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Comment by baddspellar | Hacker News Reader

Some years ago, I saw a 60 minutes episode on issues in higher education. The reporter picked a biology journal off a shelf, read its arcane title, and exclaimed "who actually reads this stuff?" to back up her claim about how useless journals are... as if she were somehow qualified to judge the importance of a paper by its title.

I couldn't help but imagining what she would have said if she picked up a paper titled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" or "On formally undecidable propositions of. Principia Mathematica and related systems".

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Fortunately it's not up to her to decide. That said, it seems that some papers go out of their way to hide what the paper is really about by looking at the title.

Usually you just don't know. I got shamed in front of a prof once by saying that a given paper title was a good way to make people not want to come to your talk, and he responded by explaining why he thought it was an interesting talk.

There are plenty of examples of things that might be meaningless to a graph-theory professor that are a core part of the language of a combinatorics specialist.

And of course, undergrads and humanities majors best keep their mouths shut.

One of the things taught to undergrads in the humanities—specifically, in communications design—is that you should make the metadata of something interesting-seeming to a wider audience than the data it represents, so that it spreads further—that way, more of the people interested in the data will see it.

As an example, one of my friends told me about a very interesting paper called, and I quote, "Three Monkeys something something." He didn't know what it was about, but he said it "sounded like something I'd be interested in." He was quite right—but if it hadn't been for the monkeys, he wouldn't had anything vivid about the paper to recall at all.

Wasn't that an Andy Rooney sound bite? I.e. a comedian's opinion on the world.

There's a Mathematical Theory of Communication? Wow!

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