Uh oh, I’m starting to feel like that pizzagate guy . . .
Here’s the background. When I talk about my serious published errors, I talk about my false theorem, I talk about my empirical analysis that was invalidated by miscoded data, I talk my election maps whose flaws were pointed out by an angry blogger, and I talk about my near-miss regarding Portugal.
OK, fine. But then I was going through old blog posts and I’d found a published error of mine that I’d completely forgotten about! It was a statement in one of my most influential papers—just a small part of the paper, it didn’t change our main results, but we really were wrong, and arguably our mistake misled people. I’m glad that later researchers were suspicious of our statement, checked it, and pointed out how we’d been wrong.
Speaking of errors in published work, and the fine line between “There are some issues with your paper,” “You are clearly hiding something,” and “OMG. There’s something wrong on the Internet” I note that Stan Liebowitz is at it again: https://econjwatch.org/file_download/983/LiebowitzMay2017.pdf?mimetype=pdf This really is a perfect storm of doubling down, hoping it will all go away and incredible persistence from a single academic with an idee fixe.
Maybe you should slag off the person who pointed it out in your own Ted talk. It might get you a promotion or editorship even. In case you are not taking that comment seriously enough, it is quite unforgivable that you made and corrected an error from 20 years ago.
setting an excellent example here — science would be a better place/thing/activity if everyone were willing to publicly broadcast their own mistakes. **that said** i suspect that having tenure makes doing this considerably more palatable…
question: what kinds of protocols are there (if any) for identifying, correcting, and/or just documenting small mistakes in published research??