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Cute title but the post didn't really address either reasonableness or effectiveness, but mostly claimed that the potential has not yet been realized. It's a pe
by andreasvc 9y ago
Cute title but the post didn't really address either reasonableness or effectiveness, but mostly claimed that the potential has not yet been realized. It's a pet peeve of mine to see these hackneyed joke titles referencing famous papers, "considered harmful" is another case in point. Let's just stick to descriptive titles.
- visarga 9y agoIt imitates an old paper title: "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" by Eugene Wigner (1960)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- backpropaganda 9y agoI thought Wigner was actually paying homage to Karpathy.
- visarga 9y agoFew know that Karpathy was using a previous meme.
- gipp 9y agoYes, that's exactly what the parent was referencing -- bloggers in the CS space looove referencing that one and the "Goto Considered Harmful" paper, and it's been really, really annoying and not clever at all for years.
- coliveira 9y agoIt is a modern disease of CS and related areas. They think it is better to be "cute" than descriptive, as a way to attract attention.
- gumby 9y agoIt's an element of all disciplines and, more charitably, one aimed at achieving two functions. One is to say "this is a paper from someone embedded in the discipline and who speaks the same vocabulary as you". The other is to say "and this is intended to expound on a subject parallel to X (or following on from X, as the case may be)" You can argue that this class of jargon is exclusionary or not. Agre, at UCLA, for example took the position that jargon was inherently a tool of dividing up groups into "in and out" (ironically he himself, with an MIT PhD, was very much in the in group). I tend to consider jargon just a tool like any other, typically valuable because you can save a lot of time and gain clarity by saying "O(n^2)" or "trie" and assume your reader understands it.