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Will we never be done with this “unreasonable effectiveness” cliche - or am I missing something?



It's an unreasonably effective cliché.


I would go further and call it a meme at this point. And it's completely lost its effectiveness. After all, this article uses the phrase to mean exactly the opposite of what it originally meant, arguing that it is, in fact, _perfectly_ reasonable to expect that rebooting will solve your problem:

> I offer the following argument that restarting from the initial state is a deeply principled technique for repairing a stateful system [emphasis original]

Whereas, Wigner's original article on the "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" has this statement:

> The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.


HN needs a blanket ban on that and "considered harmful", and "rise and fall", and "for fun and profit". People are so uncreative.

Maybe we can make a browser extension that rewrites bad titles.


Not until it's considered harmful.


I find it quite sad how pervasive the 'considered harmful' line is. It wasn't even the original title of the article. 'A Case Against the Goto Statement' was a much better title.




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