...your credibility will be reduced when the truth comes out, even if it doesnāt have any real logical bearing on your conclusions.
Iāve had this happen to me before, and it was annoying...
...but I still think that itās appropriate for people to reduce their trust in my conclusions if Iām getting āirrelevant detailsā wrong. If an author makes errors that I happen to notice, Iām going to raise my estimate for how many errors theyāve made that I didnāt notice, or wouldnāt be capable of noticing. (If a statistics paper gets enough basic facts wrong, Iām going to be more suspicious of the math, even if I lack the skills to fact-check that part.)
This extends to the authorās conclusion; the irrelevant details arenāt discrediting, but they are credibility-reducing.
(For what itās worth, if someone finds that Iāve gotten several details wrong in something Iāve written, thatās probably a sign that I wrote it too quickly, didnāt check it with other people, or was in some other condition that also reduced the strength of my reasoning.)
...but I still think that itās appropriate for people to reduce their trust in my conclusions if Iām getting āirrelevant detailsā wrong. If I notice an author make errors that I happen to notice, Iām going to raise my estimate for how many errors theyāve made that I didnāt notice
This makes sense, but I donāt think this is bad. In particular, Iām unsure about my own error rate, and maybe I do want to let people estimate my unknown-error rate as a function of my āirrelevant detailsā error rate.
Iāve had this happen to me before, and it was annoying...
...but I still think that itās appropriate for people to reduce their trust in my conclusions if Iām getting āirrelevant detailsā wrong. If an author makes errors that I happen to notice, Iām going to raise my estimate for how many errors theyāve made that I didnāt notice, or wouldnāt be capable of noticing. (If a statistics paper gets enough basic facts wrong, Iām going to be more suspicious of the math, even if I lack the skills to fact-check that part.)
This extends to the authorās conclusion; the irrelevant details arenāt discrediting, but they are credibility-reducing.
(For what itās worth, if someone finds that Iāve gotten several details wrong in something Iāve written, thatās probably a sign that I wrote it too quickly, didnāt check it with other people, or was in some other condition that also reduced the strength of my reasoning.)
This makes sense, but I donāt think this is bad. In particular, Iām unsure about my own error rate, and maybe I do want to let people estimate my unknown-error rate as a function of my āirrelevant detailsā error rate.
I also donāt think itās bad. Did I imply that I thought it was bad for people to update in this way? (I might be misunderstanding what you meant.)
Reading it again, you didnāt