IMHO, it’s very important for papers to lay out the idea lineage and contextualize their incremental progress (analogous to a codebase commit history). For what

IMHO, it’s very important for papers to lay out the idea lineage and contextualize their incremental progress (analogous to a codebase commit history). For whatever reason, ML seems to prefer the practice of framing each paper as a shiny nugget uniquely disconnected from the ecosystem of ideas, and with is own fancy name (as if it was born a fully developed rockstar). Imagine isolated code dumps without the shared history leading to nightmare merge conflicts… I think this makes its really hard for anyone not steeped in experience to parse through the outputs of the spraying firehouse, and organize their thinking rigorously — thereby fragilizing the field’s intellectual output in a vicious cycle.