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<p><font size="+1">Barak, as usual turgid and yet clear. <br>
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<p><font size="+1">Exactly correct. I agree. Well, mostly.<br>
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<p><font size="+1">however the Jurrasic--*not antidiluvian*-- nature
of citations does require one to *read* as you so intimated in
your citation "algorithm" -- citations are meant to be
contextual and relevant. So it is easy to miss references in
Cognitive Science.. as sometimes its just not clear what is
similar to what. SO there is a matter of judgment here that
folks could differ on.. Math and CS are a bit more obvious, as
Calculus was either invented by Newton or Leibnez. The
Bernoulli brothers (not to be confused with the Doobie
brothers) invented probability theory and Laplace not the
revered Bayes invented bayes law (I know.. its sounds wrong).<br>
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<p><font size="+1">But there are phase transitions in science.. so
its often hard to decide where the citation path starts and
where it ends. As Barak, correctly points out, reviews of the
literature, annual reviews are good targets to cite, because
they claim to leap-frog from the past in an authoritative and
comprehensive way. And so maybe you are tempted to be lazy and
not read it. Read it.<br>
</font></p>
<p><font size="+1">Mostly in academics, the stakes are so low,
mostly no-one seems to care who invented the "one sided t-test",
but someone did (Braver). But with 100M$ being tossed about
on a daily basis, especially when the algorithms are being
appropriated without acknowledgement and prizes are given out
without the entire context, Juergen;s concerns are more
tangible. And writing a comprehensive review is valuable and
generates relevant and useful discussion. So bravo to Juergen
for an impressive historical exegesis. Where the problem
begins, is where does the modern era begin--2012? 2006? 1984?,
1961?, 1946?.. an ancient Greek guy for Arithmetic?-- well this
might be a matter of taste. I think its safe to say we know
when something is new because it actually works better (the
context changed--there is a *change point* if you will), and the
citation nuance between the present and past begins to melt
away.</font></p>
<p><font size="+1">Steve<br>
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<p><font size="+1"><br>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 11/15/21 9:21 AM, Barak A.
Pearlmutter wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CANa01BJ33QcUok1mE_ZJxKsDDkOXLi9xmK624kekU=W6TmfLZw@mail.gmail.com">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">One point of scientific propriety and writing that may be getting lost
in the scrum here, and which has I think contributed substantially to
the somewhat woeful state of credit assignment in the field, is the
traditional idea of what a citation *means*.
If a paper says "we use the Foo Transform (Smith, 1995)" that,
traditionally, implies that the author has actually read Smith (1995)
and it describes the Foo Transform as used in the work being
presented. If the author was told that the Foo Transform was actually
discovered by Barker (1980) but the author hasn't actually verified
that by reading Barker (1980), then the author should NOT just cite
Barker. If the author heard that Barker (1980) is the "right" citation
for the Foo Transform, but they got the details of it that they're
actually using from Smith (1995) then they're supposed to say so: "We
use the Foo Transform as described in Smith (1995), attributed to
Barker (1980) by someone I met in line for the toilet at NeurIPS
2019".
This seemingly-antediluvian practice is to guard against people citing
"Barker (1980)" as saying something that it actually doesn't say,
proving a theorem that it doesn't, defining terms ("rate code", cough
cough) in a fashion that is not consistent with Barker's actual
definitions, etc. Iterated violations of this often manifest as
repeated and successive simplification of an idea, a so-called game of
telephone, until something not even true is sagely attributed to some
old publication that doesn't actually say it.
So if you want to cite, say, Seppo Linnainmaa for Reverse Mode
Automatic Differentiation, you need to have actually read it yourself.
Otherwise you need to do a bounce citation: "Linnainman (1982)
described by Schmidhuber (2021) as exhibiting a Fortran implementation
of Reverse Mode Automatic Differentiation" or something like that.
This is also why it's considered fine to simply cite a textbook or
survey paper: nobody could possibly mistake those as the original
source, but they may well be where the author actually got it from.
To bring this back to the present thread: I must confess that I have
not actually read many of the old references Jürgen brings up.
Certainly "X (1960) invented deep learning" is not enough to allow
someone to cite them. It's not even enough for a bounce citation. What
did they *actually* do? What is Jürgen saying they actually did?
</pre>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
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