> In the late ’50s, a Cornell scientist named Frank Rosenblatt had proposed the world’s first neural network machine. It was called the Perceptron, and it had a simple objective—to recognize images.

This is right in the article. They don't attribute neural networks to Hinton—they just note that he worked with them.

It describes how he had the idea as a teenager, inspired by a friend's description of holograms. In the next paragraph, the idea had already been tried as the perceptron, and had been disproven. It's ambiguous because that's how ideas are; the same idea will come to more than one person quite frequently.

> the same idea will come to more than one person quite frequently

This seems to happen as often as not. And sometimes the ones in the not category are that way for a reason!

A lot of such articles exaggerate many of the specifics in favor of a dramatic storyline. I find that I enjoy them most when I treat them like based-on-real-events documentaries - Not taking them too seriously, but picking up interesting little facts and ideas along the way.

Except you won't know which are facts and which are dramatized factoids.

And yet we merrily accept stuff they write outside our expertise :)

This is called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect[0]. People believe things about stuff they don't know, even if the source is wrong about stuff they do know.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

I was reading somewhere that there are evolutionary drivers behind our cognitive biases. I wonder if this is because to cooperate in social settings you have to rely on other people's expertise.

It's amazing how often people mention Gell-Mann Amnesia on Hacker News. Seems like Crichton's strategy of trying to make the term more popular by attaching a famous scientist's name to it paid off.

To be honest, I first learned about it on HackerNews a couple of years ago. Someone apparently reposted a link a few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20789446