Lost in Math?
<i>But complexity theory aims at describing the performance of A over the space of all problem instances and it does so by abstracting away from individual problem instances.</i><p>I appreciate the effort to extend the story into CS, but I wonder if you have to be familiar with the particular work he&#x27;s alluding to.  The charge (as leveled against theoretical physics) is not that some people do pure mathematical work for the sake of beauty.  The charge is that people who are <i>supposed</i> to be applying mathematics to reality are instead prioritizing mathematics and neglecting reality.  To extend the analogy to CS, he must be talking about researchers supposedly trying to model real systems but instead just chasing beautiful math, but he isn&#x27;t specific.  Is it obvious to people in the know who or what he&#x27;s talking about?<p>For practical programmers, I think the problem is the reverse of being &quot;lost in math.&quot;  Practical programmers use extremely general theoretical results because they <i>don&#x27;t want to do</i> math, not because the math is more beautiful.  If they applied the information they know about their particular problem, they could get more useful mathematical results, but since they want to stay as far away from (doing) theory as possible, they use whatever facts they remember from class, which are ironically the most purely theoretical ideas because those are the simplest and easiest to remember.