You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Ishaan comments on [Open Thread] Stupid Questions (2014-02-17) - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: solipsist 17 February 2014 05:34AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (136)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 21 February 2014 09:20:34AM *  0 points [-]

I didn't think about this part, because originally I was only thinking about math. Thank you for giving specific examples, so I can test my intuition to them.

Uhm... I'd say that "Δ . B = 0" doesn't trigger my feeling of awesomeness, however important it may be. Even "E = m * c^2" doesn't, and that has a lot of applause light connected with it. They are just too simple; they feel like "a + b = c".

On the other hand, I realized that if I don't know what the equation means, I can't decide whether it is good enough. So the meaning is a part of the utility function, but mathematical elegance is another part (the feeling of "oh, this is really equal to that?" like when the pieces of puzzle suddenly fit together) -- and I want the equations that satisfy both criteria.

Squark's examples are already great enough and probably all I need, so if you had some specific examples in mind, please post them here, but otherwise I already have what I wanted.