[Lerc]

>2. is nothing about "following established traditions" but rather the general concept of crediting people for their prior work, unless you think that "not plagiarising" is a trifling established tradition.

But that is the nature of establishment, when something is a sufficiently firmly established tradition, people see it as a truism.

Crediting people is a social convention. Plagiarism is a social construct. It can be useful, in many areas of science, to reference to support your arguments. This is less important in proofs, because a proof is a proof, but references aid in understanding.

These are all reasons to reference and attribute that benefit the writer, and could be done voluntarily. The notion of a duty to reference or attribute has no impact on the validity of the claims being made. It is a collective decision to proportion prestige.

Turning the duty to do so into an unquestioned truism means it has to be done regardless of whether it accurately represents any property of merit.

There are many instances where prestige delivered grossly mismatches what an impartial observer would consider a fair balance of effort and ability.

We should at least recognise that this is so because we have chosen to let it be this way.

[applfanboysbgon]

I did say in another reply already that if this was the person I replied to's position, they should stand on it and argue for it. I don't believe it's some kind of sacred cow that is beyond discussing. My problem with what they were saying is that they weren't solidly taking a stance and trying to make such an argument, but rather taking cheap shots by quoting things in misleading ways. Tackle the argument head on if this is what you believe, don't try to mislead people who might not've (fully) read the article by misstating the article's position in an attempt to make it look weaker than it actually is. If your argument depends on misrepresenting your opponent's position rather than standing on your own convictions, well, it doesn't speak much for your convictions.

[adrian_b]

In the research papers of any branch of science and technology, crediting the previous work is not some social convention, but it is very useful information for readers.

Despite the fact that there are some dishonest researchers, who attempt to create the illusion that their work is revolutionary and does not owe anything or only very little to predecessors, the truth is that almost anything novel that is published today contains only a few percent of truly new ideas that are grafted on a big body that combines many results extracted for older works.

If a new research paper separates properly its new elements from the old elements, which are properly attributed, enabling the search of the original sources, that can help a lot the readers to understand it.

I consider the fact that when you ask a question to an LLM, it is unable to accurately provide the source of the answer, as their greatest defect.

[Lerc]

>In the research papers of any branch of science and technology, crediting the previous work is not some social convention, but it is very useful information for readers.

I covered that aspect. Those are thing that the writer does to increase the utility of their work. It is one of many ways that improvements may be done. That this particular way is compulsory and the others are not suggests that this is not the reason for the choice to make it compulsory.