"Hello, world!"
The transcendentals in theory and in practice
My church recently concluded a series on “The True, Good, and Beautiful.”, a.k.a. the transcendentals. Pastor Dave provides the following definition for these three things:
Truth is that which corresponds to reality.
Goodness is that which aligns to its nature and its teleology.
Beauty is that which awakens.
Like everyone else, I often struggle to find the motivation to work. The thing that helps me the most is to recall my “Hello, world!” moment, the moment I had as a computer science student that made me realize there was something quite special about the field. I had just pressed control-enter in Jupyter Notebook and was watching the progress bar underneath the cell grow with each iteration of my model’s training loop. I was training a model, albeit just a toy one, for the very first time.
A “Hello, world!” program is traditionally the first thing that novice coders learn to write. If you can get your computer to say “Hello, world!” then you know that you have succeeded in using the most basic commands of your programming language. And once you do that, then the entire world is your oyster.
This feeling of possibility came much later for me—it didn’t happen until I trained my first model. Doing so is what awakened me. And then when I evaluated the model and saw its accuracy go from 20% to 80% (it worked!), I knew immediately this was something very cool. And that’s a feeling I hold on to strongly.
Pursuing the Good, Beautiful, and True as aesthetic ideas can be foolish and idealistic, so I advocate for a more grounded approach— which is to find these qualities in the work that you do.