= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Epictetus comments on Open thread, Mar. 23 - Mar. 31, 2015 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (181)
Calling things "an art, not a science" has always been a pet peeve of mine. And I've heard people say things like, "there's no best way to do it'. In particular, I'm taking a Responsive CSS course on Udacity and the guy said these things (if you listen closely, you could hear me cringe).
And then there's the idea that art is like inherently intuitive, whereas science isn't. I want to focus on the "art is inherently intuitive and not about breaking things down into components like science" part. My thought is that these people who say this are confusing their map for the territory. They may not know how to deduce what the perfect painting would look like, but that doesn't mean that it's not possible.
I know that there are different versions of these beliefs, and that I may be misunderstanding them. If so, please correct me. Anyway, what do you guys think?
To me it's shorthand for "It took years of practice to get good and I can't explain the process I use. The problem appears too complex for a scientific approach to be worth the effort. I certainly can't think of any polynomial-time algorithm and my experience has led me to doubt that one exists."
It's a caution for beginners. The expert is basically saying that getting good at it will take a lot of work and finding a good systematic approach is likely to be a dead end.
One can certainly brute-force the issue by creating every possible painting and comparing them. Whether this can be done efficiently is another matter altogether.