Elegy for "Elegance"

I was informed last Friday that "elegant" has been buzzed to meaninglessness, no better than "the web 2.0." Bit disappointed as it was one of my favorite words and, for me, absolutely laden with meaning-- the ideal of moving only in ways that are massively effective rather than scratching and clawing together something that will work for now. Very Zen.

That it has gained traction as a buzzword doesn't bug me that much. Yesterday, teetering on the precipice of an improbably steep sand dune in a ridiculously lumbering DUC-boat looking Dune buggy, I heard a kid yell appreciatively, "Oh SNAP!" I was joined by other chucklers as this is not the sort of context we ourselves would deploy the phrase in (if at all)... but did I feel that our lexicon was in peril because some kid was scrambling up the verbal learning curve? No.

Even misappropriating a phrase is a nod to its influence. Chances are, we've seen some version of this in watching how the language evolved in our totalitarian cautionary tale of choice (V for Vendetta and Clockwork Orange for me). That a sentiment is viral to the point of buzzwordy, even at the expense of some ambiguity in use, is a comforting sign to me. We need more respect and devotion for elegant solutions.

Take scientific theories. If they hang together in a breathtakingly simple "why didn't I think of that?" way, your patron may demand his money back, but the theory itself has a lot of mileage. Evolution is elegant. If instead, they've got a lot of exceptions or convoluted rationale, we've jammed the wrong piece into the puzzle. Things may hold for now, but it won't be long before we find a more "elegant" explanation. Heuristics and biases research is not elegant.

As IP VC's, maybe we're best served tackling the concepts we find hardest to learn and internalize because chances are they could use a debugging.

In the process of searching for "elegance" at a meta-level, there is a risk that we'll need to scratch, hack, and otherwise proliferate crappy first drafts at a tactical, day-to-day level. Leo has a solid post describing why we need what I perceive to be "hybrid engines" and can't rely solely on motivation to move us, plus some tips to get the ball rolling and tide us over until our next breakthrough...