Comment by magicalhippo
10 hours ago
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...
[2]: https://www.hep.upenn.edu/~johnda/Papers/wignerUnreasonableE...
That may be its primogenitor, but it's long since become a meme: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=unreasonable+effectiven...
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.
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/
Unreasonable effectiveness of [blah] has been a thing for decades if not centuries. It's not new.
It's an older version of "x hates this one weird trick!"
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.