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Comment by grunder_advice | Hacker News Reader

I personally detest the way we sanctify some sole individuals while forgetting the bulk of the community. I don't care who published the first patent for the transistor. He or She certainly cannot be credited for all the work that has been put into it so that I can today use a hand held device to post this comment.

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I see where you're coming from, but while that's the case with most stuff ("normal science") , it often isn't the case for truly revolutionary stuff. Many breakthroughs happen not because of the bulk of the community, but against it, often at the highest cost for the individuals.

Surprisingly also not true. Yes, people go against the grain and it is required to actually make paradigm shifts but they're never alone nor did they build from scratch. It may be few against many but it is almost never one against all. That one only prevails due to support from others. Those names don't shine but it doesn't mean they weren't critical to the advancement of a field

Strong claims - maybe good time to do some homework instead of arguing without evidence?

Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for heresy. Boltzmann died by suicide after lack of acceptance by the scientific community. It's a very long list and something that's been studied, actually.

You do realize Galileo and Kepler were around at the same time, right? Galileo is the best example of what I claimed.

You criticize me for "not doing my homework" yet you haven't heard of Castelli[0]? He's even in the fucking Wiki article on Galileo lol[1]

  > Boltzmann died by suicide after lack of acceptance by the scientific community.

Your knowledge of Boltzmann seems to be as deep as your knowledge of Galileo.

  > It's a very long list and something that's been studied, actually.

You're absolutely right. You should read some of it. Or if you don't like reading I do highly recommend An Opinionated History of Mathematics[2]. Blåsjö even has a whole season dedicated to Galileo.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedetto_Castelli

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Controversy_ov...

[2] https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/85etf-7ecf8/Opinionat...

Sorry, but having two people instead of one pushing for similar/related ideas is not supporting the main claim ("we sanctify some sole individuals while forgetting the bulk of the community"). Nor is stealing ideas and having the wrong name on results. It's rather common to have multiple names in theorems because of this. That's still beside the point, when claiming it's the "community" or hive mind.

It's not that I don't see where you're coming from. What's been gesticulating at is called "Stigler's law of eponymy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy). Pythagorean theorem was known 1000 years before Pythagoras and a ton of results are wrongly attributed to. But that doesn't make revolutions a collective effort.

Was Galois', Gödel's or Grothendieck's work obviously the common sense of the community? Or wasn't it the "community" that tried to "solve" the parallel postulate for 2000 years before Bolyai did?

Or maybe everyone in the Copenhagen crowd cheered Bohm, Everett and Bell because it was all obvious in the community?

Thanks for the link, but when I said "do homework" I didn't mean podcasts :), but rather either general or concrete work in the history and philosophy of science, like Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of scientific revolutions".

It seems like you agree with me yet simply do not easy to. I can't do anything with that. You seek evidence that is incredibly difficult to present. History is recorded differently now than in the past yet things are the same. You're ignoring the biases of how it's recorded. Any example I give you'll say it's not enough and point out another. It's a fruitless game

  > but when I said "do homework" I didn't mean podcasts

Maybe you should judge the information on its merit rather than its medium

Possibly. I don't think either extreme opinion is correct— i.e., both can be partially correct, hence we may agree on that. Merit is often arbitrarily attributed (and sometimes, perhaps often enough, wrongly). I don't think that's enough to say that that's "always" or "most often" the case. That was my main point. You argued that no one does something strictly alone or from scratch. I think the "from scratch" part is irrelevant and think that a single person, a very small group, or a few independently (even if at different points in time) still warrants the same individual recognition.

Neither really fits what Jürgen Schmidhuber argues for. He clearly argues against intentional non-attribution and/or ignorance. Both are evidently the case deeply in current AI research (probably also outside, but this is what OP is about). At the same time, claiming that his points are worthless because he's just pointing to other individuals that suffer from the same misattribution problem is generally a wrong take. Work concentration and results are simply non-linear and generally clustered around individuals and groups. Failing to attribute, either from ignorance or malice, is equally wrong.

“It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.”

― Mark Twain

This is understandable, but maybe you cannot offer an alternative to just give credit nobody. Schmidhuber is playing the game by its rules being self-consciously contrarian enjoying himself, while offering an interesting historic pinch of retrospective justice.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Giants who are just a bunch of people in a trench coat

  @book{Kuhn1962,
    author    = {Kuhn, Thomas S.},
    title     = {The Structure of Scientific Revolutions},
    publisher = {University of Chicago Press},
    year      = {1962},
    address   = {Chicago},
    note      = {Often cited with various editions, e.g., 50th ed. 2012},
    keywords  = {paradigm shift, normal science, scientific revolutions}
  }

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