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

[Danko Nikolic]

I have watched Tsvi's YouTube videos, the entire list. I recommend everyone
to watch it. Mind opening.

Danko

On Thu, 18 Nov 2021, 08:39 Tsvi Achler <achler at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ultimately this controversy and others around corruption in academia
> arises from the fact that academia is governed by self-selected committees
> (a system established in the middle ages) thereby putting oneself in
> position to govern is more important than research.
>
> The issue with the ACM is the tip of a greater problem that includes a
> high rate of non-replicability, early innovators being ignored and not
> properly cited and where popularization gets priority over novelty.
>
> Statements like “they were ahead of their time” is a way of saying the
> academic egos at the time would not accept it.  Those that were ultimately
> able to popularize new ideas may simply have had the fortune of being alive
> at the right time.
>
> Moreover this continues to happen today and in this group.
>
> I think in order to really change things the root cause needs to change.
> Otherwise some may perceive this work as just an exercise of
> academics jostling for governing positions and ultimately having very
> little to do with moving research forward.
>
> The National Bureau of Economics quantified mechanisms of how politics in
> academia affect the ability to publish and popularize within two articles
> that I referenced in a previous message.
>
> Moreover I think even more costly than crediting the wrong people as in
> the ACM, is the inhibition of novel ideas and in that vein it seems no
> one is immune.
>
> I noticed Jürgen dismissed my claim of a novel approach by saying it must
> be an RNN even though I specifically wrote that those in the field simply
> assume it is a recurrent network and that this is part of the difficulty of
> presenting novel ideas in today’s environment.
>
> But admittedly discussing my approach on this thread is off topic and
> furthermore I have been specifically asked by Jürgen not to write about it,
> so I respectfully will not elaborate here.
>
> However, a discussion of how to avoid this problem today would greatly tie
> this article together and make it relevant to the present day.  We live in
> the information age where companies such as Google, Wikipedia and others
> have demonstrated for us alternate ways to rate, digest and present
> information through less political methods. (and even fund)
>
> Thus I think without a discussion about the continuing situation today or
> committment to modify current trajectories, this article may become just
> another snapshot of the academic egos of the time, and we will need a new
> article discussing what went wrong for the next phase of research that will
> eventually materialize.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> -Tsvi
>
> PS. Also see my video list on ideas to improve Academia for more details
> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM3bZImI0fj3rM3ZrzSYbfozkf8m4102j
>
> On Tue, Nov 16, 2021 at 11:53 PM Schmidhuber Juergen <juergen at idsia.ch>
> wrote:
>
>> In a mature field like math we’d never have such a discussion.
>>
>> It is well-known that plagiarism may be unintentional (e.g.,
>> https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/skills/plagiarism).
>> However, since nobody can read the minds and intentions of others, science
>> & tech came up with a _formal_ way of establishing priority: the time
>> stamps of publications and patents. If you file your patent one day after
>> your competitor, you are scooped, no matter whether you are the original
>> inventor, a re-inventor, a great popularizer, or whatever. (In the present
>> context, however, we are mostly talking about decades rather than days.)
>>
>> Randy wrote: "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."
>>
>> See Sec. XVII of the report: "The deontology of science requires: If one
>> `re-invents' something that was already known, and only becomes aware of it
>> later, one must at least clarify it later, and correctly give credit in all
>> follow-up papers and presentations."
>>
>> In particular, along the lines of Randy's remarks on historic surveys:
>> from a survey like the 2021 Turing lecture you'd expect correct credit
>> assignment instead of additional attempts at getting credit for work done
>> by others. See Sec. 2 of the report:
>> https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/scientific-integrity-turing-award-deep-learning.html#lbhacm
>>
>> I also agree with what Barak Pearlmutter wrote on the example of
>> backpropagation: "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: `Linnainmaa (1982) described by
>> Schmidhuber (2021) as exhibiting a Fortran implementation of Reverse Mode
>> Automatic Differentiation' or something like that.'" Indeed, you don't have
>> to read Linnainmaa's original 1970 paper on what's now called
>> backpropagation, you can read his 1976 journal paper (in English), or
>> Griewank's 2012 paper "Who invented the reverse mode of differentiation?"
>> in Documenta Mathematica, or other papers on this famous subject, some of
>> them cited in my report, which also cites Werbos, who first applied the
>> method to NNs in 1982 (but not yet in his 1974 thesis). The report
>> continues: "By 1985, compute had become about 1,000 times cheaper than in
>> 1970, and the first desktop computers had just become!
>>   accessible in wealthier academic labs. Computational experiments then
>> demonstrated that backpropagation can yield useful internal representations
>> in hidden layers of NNs.[RUM] But this was essentially just an experimental
>> analysis of a known method.[BP1-2] And the authors did not cite the prior
>> art - not even in later surveys.[DL3,DL3a][DLC]"
>>
>> I find it interesting what Asim Roy wrote: "In 1975 Tjalling Koopmans and
>> Leonid Kantorovich were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for their
>> contribution in resource allocation and linear programming. Many
>> professionals, Koopmans and Kantorovich included, were surprised at
>> Dantzig’s exclusion as an honoree. Most individuals familiar with the
>> situation considered him to be just as worthy of the prize. [...]
>> (Unbeknownst to Dantzig and most other operations researchers in the West,
>> a similar method was derived eight years prior by Soviet mathematician
>> Leonid V. Kantorovich)." Let's not forget, however, that there is no "Nobel
>> Prize in Economics!" (See also this 2010 paper:
>> https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/nobelshare.html)
>>
>> Jürgen
>>
>>
>>
>>
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