[domenicrosati]

Well said.

Attribution is important but it's impossible to know all the literature that is out there and even when you've tried your best to seek out prior arts there is always a possibility that you've missed something or not understood the connection with something previously read. Heck even when something is similar you may not cite it since it's so old the relevance is no longer there for a working research paper.

I've always thought that Schmidhuber was toxically uncharitable - what is the point of accusing and blaming? If someone has a similar idea to mine I'd celebrate them, seek to collaborate and encourage. Wouldn't that mean your research program is getting advanced for free! Heck you should thank them for doing your work for you.

[logicchains]

>Attribution is important but it's impossible to know all the literature that is out there and even when you've tried your best to seek out prior arts there is always a possibility that you've missed something or not understood the connection with something previously read.

It's not like Schmidhuber's papers are obscure.

>I've always thought that Schmidhuber was toxically uncharitable - what is the point of accusing and blaming

You're engaging in toxic victim-shaming. What, you expect him to just bend over and accept people stealing his ideas without giving him credit? Fundamentally the researchers who stole from him were engaging in unethical behaviour and shouldn't be allowed to get away with that without consequence.

[jacquesm]

> people stealing his ideas

So, ideas can now be stolen after all? I thought the HN consensus was that ideas can't be owned, but implementations can be. Or is it somehow different when we're looking at science?

[V1ndaar]

Yes, it's very different for two reasons: 1) many ideas in science are highly non trivial compared to all sorts of crap that gets patented and 2) as scientists all we usually care about is getting some credit for our ideas. We want them to be known and used by everyone though.

Quite a huge contrast to companies that want their ideas for their own so only they can profit from them.

[impossiblefork]

This was not the attitude of top guys in mathematics when I was at university.

Instead, one guy, who won a bunch of major scientific prizes in mathematics was of the view that people when they get scooped by people publishing in 'obscure' languages or non-English journals, were still scooped and that they can just shut up about proving things. Another guy of similar caliber was happy to read and figure out the ideas of papers in Russian and French maths journals, when it was relevant to his work, even though he couldn't read Russian.

Meanwhile, I've heard people speak of Schmidhuber's stuff as obscure because some stuff was in German, which is of course much easier than Russian for English speakers.