Have you heard of anyone called Greg Pytel?

The name rang no bell with me either until this morning, when this annoying peevish message arrived:

Dear Mr Crawford,

Over a year ago I wrote an article "Regulating financial risks" (it was also reprinted by a couple of financial websites like Stockpedia).

https://gregpytel.blogspot.com/2011/03/you-cannot-regulate-risk-self.html

https://www.stockopedia.co.uk/content/why-you-cannot-regulate-systemic-financial-risk-54717/

I stated the obvious, that to fix the financial system:

– it has to be deregulated (rather than more regulated as it is quite often argued);

– those running it must take personal responsibility/liability (this can be achieved for example by partnerships, but there are other legal forms that can do this too).

Today I have read your article which repeated my core arguments (without giving credit to the real source, i.e. myself). https://charlescrawford.biz/blog/deregulated-partnerships-the-answer

It is simply not on to propagate my original ideas (which are well-known and well-publicised in the public domain) as somebody else’s (even if it is over a year after my original publication). Please publish the correction on your web site (as my comment was not accepted).

What? Was this Mr Pytel somehow suggesting that I wrote my piece about deregulated partnerships in a way designed not to give him credit for the idea?

I put this question to Mr P and had the following exchange with him:

Dear Mr Pytel,

A somewhat intemperate message. Questions.

Are you suggesting that the piece to which I linked by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry also is propagating your ‘original idea’?

And that I knew about your original idea but deliberately did not give any attribution?

Is it possible that among the tens of thousands of smart people round the world looking at these financial issues a number of them may reach similar conclusions (eg on the need for less regulation) independently?

Your comment awaits clarification in the sense above.

Regards,

 Charles

PS  Are you part-Polish?

His reply:

Dear Mr Crawford

 Thank you very much for your e-mail. Let me respond in turn:

 1. May I suggest you read Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry piece and my article which was published on my blog (around 250,000 readers) and Stockopedia:

https://gregpytel.blogspot.com/2011/03/you-cannot-regulate-risk-self.html

 https://www.stockopedia.co.uk/content/why-you-cannot-regulate-systemic-financial-risk-54717/

and then compare the crux, the idea behind of both articles (Mr Gobry’s and mine). In my view it is the same, but I published it over a year earlier.

2. That I do not know. But as

 – it is extremely easy to find my articles and analyses, and:

– Mr Gobry’s arguments are exactly the same as mine (personal liability + deregulation)

– I am not a complete unknown to those interested in the financial crisis (for example my analysis was published as evidence by the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee: https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmtreasy/144/144w254.htm), and:

– I was not born yesterday

 I do not feel entirely comfortable.

Based on my current knowledge I have to say that it could be a case of plagiarism or incredible incompetence in checking other’s relevant publications (which in the age of Google is simply trivial). Do you see any third option? If yes, please advice.

3. Well, I was not born yesterday. I would be more minded to accept this argument before the web search engines era. At present I am quite sceptical especially that when I have just typed "financial crisis" on bing.com search engine my blog was appearing on page 3. (At the time when I publish my blog posts when I searched for "financial crisis" on google or bing I saw my blog appearing on page 1 or 2.) My work have also been used as an academic source material/analysis, e.g.

https://www.er.ethz.ch/publications/MAS_Thesis_Marina_Stoop_2010_final.pdf

I know that many people (from pupils to student to journalists) are searching the web for ideas and then some write about them as their own. I hope you were not born yesterday and will reflect on that from this perspective.

To summarise publishing ideas (in the public domain) is like with patents: checking first whether someone else has not done it before. In the age of internet search engines it is trivial. And if cock-ups happen (regardless of what’s really behind them) a correction is in order.

The reason why I am concerned is that in the last 3 years I have published a lot of ideas on my blog which are regarded as original (or ahead of its time) by my readers (some of them quite well known and regarded): https://gregpytel.blogspot.co.uk/

However they have been discarded by the mainstream journalists and policy/decision makers. (I made sure they were made aware of them.) Now as the chickens are coining home to roost (e.g. Euro break up that I technically predicted in my analysis for the Arab Financial Forum in February 2010) and the mainstream analysts are catching up with things 3 years late I expect that many of my ideas will be published as somebody else’s. Why? Not because they are novel in any sense but because they have a better access to media. My ideas were no good years ago when I published them and they will be called ‘brilliant’ as somebody else’s (as, for example, Edward Lucas called Mr Gobry publication) some years later. Do you think it is fair on me (and my work)?

Best wishes

Greg Pytel

PS. Yes, I am actually Polish and British. I am a policy expert at Sobieski Institute. And we had met on a couple of occasions (although you might not remember it as you were the Ambassador).

Blimey (especially that last cryptic observation).

Dear Mr Pytel,

Not sure about that final observation! Would you like me to publish on my site this exchange too?

Charles

His reply:

Dear Mr Crawford

Of course I will be happy if you publish it (as it puts the record straight). [I made a couple of corrections on the text below.]

BTW, do you honestly believe that a smart person who is able to come up with "original" ideas is not smart enough to do a basic research (prior to the publication) to check whether his/her idea is really that original (or, if not, it has to be attributed to someone else)? Is it not the first thing students are taught at universities about publications? And we live at the age of web search engines when this is really, really trivial (not when I studied 25 years ago when it was quite hard actually).

Draw your own conclusions… I am the last one to accuse anyone of anything without solid evidence but at the same time I have checked in my life students’ work. At best it does not look good, it is embarrassing. 

Best wishes

Greg

How not to respond to that?

Dear Mr Pytel,

I am the last one to accuse anyone of anything without solid evidence

Well, in your first message you basically accused me of using your ideas without attribution (without having any evidence whatsoever) and demanded a ‘correction’! It is simply not on to propagate my original ideas (which are well-known and well-publicised in the public domain) as somebody else’s (even if it is over a year after my original publication). Please publish the correction on your web site (as my comment was not accepted).

I’ll get round to a piece on my site explaining these issues. I basically disagree with you on the substance.

It does not follow that if X independently comes up with an idea after Y does so, X should give credit to Y in some way or waste too much time searching to see how far X’s idea is indeed original. Life’s too short and ideas are not patented. And it is likely that many people looking at the current financial mess will come to conclude that there has been too much regulation and dispersal of risk – there is a huge bloc of work out there making just those points, and the claim that you have some sort of first-mover entitlement to be seen as the father of that thought (noble as it is) strikes me as a bit vain.

That said, there are issues of good manners and friendly etiquette, which get stricter as work is claimed to be more scholarly and reliant on other sources. So if some people have read you work and based their own published thoughts upon it without reasonable attribution, boo hiss to them.

In my case, I read that piece by P-E G and liked it and linked to it. Done. It’s a blog, not a PhD thesis.

Charles

Phew. Last one:

Dear Mr Crawford

What I wrote was the statement of fact and that I was not happy with the situation and that I requested the correction. As a mathematician, who specialised for some time in semantics of languages, I must say that anything else was contextual and depended on mental predisposition of the reader (for which I cannot be responsible I suppose). Contextually I possibly think better about other people than average. I hope that my subsequent e-mails made my views clear.

I do not agree with your premise. If you were correct universities would be full with PhD theses which would be essentially the same and their authors would have claimed that they were not aware of others work. Publishing own ideas, whether is a PhD thesis or an article, (as I was told at good English university) always involves checking their originality (i.e. whether someone else did not come up with it earlier). And it was very simple to find me as the source the ideas we talk about. And if there is a cock-up, correction is in order.

You cannot patent ideas in terms of commercial use but the attribution of their source is in order.

I am pretty sure you know the power of the media. It is far more influential in real life than PhD theses. The fact that you linked to P-E G article not mine over a year earlier I guess proves my point. (I assume that you simply did not know my article even though it was published on Stockopedia.)

I am glad that you agreed: that "if some people have read you work and based their own published thoughts upon it without reasonable attribution, boo hiss to them." This deals with the case of plagiarism.

What about the case of not checking reasonably for originality of ideas? I think this is equally important. As from my perspective, as the original source of the idea, whether the reason is plagiarism or lack of reasonable check, the practical effect is the same. For example CNBS discusses P-E G’s "ideas" as if they were NEW (never mind whether they were his). 

https://www.cnbc.com/id/46710668/A_Proposal_for_Financial_Reform_Massive_Deregulation

Nope, they are VERY OLD actually.

Best wishes

Greg

Astonishing though it may seem to most thinking people, I have never heard of Stockpedia and so, yes, I was unaware of GP’s article there when I wrote my first thoughts (modest as they were) on deregulated partnerships. Nothing to see here folks. You can move along now. Over and out.