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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

Whenever you cite papers just because you're "politically supposed to", even though you don't think it's really intellectually useful for anyone to be aware of the cited paper, you're making the citations less useful for everybody.

Schmidhuber is only the worst of many abusers of the citation system. Everyone knows that anonymous reviewers are more likely to approve of people who cite their work. Someone is politically powerful? Better cite their paper, even though you don't really think it's a good paper and you didn't use it.

Schmidhuber is cited far more often than he should be, because people just don't want to deal with this crap, and the cost of sticking in one more citation is very low.

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> Whenever you cite papers just because you're "politically supposed to", even though you don't think it's really intellectually useful for anyone to be aware of the cited paper, you're making the citations less useful for everybody.

The audacity of deciding on behalf of readers whether information is valuable to them when publishing an academic paper is quite an interesting concept to me.

I'm not published in journals, but I do have a "professional" writing background. There's only a few ways I can imagine to read into your statement. Either you think you're above citation, or so much smarter than the reader you're qualified to decide on their behalf whether it's relevant, or simply hiding it for nefarious reasons.

Any of these options, or even the perception of them, is precisely the type of behavior fostering anti intellectualism and prejudice for academia.

It's also quite ironic you repeatedly mention "politics" while your entire argument seems to hinge on seeking to deny empowering further those already in power. Isn't that exercising political capital?

> Isn't that exercising political capital?

These are very good points.

> ... the worst of many abusers of the citation system.

Is this ad hominem argument by user "lacker" meant to distract from the omissions of the awardees Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun? Especially the first two got tons of citations for work that should have credited Schmidhuber's lab: the analysis of vanishing gradients in neural networks, the principle of generative adversarial networks, attention in neural networks, distilling neural networks, speech recognition with LSTM neural networks, self-supervised pre-training, and more.

The disputes with LeCun are more recent and of lesser magnitude IMO.

My godfather is an academic that does some arcane nonsense (I mean that in the nicest way possible) involving topology and number theory. He told me a story about how he and his coauthor had a paper in review for 3 years because the reviewer insisted on adding citations to what they assumed were his own work because they were not particularly relevant. My godfather after a round or two didn’t have the patience for it and said whatever let’s just put them in by his coauthor refused hence the three years of back and forth.

>> Schmidhuber is only the worst of many abusers of the citation system. Everyone knows that anonymous reviewers are more likely to approve of people who cite their work. Someone is politically powerful? Better cite their paper, even though you don't really think it's a good paper and you didn't use it.

The reason that this is not the norm in academia is because there is a substantial number of researchers who care very, very much about academic integrity and even more so about getting their work properly recognised, just like good old You_again.

Btw, "everyone knows" is a running joke in Game of Thrones, it's what the Dothraki always say to show that they're pre-scientific barbarians who believe whatever they like, or at least that's how I get the joke.

Whether Schmidhuber is a bad actor taking advantage of the "system" in general is separate from the specific case I was responding to (not sure if that was your comment or somebody else's.)

But as I said before, we should take the long view. Globalized scientific research ought to have a more neutral way of assessing citations. The 20th century way of doing it may not be the right way any more. I don't see anyone else suggesting a problem of this scope.

> Schmidhuber is cited far more often than he should be

You haven't even read the paper, have you? Otherwise you'd see that it's Hinton and Bengio who are cited far more often than they should be. Just look at disputes B1, B2, B5, H2, H4, and H5 to see how they republished parts of his work again and again without citing it. No honest scientist can approve of something like that.

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