ArXiv is incredibly useful for research, but I think people also use it for a sort of "I posted it to arXiv first, therefore I solved it first" kind of thing, which imo can be misleading at times, if not everyone follows that. Also there is the eprint.iacr.org which seems to do the same thing, except for cryptography (or is it cryptology?), so I'm not sure if every important preprint in that topic gets to arXiv.
> I think people also use it for a sort of "I posted it to arXiv first, therefore I solved it first" kind of thing, which imo can be misleading at times
True, but I don't see that fights over precedence are unique to ArXiv either, or even made worse by it, no? I mean, at least now there is an unambiguous date-stamped public place to cite in this kind of fight. And those fights provide a built-in incentive to put stuff up there, which is good for all of us.
Basically: who cares about spitballs as long as the papers end up on ArXiv? Seems like a cost worth paying to me.
> True, but I don't see that fights over precedence are unique to ArXiv either, or even made worse by it, no?
I'm not familiar enough with other methods of preprint publishing besides arXiv / eprint.iacr, but you may be right that it is not unique to arXiv.
My personal preference would to be to have bits of research done through something like git, so that work along the way can be seen, otherwise one may solve a problem and then be 'out-arXived' by someone who spends an all nighter tex-ing your solution (this is a hyperbolic example, but I think the idea of the potential flaw in the system should be clear).
Besides disputes involving patents, papers that are withing a short time frame of each other are usually understood to be cases of parallel invention, it's happening quite frequently in deep learning atm since there are still a lot of relatively low hanging ideas, to the extent that people are commenting/joking that they consider the risk of colliding with someone else when deciding what to work on.
> withing a short time frame of each other are usually understood to be cases of parallel invention
I see what you are saying, but I don't think it's that cut and dry, otherwise I could just take someone else's work from yesterday (or whatever a short time frame is), and re-solve it (easily -since now the tricky parts have been revealed) and post it today - tada, I parallel invented it!
Typically the work in a paper, if substantial, is done over a long time, so even if the main destination ends up being same, it's unlikely the route and sidestops are the same. So often you can wriggle a little bit and expand the paper sideways, so that it is still publishable work even if the other work is given priority.
It's actually not that rare to have similar papers appear in arXiv one or two weeks later after you submit --- to me, it happened several times within last few years. In these cases, it is possible to see that the approach differs enough (and moreover, often you know the people in question, or you know someone who does).
