HumanitiesResearcher comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong

27 Post author: orthonormal 01 April 2013 04:19PM

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Comment author: HumanitiesResearcher 18 April 2013 05:17:47AM 1 point [-]

I was openly warned by a professor (who will likely be on the dissertation committee) not to talk about this project widely.

The capitalized nouns are to highlight key terms. I believe the current description is specific enough to describe the situation accurately and without misleading people, but not too specific to break my professor's (correct) advice.

Have I broken LW protocol? Obviously, I'm new here.

Comment author: beoShaffer 18 April 2013 05:20:18AM 0 points [-]

I was openly warned by a professor (who will likely be on the dissertation committee) not to talk about this project widely.

Did they say why?

Comment author: HumanitiesResearcher 21 April 2013 04:23:22PM 3 points [-]

Yes. He said that I should be careful about sharing my project because, otherwise, I'll be reading about it in a journal in a few months. His warning may exaggerate the likelihood of a rival researcher and mis-value the expansion of knowledge, but I'm deferring to him as a concession of my ignorance, especially regarding rules of the academy.

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 22 April 2013 04:40:06PM 6 points [-]

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."

Comment author: Vaniver 22 April 2013 07:47:47PM 6 points [-]

This is heavily context-dependent. Many fields are idea-rich and implementation-poor, in which case you do have to ram ideas down people's throats, because there's a glut of other ideas you have to compete against. But in fields that are implementation-rich and idea-poor, ideas should be guarded until you've implemented them. There are no doubt academic fields where the latter case applies.

Comment author: gwern 22 April 2013 08:01:50PM 1 point [-]

But in fields that are implementation-rich and idea-poor, ideas should be guarded until you've implemented them. There are no doubt academic fields where the latter case applies.

Can you name any?

Comment author: shminux 22 April 2013 09:02:48PM *  5 points [-]

I've been privately told of several such cases in high-energy physics. Below is an excerpt from the Politzer's Nobel lecture. He discovered Asymptotic freedom (that quarks are essentially connected by the miniature rubber bands which have no tension when the quarks are close to each other).

I slowly and carefully completed a calculation of the Yang-Mills beta function. I happen to be ambidextrous and mildly dyslexic. So I have trouble with left/right, in/out, forward/backward, etc. Hence, I derived each partial result from scratch, paying special attention to signs and conventions. It did not take long to go from dismay over the final minus sign (it was indeed useless for studying low energy phenomena) to excitement over the possibilities. I phoned Sidney Coleman. He listened patiently and said it was interesting. But, according to Coleman, I had apparently made an error because David Gross and his student had completed the same calculation, and they found it was plus. Coleman seemed to have more faith in the reliability of a team of two, which included a seasoned theorist, than in a single, young student. I said I’d check it yet once more. I called again about a week later to say I could find nothing wrong with my first calculation. Coleman said yes, he knew because the Princeton team had found a mistake, corrected it, and already submitted a paper to Physical Review Letters.

He does not explicitly say that Gross was tipped off, but it's easy to read between the lines. The rest of his lecture, titled The Dilemma Of Attribution is also worth reading.

Comment author: gwern 22 April 2013 09:36:25PM 0 points [-]

I cannot speak to your private examples, but I think you may be reading that into what Politzer said. He previously mentions the existence of 'multiples':

And the neat, linear progress, as outlined by the sequence of gleaming gems recognized by Nobel Prizes, is a useful fiction. But a fiction it is. The truth is often far more complicated. Of course, there are the oft-told priority disputes, bickering over who is responsible for some particular idea. But those questions are not only often unresolvable, they are often rather meaningless. Genuinely independent discovery is not only possible, it occurs all the time.

And shortly after your passage, he says

On learning of the Gross-Wilczek-Politzer result, [Nobelist] Ken Wilson, who might have thought of its impossibility along the same lines as I attributed to [Nobelist] Schwinger, above, knew who to call to check the result. He realized that there were actually several people around the world who had done the calculation, en passant as it were, as part of their work on radiative corrections to weak interactions in the newly-popular Weinberg-Salam model. They just never thought to focus particularly on this aspect. But they could quickly confirm for Wilson by looking in their notebooks that the claimed result was, indeed, correct....[Nobelist] Steve Weinberg and [Nobelist] Murray Gell-Mann were among those to instantly embrace non-Abelian color SU(3) gauge theory as the theory of the strong interactions. In Gell-Mann’s case, it was in no small part because he had already invented it (!) with Harald Fritzsch and christened it QCD...’d only heard of Gell-Mann and Fritzsch’s work second hand, from [Nobelist] Shelly Glashow, and he seemed think it shouldn’t be taken too seriously. I only later realized it was more Glashow’s mode of communication than his serious assessment of the plausibility of the proposal. In any case, I had completely lost track of Gell-Mann and Fritzsch’s QCD.

Comment author: shminux 22 April 2013 09:45:06PM *  3 points [-]

I cannot speak to your private examples, but I think you may be reading that into what Politzer said.

Not me. This tip-off story had been talked about in the community for a long time, just never publicly until Politzer decided to carefully and tactfully state what he knew personally and avoid speculating on what might have transpired. The result itself, of course, was ripe for discovery, and indeed was discovered but glossed over by others before him. I mentioned this particular story because it's one of the most famous and most public ones. Of course, it might all be rumors and in reality there was no issue.

Comment author: gwern 22 April 2013 09:51:36PM 1 point [-]

'When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras'. I see here by Politzer's testimony a multiple discovery of at least 3 (Gell-Mann and the more-than-one persons implied by 'several') and you ask me to believe that a fourth multiple is not yet another multiple but rather a plagiarism/theft based, solely on you say it was being talked about. It's not exactly a convincing case.

Comment author: Vaniver 22 April 2013 10:29:42PM 1 point [-]

It may be more precise to say there are academic groups to which that description applies, and that discretion is worthwhile in their proximity. Examples of those still living will remain private for obvious reasons.

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 23 April 2013 05:14:18AM *  2 points [-]

Yup, some specific people steal. This definitely happens (but I will not mention names for obvious reasons).

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