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> The tone is self-effacing, it does not have an "ego" the way scientific papers tend to have.

I can't imagine judging scientific papers based on whether the author might be looking down on me, or thinks he knows better than me.

> if we were "allowed" to cite research that reads like this

Maybe you're looking down on yourself? You can cite anything you want to cite.

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Well if you yourself are trying to publish in a scientific venue you can't always cite exactly what you want to cite. Though it's probably uncommon for a peer reviewer to ask for a specific citation to be removed, the review process absolutely does affect the references list, and expectations about this process affect it doubly so.

In ML, no one is going to police your citation list. I've cited some weird stuff in my papers, including ideas from tweets and random quotes from Jeff Dean. It's never been a problem.

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