Beauty, The Last Bastion

As more and more work gets outsourced to LLMs, skills that are difficult to convey through language become more and more valuable. Call it intuition, taste, a sense of beauty, or whatever, these aren't fluffy, abstract qualities; they're deeply human and hard to teach [1]. This is the first in a series of essays on beauty: exploring a sense of beauty as something innate yet cultivated that point us towards breakthroughs.

A Canary for Good things

Steve Jobs once said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Beauty is the harmony between form and function—a signal that something will work the way it should [2]. Beautiful things are good things.

Take aircraft design. Kelly Johnson, who led Lockheed's Skunk Works, believed that "an aircraft that looks beautiful will fly the same way." Similarly, Paul Dirac, a founder of quantum mechanics, argued that "a theory with mathematical beauty is more likely to be correct than an ugly one that fits some experimental data." And G. H. Hardy, "Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics." I could go on and on, mathematicians call elegant proofs or equations beautiful, hackers call good software beautiful, musicians, chefs, you get the point. It's no coincidence that people spanning time, space, and different fields all use the same word. They are all experiencing beauty, the exact same beauty we feel when we see, say, a sunset [3]. And this taste is the compass they use to create good things.

Cultivating the Sixth Sense

That being said, it's not that simple. While everyone can appreciate a beautiful landscape, it takes expertise to sniff out beauty at the innovative fringes in any particular field. It's the difference between admiring a polished diamond and seeing the potential in an uncut stone. The ability to envision something beautiful--whether hidden behind a cheap prototype or a seemingly chaotic collection of music notes--requires honing your craft.

Kelly and his engineers were world-class aerospace engineers, they honed their sixth sense through decades of designing and testing the best aircraft ever built; Kelly encouraged them to use it.

The same goes for food. Watch Anthony Bourdain or Lucas Sin dissect a dish even to the smallest details—the preparation, the technique, or even the dish's order in a tasting menu. Their years spent grinding in kitchens give them the ability to see things the average person can't. Their honed appreciation of the craft separates them from the endless stream of “eat food, make funny face” content [4].

Professionals, people that have honed their skills in any field have developed a sixth sense, noticing things that most people miss, and points them towards creating good things.

The Last Bastion

As AI automates more tasks, our human qualities become our most valuable assets. Among these, our sense of beauty--our taste--stands out as perhaps the last bastion of human advantage. After all, we make things for other humans.

So, hone your craft. Develop your taste, and trust it, even when data or logic might say otherwise. And when you see something truly beautiful in your field, pay attention--it's your best guide to your next breakthrough.

Notes

[1] Language is a lossy encoding for our thoughts, like a variational autoencoder we stochastically encode our thoughts to the latent space (language) which gets decoded by whoever we're speaking to. Importantly there are 2 stages of information loss, the speaker's thoughts -> language then language -> the listener's interpretation. Until we can beam thoughts directly to each other, or to AI, taste will remain hard to teach and impossible to replace.

[2] I want to explore “what is beauty?” in later essays, but beauty being a signal for function/truth is okay for now. As for why, fundamental truths about the universe seem to align with what we find beautiful.

[3] A study in the Journal of Neuroscience actually tested this. They took math graduate students, stuck them under an fMRI machine, and showed them various equations. The results were exactly what you'd expect, they found that areas of the brain, like those activated by a beautiful sunset, lit up when viewing elegant mathematical equations. Euler's identity, 1 +e^iπ = 0, was rated as most beautiful for anyone interested.

[4] Not to diss the “Mark Wiens” style content too much, they're alright, are probably good for the local economies. Plus our immigrant moms gotta watch something.