NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8112275" data-attributes="member: 6790260">And if I were saying that elegance were inherently bad, this would be a great argument against my position.But I'm not saying that. I have repeatedly and explicitly said that I'm not saying that. I have repeatedly said that "elegance" (using my own terms, of course) is a perfectly valid consideration and one that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.What I am saying is that "elegance" has been elevated above empirical adequacy (as van Fraassen would put it). That equations which have nice properties like smoothness or absence of singularities or infinite differentiability, but which sacrifice some amount of ability to accurately and precisely predict empirical data, are being prioritized over equations which do accurately and precisely predict the empirical data. And, specifically, that this priority is being assigned because the former equations are more elegant than the latter, and treating any challenge to that as self-evidently ridiculous.Consider, for instance, the theories of light that held before Michelson–Morley. Based on common sense and comparison to all other waves of which we had knowledge (all mechanical waves) required a medium. It was, originally, shockingly inelegant to suggest that there was some second, "new" kind of wave that didn't need a medium (but could still pass through one), hence the long-term sticking power of the aether models despite continual concerns and problems. The adherence to the "luminiferous aether" until all possible avenues of escape had been eliminated was not driven by the empirical adequacy of such theories, which stumbled repeatedly and required multiple ad-hoc modifications to fix, but rather by the desire to avoid the loss of elegance. It resulted in quite a lot of wasted time and, frankly, dodgy science--something that even its late-stage proponents (like Sir Oliver Lodge) had to admit looked bad.That is what I am arguing against. Stridently advocating for a structure regardless of any practical design consequences it has, on the basis that its aesthetics, whatever those aesthetics may be, are superior. My concerns would apply just as much to a stridently pro-keyword approach, if anyone were actually advocating that, as it does to a stridently pro-centralization approach, which is commonly advocated both here and elsewhere. (Seriously, every single thread anyone ever starts about making a 4e heartbreaker, you're gonna get a third or more of the responses advocating for either all powers from a given source being condensed into a single pile, or all powers in the whole game condensed into a single pile, not because that would be more effective to play nor because it would be easier to design, but because single piles are presumed to be self-evidently "better" than separate piles. When one naturally points out that build differences would become extremely difficult to implement in such a system--e.g. every power could easily have 4 or more build-specific clauses in it, making them incredibly bloated--these concerns are flatly dismissed as unimportant compared to the importance of collecting all plausibly-similar options together in a single list.)Elegance may be a useful heuristic--or it may be a stumbling block to admitting that we really DO have more to learn about a subject. Pretending that it is always a useful heuristic--or, as I'm asserting people are doing, pretending that it is not only useful but more important than any other considerations unless they are unequivocally overwhelming--is not better than pretending it is totally useless and should always be ignored.Elegance is good to have. All else being equal, it should be pursued. We should never forget that all else is often NOT equal.</blockquote>

Verification