Will Crichton

Picking good names is a crucial tool for thought. A good name communicates or reminds you of the idea underneath an abstraction. Naming something after a person is the 2nd laziest form of naming. First is "Type 1" and "Type 2" error, the dumbest naming scheme ever invented.

Extended thoughts. Naming conventions that need to die: http://willcrichton.net/notes/naming-conventions-that-need-to-die/ …

What typically happens is that folks publish a paper containing some idea, and it turns out that idea is Important, and without a name for that idea folks just start calling it "Foo's theorem" or whatever

in both physics and math part of the problem is that there are so many new things being discovered that it's hard to know in advance which ones are important enough to name

This is a fair criticism. The wording is too harsh and definitely ascribes too much intent to what can be a coincidence of history. (When writing the post, I was still in a blind rage from thinking about Type 1 errors.) I've updated the wording to be less incendiary.

Thanks, but it still kind of ascribes intent here -- while in many cases (e.g Avogadro's number) the naming is done as a way to recognize their contribution, in many others it's literally just the gradual evolution of "that theorem that Cauchy wrote that we like"

as in, simply saying "we should stop naming things after people" isn't enough because this is a *symptom* of a paradox: you can't invent names for everything, so you need to come up with names for important things, but you don't know what's important until others talk about it