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I have seen many cases where people -- accidentally as well as intentionally -- copied or re-invented the work of others (a friend posted on LinkedIn that someo

by jll29 1y ago

I have seen many cases where people -- accidentally as well as intentionally -- copied or re-invented the work of others (a friend posted on LinkedIn that someone else plagiarized his whole Ph.D. thesis, including the title, so only the name was changed; only the references to seperately published papers on which the individual chapters were based at the end still had my friend's name in it, so you could see it was a fake thesis). If a bona fide scientist makes a mistake about missing attribution, they would correct it as soon as possible. Many, however, would not correct such a re-discovery, because it's embarrassing. But the worst is when people don't even imagine anything like what they are working on could already exist, and they don't even bother finding and reading related work -- in other words, ignorance. Science deserves better, but there are more and more ignorant folks around that want to ignore all work before them.

godelski 1y ago
> Many, however, would not correct such a re-discovery, because it's embarrassing. This is a culture thing that needs to change. I'm a pretty big advocate of open publishing and avoiding the "review process" as it stands today. The reason is because we shouldn't be chasing these notions of novelty and "impact". They are inherently subjective and lead to these issues of credit. Your work isn't diminished because you independently invented it, rather, that strengthens your work. There's more evidence! Everything is incremental and so all this stuff does is makes us focus more on trying to show our uniqueness rather than showing our work. The point of publishing is to communicate. The peer review process only happens post communicating: when people review, replicate, build on, or build against. We're just creating an overly competitive environment. It is only "embarrassing" because it "undermines" the work. It only "undermines" the work because how we view credit. Consider this as a clear example. Suppose you want to revisit a work but just scale it up and use on modern hardware. You could get state of the art results but if you admit to such a thing with no claimed changes (let's say you literally just increase number of layers) you'll never get published. You'll get responses about how we "already knew this" and "obviously it scales". But no one tested it... right? That's just bad for science. It's bad if we can't do mundane boring shit.

by jll29 1y ago

godelski 1y ago

> Many, however, would not correct such a re-discovery, because it's embarrassing. This is a culture thing that needs to change. I'm a pretty big advocate of open publishing and avoiding the "review process" as it stands today. The reason is because we shouldn't be chasing these notions of novelty and "impact". They are inherently subjective and lead to these issues of credit. Your work isn't diminished because you independently invented it, rather, that strengthens your work. There's more evidence! Everything is incremental and so all this stuff does is makes us focus more on trying to show our uniqueness rather than showing our work. The point of publishing is to communicate. The peer review process only happens post communicating: when people review, replicate, build on, or build against. We're just creating an overly competitive environment. It is only "embarrassing" because it "undermines" the work. It only "undermines" the work because how we view credit. Consider this as a clear example. Suppose you want to revisit a work but just scale it up and use on modern hardware. You could get state of the art results but if you admit to such a thing with no claimed changes (let's say you literally just increase number of layers) you'll never get published. You'll get responses about how we "already knew this" and "obviously it scales". But no one tested it... right? That's just bad for science. It's bad if we can't do mundane boring shit.