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Comment by jdthedisciple | Hacker News Reader

Currently wondering whether I welcome or dislike this recent trend of memeizing research paper titles ...

Recent? This has been going on forever. You probably only notice them more now because due to the explosion in ML research, this stuff bubbles to the top more often in recent years.

You think this has been going on forever? You probably don't realize the shift in professionality because you experienced the degradation in real time.

> shift in professionality

How did it happen, in your opinion?

There is no shift in the professionalism curve. Good researchers are still good and bad ones are still bad in that regard. But if you 10x the number of researchers and/or papers in a field, the bottom 10% will seem like they are a lot more common. Especially for people outside the field who have no way of discerning high quality from low quality papers, which is all too common on HN.

Certainly for years. I remember a biochemistry review paper titled "50 ways to love your lever" about, well, biological levers but of course a pun on the 1975 song https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Ways_to_Leave_Your_Lover

edit: https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(00)81332-X

I'm sure I read an old article by Dijkstra about connected graphs structure that was titled "wheels within wheels" or used the term inside.

Unfortunately I can't find it by either searching or using the public LLMs, because there are too many results about the shortest path algorithm and anything else about dijkstra is lost.

As long as it's not "clickbaitizing" I personally do welcome it. This one is a bit on the edge though...

For me it falls under "if you have to say it in the name it ain't so", like Natural Life Soap Co. or Good Burger Co. So I see meme paper titles as no different than calling your paper New Watershed Moment Paper Breaks Popularity Barrier To Confirm A>B.

If the very first impression you want to convey is how you feel you need to circumvent any logical assessment of you then it's not you leading with your best foot and that's what category you belong in. I chalk it up to the scientists who want to spread a neediness for external authority persona in every breath—your assessment is not required for this one, only your accolades.

This is actually the place where HN's title redactor _should_ be used - instead of dropping "how", "on" and "why" from titles, redacting memes like "left the chat" or "lives rent-free in my head"[1] leads to a sensible title without loss of any relevant information.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40326563

Personally I welcome it. It feels like an extension of humor in code (comments), and it provides a different perspective on the message.

Definitely not especially recent:

https://gosling.psy.utexas.edu/scales-weve-developed/short-t...

Was just thinking the same. It's also nicely ironic. Also, given the replication crisis I wonder how many of these LLM research papers are actually worth a damn and how many are research paper equivalent of AI software grift.

Can we get a model that can work this out for us?

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