"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.

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soulofmischief a day ago | parent | next [-]

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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_bent a day ago | parent | next [-]

you can just write a doc with your proof/idea, hash it and post that hash on twitter

	▲	mejutoco 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not so easy. The problem is that someone can "just" generate a lot of documents with different or contradicting predictions or idea and then selectively release some.
	▲	soulofmischief a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes, you can. So maybe we'll see an adoption of that paradigm, or another. The value of a ZKP is that you can optionally prove some facts up front about the file, whereas a normal hash is all-or-nothing. You can't reveal part of the information because you need the entire contents to properly verify the hash.

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mjd a day ago | parent | prev [-]

ceiiinosssttuv

	▲	soulofmischief a day ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for putting me onto this, that was new to me. And of course Huygens was all over this idea.

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a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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ShinyLeftPad a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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hobo123 a day ago | parent | next [-]

At least that's how traditional Western universities used to work. The profs sometimes published something, and they taught students. Looking at science back then, it seemed to work out rather well.

	▲	ShinyLeftPad a day ago \| parent [-]
		True.

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mohamedkoubaa a day ago | parent | prev [-]

If possible, this would be ideal.