Systemic virtues as a foundation for a general theory of design elegance
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Recent discussion and research in systems engineering have highlighted the need for a principled approach to attaining elegance in engineered systems, in order to enhance product value and reduce life cycle risks. In this paper, we analyse the “elegance factors” pertaining to designed systems from the perspective of the philosophy of value (axiology) and characterize the elegance factors as “systemic virtues,” analogous to philosophical models of the factors pertaining to the “goodness” of persons and scientific theories. We defend the possibility of the existence and discovery of general systems laws that could ground a general theory of design elegance, and report on our strategy and progress in developing methods for discovering such laws and for developing such a theory.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it