I'd laugh a lot harder when people struggle for days and then reach a half-assed piece of some algorithm that's completely well know if I hadn't been there a dozen times myself.
Programmers are especially vulnerable to this. Who hasn't made a 4 page case statement when 3 lines of recursion would have done it, especially when starting out? Then again, I've never named my case statements after myself.
No matter how brilliant one is, its ridiculously hard to know what you don't know. In fact, sometimes being very advanced in one field makes it doubly hard to think of in one you're poor in.
Sure, it's completely fair. We all reinvent the wheel sometimes.
That hilarious part is that this paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal---and none of the reviewers realized that he'd rediscovered some 17th century math.
And furthermore it came as news enough to other researchers that the paper got cited many times.
But rediscovering some old math doesn't make it that bad. I've rediscovered old math before, and it was something that mathematicians around me thought was interesting because they hadn't seen it before either. What makes this particularly egregious is that everyone involved theoretically took a course that not only described this exact technique, but which described an even better one! (Simpson's rule.)
"One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid." — James D. Watson
To be fair, James D. Watson is a bit of a jerk who delights in calling other people stupid. Usually winning a Nobel Prize tends to make people more charitable, since they no longer need to prove themselves to anybody... apparently it didn't work for Watson.
I wouldn't recommend following Watson's advice on the correct attitude to your fellow man.
I would speculate that the reason it didn't work for Watson is the unacknowledged use of Rosalind Franklin's data, with the resulting belief by many that Watson couldn't have done it on his own. The fact that Rosalind died in part due to radiation absorbed during collecting that data adds to the controversy.
Here is a piece of interesting trivia about that. Rosalind Franklin was a true expert on x-ray diffraction. However there are 230 possible space groups. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_group for more on that.) The x-ray diffraction pattern you see depends on the space group, and so one of the first step is to go through all of the possibilities and identify which one you have, and only then can you really start figuring out what you have. Rosalind Franklin knew about all of them. But by luck Watson's PhD thesis had been on a protein with the exact same set of symmetries that DNA has. As a result he was in a much better position than she to interpret her data.
No matter how brilliant one is, its ridiculously hard to know what you don't know.
This cannot be overstated. And when ego is the cause...oy vey! I believe that one of the greatest intellectual challenges to overcome when one over identifies as being "brilliant" is the, oft youthful, focus on pedantry. How embarrassingly ironic to display one's ignorance as a result of flaunting one's intellect. As a recovering pendant well in to those years that separate true youth from "decidedly middle-aged" let me sincerely recommend to some of our (mostly) younger members that they put down the Bertrand Russell long enough to pick up some William Blake.
When used properly, I have found that one of the most powerful phrases I can use to build confidence, trust, and credibility with a client is "I don't know."
I hear that. I once spent the better part of a day reinventing ActiveRecord's serialize class method (with tests!) only to be told by a friend that I had, uh, reinvented an existing method.
I can't imagine spending months on a peer-reviewed paper accomplishing the same amount of nothing. That would be disheartening to say the least.
Ooh spooky close. I was 14. I though I'd invented a whole new kind of array. I dubbed them k_arrays (for kickass arrays of course.)
When I was 15 I took my first real programming course. Soon I was a bit sadder and much wiser. Fortunately, it was just part of the cirriculum. I managed to learn the lesson without ever displaying my shocking ignorance and bringing shame to my family for generations. (not to mention completeling the homework implementing a simple linked list with much speed)
The really sad part is, despite all my enthusiasm, it never once occured to me to link them in both directions to enable bi-directional traversal. Half-assed indeed.
Ah memories - I 'invented' a fully recursive compression algorithm when I was 14. Oddly enough it didn't work nearly so well in code as it did in my head, and the impossibility of successfully extracting an infinite variety of information from a few bytes didn't cross my mind :-)
Programmers are especially vulnerable to this. Who hasn't made a 4 page case statement when 3 lines of recursion would have done it, especially when starting out? Then again, I've never named my case statements after myself.
No matter how brilliant one is, its ridiculously hard to know what you don't know. In fact, sometimes being very advanced in one field makes it doubly hard to think of in one you're poor in.