Comment by ekjhgkejhgk
4 months ago
I spent some time in the academia.
The person with whom an idea ends up associated often isn't the first person to have the idea. Most often is the person who explains why the idea is important, or find a killer application for the idea, or otherwise popularizes the idea.
That said, you can open what Schmidhuber would say is the paper which invented residual NNs. Try and see if you notice anything about the paper that perhaps would hinder the adoption of its ideas [1].
[1] https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/SeppHochreiter1991ThesisAdv...
Surely they wrote some papers in English even if they wrote their dissertation in German? Most people don’t go straight to dissertations anyway, it’s more of a place to go after you read a much shorter paper.
Correct, that's [2]. In [2] they even say "[we] derive de main result using the approach first proposed in " and cite [1]. So the paper that everyone knows, in English (and with Bengio), explictly say that the original idea is in a paper in German, and still the scientific community chose not to cite the German original.
[1] https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/SeppHochreiter1991ThesisAdv...
[2] https://sferics.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/gradientflow.pdf
Not to excuse ignoring the thesis, but I want to point out it's bad form to cite a supposed result from a paper you haven't even looked at (or can't read), unless you indicate (admit) you didn't read it. I have even seen it described, in a paper about the citation practices of science, as unethical. It can transform hearsay into established truth. Of course nearly everyone does it anyway when they think the chance of making an erroneous citation is low enough, and that's exactly the problem.
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I think what you're referring to is also known as Stigler's law of eponymy [1], which is interestingly self-referential and ironic in its own naming. There's also the related "Matthew effect" [2] in the sciences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
The most annoying instance, to me, of Stigler's Law is De Morgan's Laws, which say the following:
1. If two things are not both true, then one or both of them must be false. (And the reverse.)
2. If neither of two things is true, then both of them are false. (And the reverse.)
You might notice that both statements are blindingly obvious, but we've named them after Augustus de Morgan anyway.
Perhaps then inventors of promising ideas should make multiple attempts at popularizing their ideas if they care about association, multiple attempts at explaining why the idea is important and demonstrations of killer applications.
Einstein published his relativity papers originally in German.
German was the lingua franca of physics at the time, so to speak.
Starting in the 1930s, though, that tradition began to change... for reasons that I'm sure won't ever apply to American English. Nosirree, Bob, we're special. Great, even.
A relevant quote from David Hilbert:
"Mathematics in Göttingen?" Hilbert repiled. "There is really none any more."
https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/2486/source-for-hilb...
> German was the lingua franca
A finer expression of the matter cannot be made.
The only constant is constant change.
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