Comment by cubefox
2 days ago
It's a play on the famous essay 1960 "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences".
I agree this is getting old after 75 years. Not least because it seems slightly manipulative to disguise a declarative claim ("The Fourier transform is unreasonably effective."), which could be false, as a noun phrase ("The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform"), which doesn't look like a thing that can be wrong.
Also how most of the articles with this kind of title (those posted on HN at least) are about computation/logical processes, which are by definition, reasonable.