[tw1010]

It's not "not getting the basics right", it's a simple typo. A thing like that shouldn't invalidate a whole article (unless you have skin in the game for the opponent argument).

Why does HN have a pattern of dismissing whole articles due to simple typos? It's as if we're so habituated to skim and do tldr-reading that our brain is working overdrive to find the slightest excuse not to have to do any type of reading beyond surface level.

[mattlutze]

Critical and technical literature needs to be held to a standard.

When the rhetor introduces errors in the artifact, the rhetor's ethos with the audience is diminished.

The more fundamental the error (getting a basic equation wrong I guess?) the more trust you lose with a knowledgeable audience. If the author doesn't see that a fundamental issue was introduced, they may not have been expert enough to not introduce additional errors; the reader must spend more time double-checking the components of the argument rather than thinking about the argument itself.

If someone comes to this article as a novice in the topic and stores the error as a fact, they may end up at least confused when approaching it again in the future. HN tends to have an audience representing deep knowledge in many fields, who end up providing a thorough and varied set of quality filters. These quality filters are also really helpful to the novice who may otherwise miss the typo.

[jph00]

> Critical and technical literature needs to be held to a standard.

That's a sloppy statement. You haven't defined what standard. Clearly, everything is held to "a standard"; making that an entirely empty claim.

> When the rhetor introduces errors in the artifact, the rhetor's ethos with the audience is diminished.

A "rhetor" is a teacher of rhetoric. This is not the correct word in this case. In this case, the correct word is the more general "author", since the post was not teaching rhetoric. Further, the entire point of "ethos" in rhetoric is that we shouldn't be so lazy as to allow minor issues cloud our judgement.

> The more fundamental the error (getting a basic equation wrong I guess?) the more trust you lose with a knowledgeable audience.

Quite the opposite. A knowledgeable audience can decide whether to trust something based on the actual content, rather than minor surface issues. Only a lazy or uninformed audience need get distracted by typos.

[sjg007]

I mean it’s kinda a big typo.

[tw1010]

Not really, it's one of the most common mistakes I see in bayesian calculations. If the author was basing a lengthy series of calculations on that first step, it would be worse (but in this case the expression is quickly replaced by a corrected version for the classification discussion).

[mbeex]

> unless you have skin in the game for the opponent argument

I stated explicitly otherwise (I'm not even in research), something you certainly couldn't miss. I'm not quite sure, if your allegation backfires.

Especially in hot temper, people make errors. But just then they should avoid making an easy target. The authors site also has some problems with rendering math (some does, some shows still dollar signs) and this adds to a first impression of sloppyness. I t is his decision to go public - but then he has to take the consequences.

[j7ake]

It's unfortunate the first equation was mistyped, one way to check is that the Bayes's rule can be derived from a rule in conditional probability:

P(A,B) = P(B,A)

P(A|B) * P(B) = P(B|A) * P(A)

The formulation in the blog post would say instead:

P(A|B) * P(A) = P(B|A) * P(B)

which does not really make sense.

[cgel]

Author here. Sorry that the typo and the render errors affected you so much. We don't see any rendering issues on our end, if you tell us what browser you are using maybe we can replicate and fix them.

[sjg007]

What is the takeaway from this article anyway?