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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine how much steeper the learning curve would be in medicine or law if they used the same naming conventions, with the same number of layers to peel back:

I she kidding? Off the top of my head: diseases named after people. Parkinson's disease. McArdle's disease. Bell's Palsy, Hodgkin's Lymphoma, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_anatomical_parts...

In Law, precedents are referred to by plaintiff and defendant names: Smith vs. Klein. There are laws named after people, e.g. in the US. Kirsten's Law; Mann Act; Wetterling Act; Sonny Bono Copyright Extension; ...

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Yeah, I laughed when I read that sentence. Although some rules in law have naming conventions that tell you something about the underlying rule (for example, the merger doctrine, or assault with a deadly weapon), a huge number of rules are named after the case that created the rule--or, in other words, just a person or company's name. So in administrative law, you might apply Chevron deference, or say that a post-hoc rationalization poses a Chenery problem. And, of course, sometimes lawyers disagree about what case created or recognized a rule, so you'll have some people calling something Auer deference, with others calling it Seminole Rock deference.

Right, this is a ridiculous argument.

Wikipedia catalogues two different lists of eponyms in medicine: diseases and symptoms!

“Being awarded an eponym is regarded as an honor: "Eponymity, not anonymity, is the standard."”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_diseases

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_medical_sign...

The whole argument seems to be a plea for better mnemonics, but "clearer" meanings aren't often that much clearer because of the ambiguity introduced (and often hidden).

When law does use descriptive terms it's actively damaging to lay people. Too many laws are written where common words mean something similar to but importantly different from what they mean in the field. So then as a layperson you think you know what is legally required to do, but (surprise!) you don't.

This is why in programming, we're so often suggested to name new things non-descriptive terms. As you replace things and split things out and combine them together, you introduce tons of ambiguity if you name things too descriptively.

I'd read the evolution of math to name things how they do to be a collective choice for precision, rather than a move for people's egos.

Using names which mean something is impractical. The whole point of a name is to have a symbol so that we don't have to mention the meaning. The meaning is what the symbol invokes by association, not what it contains literally. The meaning is verbose, far more so than the symbol, and trying to capture meaning in names creates unwieldy, verbose names that far far short of capturing all the meaning.

We include meaning-words in names. That's why it's "Bell's palsy" and "Feigenbaum constant", and not just "Bell's" or "Feigenbaum".

Such shortenings are possible in a narrowly established context surrounding an informal conversations.

A lot of medical and legal terms are literal in some way, but Greek or Latin, so I don't know how much that helps.

I guess historians have an impossible job!

Having not read the article, is it possible she’s arguing the similar notion of erasing history because it’s psychologically unbearable for some people?

No, she is not. Read the article and please stop fitting whatever you don't like into your world view.

Yeah, that didn't pass the laugh test.

My mother always joked you could tell that elastin got named by an assistant while the doctor was out sick.

I always wanted to propose my own "Reuben's Law" (named for me) -- no more laws shall be named after dead children.

In medicine they are often named after the first (documented) patient, not the discoverer.

"Often", here, should be read as "quite rarely".

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