We are scientists and can use names. 'him' is Jürgen Schmidhuber. He's a luminary of ML, but he has entered into several attribution controversies. He famously accused Ian Goodfellow of appropriating his work to create generative adversarial networks (GANs) in a public venue (a NeurIPS workshop).

I agree with the parent comment. Ultimately, Science is about advancing the human condition more than celebrating great individuals. While I'm sympathetic to Schmidhuber's feelings he isn't given sufficient credit, he's still an internationally recognized, fully tenured professor.

>Ultimately, Science is about advancing the human condition more than celebrating great individuals.

Giving proper credit to prior work is a fundamental component of scientific progress. Just look at the Chinese academic system to see what happens to science when people are given free reign to plagiarise.

Yes, like Watson & Crick and lots of others have shown over the years by lighting the way with proper accreditation. /s

Science is a means to an end, the 'giving proper credit' bit has been under fire since the day that someone figured out that citations can bestow fame (hardly every fortune) and given the low stakes it is to be expected that that is the battleground. But the number of PhD students that have been screwed out of proper credit to further aggrandize their academic masters can probably not be enumerated any more, so let's not pretend that proper credit is the coin that makes academia function.

>Yes, like Watson & Crick and lots of others have shown over the years by lighting the way with proper accreditation. /s

This just in: A wrong thing become right when famous people (allegedly) do it. More at 9.

And that's aside from the fact that you're wrong on the particular case of W&C.

> This just in: A wrong thing become right when famous people (allegedly) do it. More at 9.

I'm pretty sure the claim was that it's not so "fundamental", not about right or wrong.

Watson and Crick gave all necessary and proper attributions.

The parent is referring to the fact that Watson and Crick relied on work of Rosalind Franklin without crediting her.

Watson and Crick's 1953 Nature paper says "We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King's College, London."

Also, Franklin's paper follows W&C in Nature: https://www.mskcc.org/teaser/1953-nature-papers-watson-crick...

I know what they meant. The W&C paper literally thanks her for her work. Stop spreading falsehoods.

> Just look at the Chinese academic system to see what happens to science when people are given free reign to plagiarise.

Can you explain what this means? It's a pretty broad statement.

Please elaborate on what has happened in the Chinese academic system?

>He famously accused Ian Goodfellow of appropriating his work to create generative adversarial networks (GANs) in a public venue (a NeurIPS workshop).

Here is his take on what happened: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/scientific-integrity-turing...

I'm sorry if this sounds rude, but "Science is about advancing the human condition" is a bit of a grandiose and pretentious way to put it, people usually do this when they want to get away with something.

Your view of what Science is about is aspirational, it's what we (and not all of us at that) hope is true, not what's actually true. Science is motivated by a mixture of (a) personal prestige and social status-seeking, (b) personal pleasure (some people simply delight in studying and understanding intricate patterns and phenomena), and (c) national prestige of nation states and profit motives of wealthy corporations.

I, for one, don't like it when people pull out the "I'm helping others" bit when motivating things. Everything humans do is pleasure and reward-seeking, even charity and helping other is pleasure. I would like if people were always honest about this, people love helping stray cats not because they are a helpless life (the fly stuck in a spider's web is a helpless life), but because cats are amusing and interaction with them gives (some of) us lots of pleasure. Let the "helping others" motivation always be something other people ascribe to you, your own self-stated motivation should always be "Because I wanted to", if you want to be honest.

>Science is about advancing the human condition more than celebrating great individuals.

This gives the impression that those 2 goals are somehow in tension, or that they compete for resources. But giving credit, even if you don't know prior work and are actually re-discovering it from scratch, is trivial in this day and age. Paper databases, keyword search, text-similarity search. It's not hard, not compared to actually writing the paper.

I'm not actually interested in the specific contraversy and other people here are pointing out that Lecun's paper is a position paper which are generally subject to more lax citation standards, but your statment just irked a pet peeve of mine.

I know Schmidhuber is an important figure in deep learning and I barely know anything about deep learning. The guy is on top of the world and could find better things to do than whine.

Let me plagiarise your work then and tell me what you think.

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.

>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.

> 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?

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.

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.

>Sure he has explored a lot of topic and never got the limelight like others. But I think it's time for him to stop gaslighting about other researchers just because they didn't cite his papers.

I can't believe you're defending academic plagiarism. His papers were not obscure, they were foundational. So what if he has a bad attitude; you would too if people kept stealing your ideas without giving you any credit.

If anyone is looking for more background: it's Jürgen Schmidhuber. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804496