The NIPS community is more prone than most to the hype cycle and to a herd mentality. (It has its strengths as well, but we should also recognize the weaknesse

The NIPS community is more prone than most to the hype cycle and to a herd mentality. (It has its strengths as well, but we should also recognize the weaknesses.). It is very very good that there is a corrective influence coming from somewhere. I used to think that the feud over the origins of backprop was an annoying one-off, but it is not. The field has had many examples of lazy citation patterns, including people not actually reading what they cite, and/or ignoring corrective papers like this one. The example that bothered me most was the "Gaussian processes" boomlet. It played for a couple of years, but it was basically linear prediction theory redone by people who did not adequately cite prior work nor convey its limitations.