Connectionists: Scientific Integrity, the 2021 Turing Lecture, etc.

[Randall O'Reilly]

Juergen,

> Generally speaking, if B plagiarizes A but inspires C, whom should C cite? The answer is clear.

Using the term plagiarize here implies a willful stealing of other people's ideas, and is a very serious allegation as I'm sure you are aware.  At least some of the issues you raised are clearly not of this form, involving obscure publications that almost certainly the so-called plagiarizers had no knowledge of.  This is then a case of reinvention, which happens all the time is still hard to avoid even with tools like google scholar available now (but not back when most of the relevant work was being done).  You should be very careful to not confuse these two things, and only allege plagiarism when there is a very strong case to be made.

In any case, consider this version:

If B reinvents A but publishes a much more [comprehensive | clear | applied | accessible | modern] (whatever) version that becomes the main way in which many people C learn about the relevant idea, whom should C cite?

For example, I cite Rumelhart et al (1986) for backprop, because that is how I and most other people in the modern field learned about this idea, and we know for a fact that they genuinely reinvented it and conveyed its implications in a very compelling way.  If I might be writing a paper on the history of backprop, or some comprehensive review, then yes it would be appropriate to cite older versions that had limited impact, being careful to characterize the relationship as one of reinvention.

Referring to Rumelhart et al (1986) as "popularizers" is a gross mischaracterization of the intellectual origins and true significance of such a work.  Many people in this discussion have used that term inappropriately as it applies to the relevant situations at hand here.

> Randy also wrote: "how little Einstein added to what was already established by Lorentz and others". Juyang already respectfully objected to this misleading statement.

I beg to differ -- this is a topic of extensive ongoing debate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute -- specifically with respect to special relativity, which is the case I was referring to, not general relativity, although it appears there are issues there too.

- Randy