Those correction notices, in full

Karl Rove's "Reality based community[1]" is still with us:

> The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

Perhaps its because your comment seemed to equate errors with crimes, or at least malicious intent. The language seems a bit provocative for many, detracting from whatever message was intended.

I wish academic papers were more like Wikipedia articles. Currently what I'm working on is really "Building on" one pretty pivotal paper from the 90s, and there's a whole constellation of work that has spawned.

So much ink is spilled re-defining the problem, and reading any paper requires going through the system model every time because tons of arbitrary decisions may have been done different. It makes it hard to compare results, and makes almost every statement that reads "Over in this area we're not innovating on, we used the SOTA" wrong, because some other group is innovating in that corner.

If instead there was one canonical version of it with an edit history, and I could go try to just re-write one little para and argue in the talk section about it with the one-or-two other groups picking away at that, I feel like things could move faster and be done higher quality.

It'd also be a lot easier to peek at other areas. Currently if I have a question like "What's the latest in NeRFs underwater? I remember seeing a paper about that a while ago" I've basically got no idea.

Without knowing the specific context: I think this really is a good example of how errors should be disclosed. We need to acknowledge that scientists/academics are human; even very competent mathematicians make mistakes and some of these mistakes appear in published papers. What we lack in many fields is a culture and process that allows (and ideally, encourages) one to disclose: "this was wrong, here is how I fixed it, or how it's actually correct". E.g., in the communities I know in Computer Science & AI, I rarely even see errata lists on personal webpages, not to speak of journals that provide a straightforward process for updates. I would even go so far to claim that the current culture, in which honest errors cannot be straightforwardly corrected, plays into the hands of the clearly dishonest "bad apples".

Science is, obviously, not a "monotonic" process in which every single paper adds to the truth; this is practically not even the case for mathematics, which is at least monotonic on object-level (but mistakes happen all the time). As a prominent example, consider this impressive list of Feynman errata: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/info/flp_errata.html.

Heh, funnily, I know I wasn't sane. I bought the "weapons of mass destruction" and "pre-emptive strike" lines and the notion of not letting the terrorists win.

What happened, I think, is much more banal. Everyone was pissed at such a large successful terrorist attack. Politicians took that as a strong signal that they must do something. And the easiest solutions were new policing agencies, privacy invasion, and invading sovereign nations. Those were easy answers to sell to angry citizens. They were also the wrong answers that lead to hundreds of thousands dead, the region destabilized, new larger terrorist organizations (ISIS/ISIL) and trillions of dollars wasted.

The right answer just wasn't flashy. Locking cockpits, diplomacy with Afghanistan leaders, and ultimately intelligence gathering and a targeted strike on Osama bin ladin if he was found. We Americans wanted blood, what we needed was to address the holes that made the attack possible and to just move on.