It seems like there may be a more general takeaway from what Hossenfelder is saying, which is that fields that should be driven principally by empiricism can be led astray by the development of a set of shared aesthetic preferences that is used as a barometer of a theory or technique's attractiveness.
Such ideas of "beauty" may begin as a useful shorthand, in that they initially incorporate experienced practitioners' intuition of what theories are more reasonable, based on the history of their field and their collective knowledge. But they are only useful for so long as they remain subordinate to actual empirical evidence in the ultimate judgement of a theory or technique's truthfulness.
But when the actual application of strong empiricism is difficult or expensive (or becomes so, as has been the case in theoretical physics over the past half-century), or just impossible, the aesthetic barometer can gradually supplant evidence entirely. This may be the true measure of a science's softness or hardness.
In the field of software engineering, there are concepts of "clean" and "beautiful" code and languages. But how rigorously are such terms defined? How closely does our subjective impression of a codebase's aesthetics mirror its actual quality on those metrics that should matter most, such as its performance, maintainability, quantity of defects, etc.?
Such ideas of "beauty" may begin as a useful shorthand, in that they initially incorporate experienced practitioners' intuition of what theories are more reasonable, based on the history of their field and their collective knowledge. But they are only useful for so long as they remain subordinate to actual empirical evidence in the ultimate judgement of a theory or technique's truthfulness.
But when the actual application of strong empiricism is difficult or expensive (or becomes so, as has been the case in theoretical physics over the past half-century), or just impossible, the aesthetic barometer can gradually supplant evidence entirely. This may be the true measure of a science's softness or hardness.
In the field of software engineering, there are concepts of "clean" and "beautiful" code and languages. But how rigorously are such terms defined? How closely does our subjective impression of a codebase's aesthetics mirror its actual quality on those metrics that should matter most, such as its performance, maintainability, quantity of defects, etc.?