4 ms·

Assuming the title is a play on the paper "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences"[1][2] by Eugene Wigner. [1]: https://en.wikip

Assuming the title is a play on the paper "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences"[1][2] by Eugene Wigner. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness... [2]: https://www.hep.upenn.edu/~johnda/Papers/wignerUnreasonableEffectiveness.pdf https://www.hep.upenn.edu/~johnda/Papers/wignerUnreasonableE...

gavmor 1y ago
That may be its primogenitor, but it's long since become a meme: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=unreasonable+effectiveness https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=unreasonable+effectiven...
- -__---____-ZXyw 1y ago
  a. Primogenitor is a nice word! b. Wigner's original essay is a serious piece, and quite beautiful in its arguments. I had been under the impression that the phrasing had been used a few times since, but typically by other serious people who were aware of the lineage of that lovely essay. With this 6-paragraph vibey-blog-post, it truly has become a meme. So it goes, I suppose.
dsubburam 1y ago
I didn't know of that paper, and thought the title was a riff on Karpathy's Unreasonable Effectiveness of RNNs in 2015[1]. Even if my thinking is correct, as it very well might be given the connection RNNs->LLMs, Karpathy might have himself made his title a play on Wigner's (though he doesn't say so). [1] https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/
- throwaway314155 1y ago
  Unreasonable effectiveness of [blah] has been a thing for decades if not centuries. It's not new.
  - temp0826 1y ago
    It's an older version of "x hates this one weird trick!"
    - ayrtondesozzla 1y ago
      It is not at all, it's being misused here to make it feel like that. Wigner's essay is about how the success of mathematics in being applied to physics, sometimes years after the maths and very unexpectedly, is philosophically troubling - it is unreasonably effective. Whereas this blog post is about how LLM agents with tools are "good". So it was not just a catchy title, although yes, maybe it is now beibg reduced to that.
chongli 1y ago
It’s also funny to me because every time I encounter “unreasonable effectiveness” in a headline I tend to strongly disagree with the author’s conclusion (including Wigner’s). It’s become one of those Betteridge-style laws for me.

gavmor 1y ago

That may be its primogenitor, but it's long since become a meme: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=unreasonable+effectiveness https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=unreasonable+effectiven...

-__---____-ZXyw 1y ago
a. Primogenitor is a nice word! b. Wigner's original essay is a serious piece, and quite beautiful in its arguments. I had been under the impression that the phrasing had been used a few times since, but typically by other serious people who were aware of the lineage of that lovely essay. With this 6-paragraph vibey-blog-post, it truly has become a meme. So it goes, I suppose.

dsubburam 1y ago

I didn't know of that paper, and thought the title was a riff on Karpathy's Unreasonable Effectiveness of RNNs in 2015[1]. Even if my thinking is correct, as it very well might be given the connection RNNs->LLMs, Karpathy might have himself made his title a play on Wigner's (though he doesn't say so). [1] https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

throwaway314155 1y ago
Unreasonable effectiveness of [blah] has been a thing for decades if not centuries. It's not new.
- temp0826 1y ago
  It's an older version of "x hates this one weird trick!"
  - ayrtondesozzla 1y ago
    It is not at all, it's being misused here to make it feel like that. Wigner's essay is about how the success of mathematics in being applied to physics, sometimes years after the maths and very unexpectedly, is philosophically troubling - it is unreasonably effective. Whereas this blog post is about how LLM agents with tools are "good". So it was not just a catchy title, although yes, maybe it is now beibg reduced to that.

chongli 1y ago

It’s also funny to me because every time I encounter “unreasonable effectiveness” in a headline I tend to strongly disagree with the author’s conclusion (including Wigner’s). It’s become one of those Betteridge-style laws for me.