[lowbloodsugar]

Basically ideas are a dime a dozen. Sure, your idea might be a good one, but how do we spot your grain of sand is special when it looks the same as the rest of the desert? Essentially having an idea isn't useful to others. Demonstrating that your idea has legs is useful to others.

I don't have to deal with citing papers, but I once had to deal with people pitching me ideas, wanting me to sign an NDA, in exchange for 50% of the revenue after I did all the actual work. Just out of curiosity, I signed one once. It was a fart app, IIRC. They thought a fart app needed an NDA, and that I'd then go do all the work and give them 50% because they "had the idea". It was so laughably sad.

If you think these ideas are valuable, I have a beautiful clock for you. It is right twice a day. You'll have the same problem: you won't know when it's right. You'll need someone else's work to tell that.

[shrimpx]

> Basically ideas are a dime a dozen.

There's a spectrum of ideas, from groundbreaking to "dime a dozen". In tech startups, and in almost all of computer science, most ideas are a dime a dozen, and the value is in the execution.

But clearly, some ideas are groundbreaking. Einstein rightfully gets the credit for an on-paper hypothesis that wasn't proved until decades later via a chain of critical discoveries and experimental innovations by other people. It's legit to call it Einstin's relativity, and not Mossbauer/Hay's relativity.

[throwaway81523]

Ideas are a dime a dozen in the sense that the same idea will often occur to dozens of people, on a dime's worth of effort. Relativity theory wasn't anything like that. Einstein made predictions that no one else was making. When one of them from GR was confirmed a few years ago, Lenny Susskind famously marveled at the foresight, saying "they didn't call him Einstein for nothing!".

[kelipso]

Problem then goes to how do I decide whether this particular idea is a dime a dozen or a unique idea... Everyone ends up going by feels when answering this question for any particular problem.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

This is nothing to do with ideas. Schmidhuber is complaining that his published work was plagiarised. In machine learning research, in order to publish your work you have to show that your proposed approach works and to do that you have to beat some benchmarks and establish a new state of the art, otherwise there's no publication. That takes work and that's the work that Schmidhuber claims was inappropriately left uncited. In fact that's exactly the kind of work that Hinton, LeCun and Bengio have always done. That's what machine learning researchers do.

This ... idea that Schmidhuber is an ideas man who's never done any real work is Hinton's allegation, and it's clearly designed to misrepresent both Schmidhuber and his work in order to discredit his complaints. And I'm sorry to say that people on HN have fallen for it hook, line and sinker, I guess because that's what social media says.

Btw, the point I make, that you don't get published in machine learning without beating some benchmarks and establishing a new state of the art, I can attribute that to none other than Hinton himself, in an interview with Wired, whence I quote, by the by:

>> What we should be going for, particularly in the basic science conferences, is radically new ideas. Because we know a radically new idea in the long run is going to be much more influential than a tiny improvement.

https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-...

So that's the guy accusing the other guy of being nothing but an ideas man and that you don't need to cite someone who first came up with an idea, saying that "new ideas" are important.

But that's just Hinton presenting things just the way he likes. Now ideas are important, now they're not, as he pleases.

[derbOac]

I don't know enough about this area of research to have an opinion on this particular topic, but I've noticed a trend with this sort of thing with my colleagues. They both claim at different times, depending on whether it benefits them, that

(1) Ideas are a dime a dozen, and making it work or bringing it to fruition, is the important thing

and

(2) The idea is the important thing; the specific implementation by someone doesn't matter, as they're just doing what the idea creator or discoverer laid out for others to follow.

Sometimes I feel like there's a fundamental paradox there that arises a lot in numerous areas of work, business, and economics.