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Notes -
Unfortunately, I’m not able to watch your videos right now, but I’ll give them a look when I can.
In general, while I do appreciate the fact that the beauty found in mathematics and the sciences is becoming more accessible, I still disagree for two reasons. First: as accessible as they might be becoming, I believe that there’s still a large gap between the number of people who can appreciate even a Numberphile video versus the number of people who walk through Grand Central Station and are awestruck.
And that leads me to my second reason: I am inclined to believe that the aesthetic experience that most people get from beautiful architecture is qualitatively different from that which they’d receive from, say, reading about advances in biology. Don’t you think that a medieval peasant is more likely to be floored and filled with the awe of God when they walk into a Gothic cathedral than when they are informed of the finer points of scholastic philosophy? Maybe I’m just typical-minding here, but I wager that for most people monumental and beautiful architecture just hits something primal in a way that more intellectual beauty does not. And if there’s a cross-over point where the latter sort of art does bear greater aesthetic fruit than the former, I would also suppose that it comes at a point inaccessible to the majority of the human population.
I do understand your position. Though I don’t deal in math nearly as advanced as you, there are times when, at the end of a long derivation, some elegant formula will pop out, and I’ll find myself floored. But I fear that it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to find this same joy.
(This is also a reply to @5434a)
I don't think I want to argue that there aren't any aspects of aesthetic preferences that are held universally enough to be objective. I just want to make the narrow claim that the common condemnation of 21st-century Western culture that it is particularly bad at producing beauty is questionable enough that it is completely dependent on idiosyncratic personal preferences that lie on top of these more universal considerations.
To do this, I gave an example of an idiosyncratic preference that I thought was within the bounds of reasonable that also judges modern, western society as exceptionally good at producing beauty. There are others that also suffice, some based on more earthy considerations that may feel more compelling to you. For example, it's not implausible that many medieval peasants may be more in awe of the Manhattan skyline or the Ground Zero memorial than a Gothic Cathedral. It's also not implausible that many might think the dramatically increased accessibility of natural beauty---Banff, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Iguazu Falls, things medieval peasants can't even dream of---is worth the cost of having cookie-cutter suburbia everywhere.
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