2 ms·

A counterpoint - I was told a story by one of my professors in the late 1990s, about one of his professors -- he'd written a thesis, gotten hired somewhere like

A counterpoint - I was told a story by one of my professors in the late 1990s, about one of his professors -- he'd written a thesis, gotten hired somewhere like Princeton, and taught there for a few years as Dr. <Somebody>. One day he received a letter pointing out a construction flaw in his thesis. He brought it to the department head who read the letter, and said "Well, Mr. Somebody, ..." Ultimately he fixed the proof. Upshot, if there are real errors in published work, I think most mathematicians want to know about them.

stevemk14ebr 8d ago
Yea but that was a person who actually put in work and had to think about and understand the problem. They didn't just generate something with a magic box.
- dev_dan_2 8d ago
  As a software engineer, I could not care less about how a bug was found or by whom, as long as I can quickly verify it is correct, I always appreciate being able to improve my work. I don't see why it should be different for mathematicians (the ones I knew would think similarly, I would assume.)
  - danabramov 8d ago
    If I may offer an analogy, what I tried to do is essentially reporting a bug after having a failing unit test that exercises the public API, without looking into the black box of internals.
- chasd00 8d ago
  > They didn't just generate something with a magic box. It doesn't matter who found the error nor how it was found. An error is an error.
  - bonoboTP 7d ago
    This issue really separates the wheat from the chaff. The dirty secret is that a lot of academic published work contains errors but the authors also have fragile egos. It reminds me of when Data Colada exposed someone for fraud and they accused the exposers of "methodological terrorism" (something in psychology or social science). Just imagine what happens once papers get exposed at scale. Now here there was no fraud just genuine error, but it will annoy people nonetheless and scrape their ego that someone uninitiated can just type some stuff in a magic box and conclude that they, the established published, tenured mathematician with awards and medals can be wrong.

stevemk14ebr 8d ago

Yea but that was a person who actually put in work and had to think about and understand the problem. They didn't just generate something with a magic box.

dev_dan_2 8d ago
As a software engineer, I could not care less about how a bug was found or by whom, as long as I can quickly verify it is correct, I always appreciate being able to improve my work. I don't see why it should be different for mathematicians (the ones I knew would think similarly, I would assume.)
- danabramov 8d ago
  If I may offer an analogy, what I tried to do is essentially reporting a bug after having a failing unit test that exercises the public API, without looking into the black box of internals.
chasd00 8d ago
> They didn't just generate something with a magic box. It doesn't matter who found the error nor how it was found. An error is an error.
- bonoboTP 7d ago
  This issue really separates the wheat from the chaff. The dirty secret is that a lot of academic published work contains errors but the authors also have fragile egos. It reminds me of when Data Colada exposed someone for fraud and they accused the exposers of "methodological terrorism" (something in psychology or social science). Just imagine what happens once papers get exposed at scale. Now here there was no fraud just genuine error, but it will annoy people nonetheless and scrape their ego that someone uninitiated can just type some stuff in a magic box and conclude that they, the established published, tenured mathematician with awards and medals can be wrong.