[thinkr42]

It is remarkable how frequently “unreasonable effectiveness” is thrown around.

[nerdponx]

It's a deliberate riff on "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences", in the same vein of declaring something "considered harmful."

[thinkr42]

That is something I hadn’t thought of before

[tomrod]

I must be missing something -- I have never considered the "unreasonable effectiveness" and "considered harmful" to be equivalent?

[jasode]

>I have never considered the "unreasonable effectiveness" and "considered harmful" to be equivalent?

I didn't downvote you but as an fyi...

When gp wrote "in the same vein of", he wasn't saying the phrases meant the same thing. He was pointing out that they are the same classification of rhetorical device which some call a "snowclone". (See examples.[1])

The "unreasonable effectiveness of <x>" is re-used as a text template similar to "<x> considered harmful".

For another timely example, the current #1 story on HN is ""Debugging Emacs, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love DTrace"". I think many readers will recognize it as a snowclone of the Kubrick film title "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"

The snowclone is: "<X> or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love <Y>".[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone#Notable_examples

[2] More examples of previous HN submissions that used that Strangelove snowclone: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=or%20%22how%20i%20learned%20to...)

[tomrod]

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks -- and thanks for teaching me about "snowclone".

[buboard]

for the sake of completeness, both are good reads

https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.p...

https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf

[adrianhel]

"The unreasonable effectiveness of ___" and "___ considered harmful" titles are copied a lot. They are not equivalent in any way.

[swagasaurus-rex]

Perhaps it's the educated equivalent of "You'll be amazed at this one amazing trick!"

[backpropaganda]

We embrace that as well: https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.5997