when you pattern match to 'good design'.
You might notice your aesthetic tastes in something change once you understand more about their design (I certainly have), and I doubt you'd see so much interest in 'carbon fiber' stickers if carbon fiber weren't associated with strong light high tech stuff.
This 'Art' thing seems to be an obvious counterpoint, but I suspect its just beauty wireheading as a result of goodhearts law.
My theory is that art is what happens when the design is to be artistic. For example, there might be books made to entertain people. You can find beauty in how well a book is written to be entertaining. Then you can start writing books specifically for that beauty. Then you find beauty in how well a book is written to be beautiful. Pretty soon, you end up with didactic books that are useless for entertainment, unless you're specifically into the beauty of didactic literature.
Because we're preprogrammed to find functionality aesthetically pleasing? Why are mathematical proofs beautiful?
I once asked a similar question (here). jimrandomh's reply was that having to satisfy constraints simply forces you to think harder about the problem, which increases the beauty of your solution. The analogy to wild animals doesn't hold up, which is lucky.
At this point the spirit of Kant compels me to say purposiveness (Deut. Zweckmässigkeit). Sorry, this isn't a real answer to your question.