The controversy surrounding Geoffrey Hinton's Nobel Prize misses the point

I think this article misses the point of the controversy. The controversy isn't that the work isn't "award winning". It's that it was awarded for physics.

Number of times that article mentions physics: once in the caption as "Nobel Prize in Physics"

I have a few issues with the article.

It starts with citing a recent tweet by Jürgen Schmidhuber in which he reiterates a point he has made before. But his point is not - as the article seems to claim - that other researchers have been overlooked. It goes much further. Schmidhuber isn't saying, "sure, Hopfield and Hilton have done great work, but shouldn't we also look and give credit to some other researchers that equally deserve it?"; he is saying, "Hopfield and Hilton should not get as much credit as they do because their scientific contribution is much smaller than the community makes it out to be. And the reason for that is that they and other prominent figures systematically downplay the achievements of others and instead predominantly cite each other's work."

To me, that is a much graver criticism. The rest of the article tries to make a counter-argument, but if the premise is already not quite right, then what you're trying to argue against is not the actual issue at hand.

Now, whether you and I are on Hobfield and Hilton et al.'s side of the argument or on Schmidhuber's side, is secondary. You pick whatever side you want. But Schmidhuber's point is represented quite accurately, I think.

My second beef with the article is that it uses a lot of comparisons and analogies to make an argument. But I find that this does not always succeed. The point of the analogies is that a lot of times breakthroughs are not the result of a singular heureka moment but the outcome of a long chain of small improvements. And consequently, it's only natural that Hinton is building on the shoulders of giants, so to speak, because who doesn't?

And now you see why I wrote about that this line of argument is not really helpful because it addresses a point slightly different from the one Schmidhuber is trying to make. You cannot disprove Schmidhuber by arguing that, of course, great innovations are the culmination of prior work. As a matter of fact, that is in a way putting Schmidhuber's point on its head: is exactly what he is arguing all along, namely that there is lots of prior work. His criticism is not "Hilton is not the lone genius that everyone makes him out to be, there are others" but his criticism is "Hilton is the one who is not admitting prior research by others".

Now again, the debate - or controversy, as this article words it - is one that should receive attention. But I'm not convinced that this article is a good contribution to the debate.

It is almost ironic that it has "misses the point" in the title.