[throwawayjava]

> 4. I think academia suffers from this as well. Mathematicians and physicists always go on talking about "simplicity" and "beauty" as if their job is to deduce the simplicity of the universe.

There is a lot of value in building concise and easy-to-understand explanations of extremely complex phenomenon. Be careful not to throw out Occam's razor with the bathwater.

I tend to agree that the pure mathematics and theoretical physics communities get obsessive. The hero-worship of theory builders in those sciences compounds matters. However, pure math and theoretic physics are the worst offenders by far in the natural science. Theorists in both fields are typically a small minority even within their own departments. The other natural sciences and the engineering disciplines are much less infected.

Some of the over-obsession with beauty in mathematics has its roots in the Church's heavy patronage of mathematics and natural philosophy, as well as religion's overall grip on nearly every intellectual mind prior to the 20th century.