Why should we be interested in doing science, critical inquiry, mathematics or the like? Sure, we want to find out what the world is like, what’s true, and what’s real. That’s a grand ideal. But what is the subjective payout? What’s in it for you when you do this? — It sure isn’t money. It arguably shouldn’t be fame. And it’s increasingly less realistic to expect prestige from it, or even respect. So, why?
For me personally, the subjective reward of doing science is purely experiential. I like to think of it as the AC-BC approach to science and thought, which is short for absolute clarity, beauty, and control. The goal is a fleeting internal feeling (the real echo of the intrinsic reward), but it’s coupled to an ideal about the externalized product: the paper, the talk, the method, the manner of presentation, the words and concepts … all of it.
The absolute in AC-BC is there because we need at least one pompous intensifier, don’t we? Absolute also expresses a maximum (at least a temporal, local one) and alludes to something deeply metaphysical (but that’s just for the marketing).
The clarity is, to me, the most important in the bunch. In a sense, everything else can follow from there if done right. Clarity is to be maximized in thought and expression. It involves the degree to which a puzzle is solved or just better understood at what it is. It’s connected to a subjective impression of understanding, but really only counts to the extent that it can be communicated and shared. That’s why proper terminology, the right arrangement of examples, good visualization or other means of high-fidelity information transmission belong to clarity as well.
Beauty can arise from clarity. A thought, method, solution or approach can be beautiful because it is simple, or it can be elegant despite its complexity. It may be surprising at first that beauty should at all be a part of the science+thinking game, but the real subjective payoff, for me at least, comes from a sense of aesthetic pleasure in the creation, presentation and consumption of ideas.
The final ingredient, control, expresses that the process and the result should not be arbitrary, a one-off chance outcome, or something that just happened once and never after. This is not to deny the importance of spontaneous ideas and heureka! moments. But insights and ideas are less valuable, at least to me, if they are not harnessed, honed, refined many times, and perfected meticulously. To me, control is also about reproducibility and communicability (whence the connection to clarity). The true mastery is not to ace a single output, but to be able to control the process by which similar quality can be reached again and again, in a way that may even be transferable to other situations and shareable with others.
In sum, it’s the AC-BC that I want to get out of engaging with scientific ideas, formal models and conceptual analysis. The payoff of the AC-BC approach lies at a very low experiential level and that’s why I considered it most causal for the motivation to carry on and work hard. In this way, the AC-BC approach can be seen as the fun-factor behind the more ulterior objectives of understanding, improving, educating, enabling and serving.