It makes our world look simple and understandable. Once such an element is fashioned, it creates the potential for such vast simplification that it opens the floodgates to invention and with lightning speed passes from discipline to discipline. We stop seeing what it took to construct this element and begin to see it as our essential building block. It is more abstract, and harder to get our arms around initially, but as we do learn to understand it, we see its essential simplicity and how it simplifies the world around us. We thus do treasure simplicity as the Shakers did.
Uniqueness implies rarity, which explains why parsimony is so important in knowledge.
The search for simplicity is fundamental to the work of our scientists and philosophers. It is described as parsimony. The quest for parsimony seems to be at the heart of the invention of knowledge by its greatest inventors. Nearly unanimously they viewed their task as the creation of unity using the fewest assumptions. Unique Artifacts turns this personal philosophy into a fundamental postulate - a general philosophical principle.