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alterom • yesterday at 6:28 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

"You don't get credit for the work you don't tell anybody about"

This has been a problem long before Godel: famously, Newton tried to get credit for inventing Calculus only after Leibniz published his work, leading to a bitter dispute that lasted long after they both died.

I wonder if this problem is now going to be significantly exacerbated by AI, as mathematicians are getting more incentives to keep their works secret —

— or, to the contrary, the community will get a push to publish incomplete ideas, scratch work, etc. early to establish a record of thinking about a problem before others did.

In the end, as always, it's a social problem created by " publish or perish " institutional incentives which reward (and require!) published results, but not the work that led to to them.

This, I hope, will finally change.


Replies

soulofmischief • yesterday at 6:44 PM

Maybe we'll see a solid societal use case for zero-knowledge proofs here, establishing one had a set of documents at a given date without revealing them.

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ShinyLeftPad • yesterday at 6:43 PM

so what would the new incentives be? don't publish... and get paid anyway?

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