Stigler's Law of Eponymy | Hacker News Reader

Stigler's Law of Eponymy

en.wikipedia.org

26 pointssriku10 comments

After some deliberation, I think this mostly makes sense and shouldn’t be upsetting. If someone discovers/invents something important but isn’t capable of communicating that new thing for whatever reason then no one else can benefit from it. Later someone else independently discovers it and is capable of popularizing it and then people can actually benefit from it. So we are often naming things after the popularizers or people who figure out how to make a discovery widely applicable, and they are often at least or more important than the original discoverer.

I think your perspective underestimates the political or nationalistic aspects of naming things. Take the "Mach number" as an example. It is named after Ernst Mach by aerodynamics expert Jakob Ackeret, but it was Christian Doppler who first came up with the number in his research about the Doppler effect.

The issue is that for a while people in different countries called the Mach number something different depending on what country there were from. The Soviet Russians did not initially call it the "Mach number" due to Lenin's criticism of Mach's (unrelated) philosophical work. Some Soviet Russians called it the "Mayevsky number" after a Russian general who did related artillery work that used the concept, but eventually they called it the Mach number. Similarly, some French engineers called it the "Sarrau number" or "Moisson number" for a while before the term "Mach number" stuck. The British sometimes called it "specific speed", which to me is even more confusing, but they also switched to "Mach number" eventually.

My point is that names can be controversial, depending on what perspective you are coming from. Some people might call something a different name just to make it align with their worldview a little better.

I say this on the job to my tech colleagues who hate documenting accomplishments:

"Doing the job is half the work; the other half is advertising the work."

If our RB-trees fall in the cloud-forest and the customer never hears, how can our praises be sung?

Advertising is insufficient. It is ultimately a popularity contest that plays out for a particular work being accepted into the general consensus. It’s altogether a very sad state of affairs.

Sad but real. Success is a triumph of quantity of effort as much as quality thereof.

software is half programming, half planning, half documentation, and the rest is just luck

There is no luck. Reality is deterministic, even if the elements of determinism are so much smaller than quantum mechanics as to appear random.

There's a joke that mathematical results are named after the second person to prove them, the first person inevitable being Euler or Gauss, don't remember which.

So…why is this named for Stigler?

“Stigler himself named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of "Stigler's law" to show that it follows its own decree, though the phenomenon had previously been noted by others”

Seems like Stigler’s law follows its own rule

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