Which neither means that beautiful math is necessarily describing the world inaccurately.
Taken to the extreme, the best description of the world is a long list of all events and facts. No beauty in that. Now science tries to compress this list of events to a simple model that explains it best. Like in statistics, one should aim for the simplest model predicting most of the data.
I'd argue that if you think of science as an attempt to compress all the data in the world, then OP's statement is obvious, and at the same time there's good reason to value beautiful (i.e. short & simple) explanations higher provided they generalize well.
You say "best", except a long list of events and facts has no predictive power, no way to infer what the future will be, only describes what the present is. The whole point of a model is to be able to predict the future. So in that sense, a long list of all events and facts is the worst description.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted; what you’re saying is true. A model whose length is the same as the data it is describing has no predictive power. A perfect model what be the size of the minimum program that prints out all of the events in the universe (that is, the program whose size matches the Kolmogorov complexity of the universe).
Taken to the extreme, the best description of the world is a long list of all events and facts. No beauty in that. Now science tries to compress this list of events to a simple model that explains it best. Like in statistics, one should aim for the simplest model predicting most of the data.
I'd argue that if you think of science as an attempt to compress all the data in the world, then OP's statement is obvious, and at the same time there's good reason to value beautiful (i.e. short & simple) explanations higher provided they generalize well.