this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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Edit: since we’re in the weeds below, let me rephrase. It’s OK for science to be fun. In fact it tends to encourage more and better science. This particular technique is quite old, and trends ebb and flow, but how you go about making science fun is up to you.
If you aren’t having fun in your work, or you aren’t having fun with other scientists, and especially if levity or personality detected in other scientists’ work really annoys you, maybe ask yourself where that feeling is coming from, because the only science being hindered is your own.
Old comment
I mean, I get that it’s easy to burn out on all the goofy titles.For example, in machine learning there’s an architecture called BERT with hundreds of paper titles referencing a puppet character from the children’s TV show Sesame Street.
Similarly a bunch of neuromorphic (brain-like) computing models are named NEMO (NEuro-MOrphic) with paper titles referencing the Pixar movie Finding Nemo.
Of course, any joke can be tiring with repetition. But good papers are approachable to a variety of audiences, including visitors in the space, and the point of that technique is to offer a “hook” (to borrow a term from music) that makes the material more accessible and interesting to the uninitiated.
TLDR: I empathize but yeah dude’s wrong
Call me a downer if you want, but I think scientific papers should be above using clickbait titles. Scientific papers should be dry, boring and technical so that there's no doubt that a paper is popular because of its content and not the personality of its writer.
When a scientific paper has one of those titles I assume it is bullshit until proven otherwise. I can not trust a paper that does not even trust itself to stand on its own merits.
I agree.
Except for the "this paper will be sad if you don't read it" one, that one's on point.
I mean, we’re not talking about mutually exclusive properties.
Whether a paper is more or less dry and whether it’s more or less accessible to newcomers is separate from the quality of the contribution.
You can have both.