Will Crichton

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

and since you didn't name it, the only way folks have to talk about the theorem is "that theorem from Cauchy's recent paper", which evolves into "Cauchy's theorem" if it turns out to be important

so there's an underlying problem that needs to be addressed: how do you name things when you have tens of thousands of new things to name each year, but only a handful of them will be eventually important enough to *need* names?

I guess it's not clear to me that "you can't invent names for everything" is true in the first place. Programmers engage in the act of naming things all the time. (Maybe that just means we need namespaces, but for theorems.)

right, we have namespaces, and outside of namespaces we come up with bullshit names most of the time too that chapter i linked to has like twenty other theorems just like cauchy's theorem. only one of them ended up having a name.