...your credibility will be reduced when the truth comes out, even if it doesn’t have any real logical bearing on your conclusions.
I’ve had this happen to me before, and it was annoying...
...but I still think that it’s appropriate for people to reduce their trust in my conclusions if I’m getting “irrelevant details” wrong. If an author makes errors that I happen to notice, I’m going to raise my estimate for how many errors they’ve made that I didn’t notice, or wouldn’t be capable of noticing. (If a statistics paper gets enough basic facts wrong, I’m going to be more suspicious of the math, even if I lack the skills to fact-check that part.)
This extends to the author’s conclusion; the irrelevant details aren’t discrediting, but they are credibility-reducing.
(For what it’s worth, if someone finds that I’ve gotten several details wrong in something I’ve written, that’s probably a sign that I wrote it too quickly, didn’t check it with other people, or was in some other condition that also reduced the strength of my reasoning.)
...but I still think that it’s appropriate for people to reduce their trust in my conclusions if I’m getting “irrelevant details” wrong. If I notice an author make errors that I happen to notice, I’m going to raise my estimate for how many errors they’ve made that I didn’t notice
This makes sense, but I don’t think this is bad. In particular, I’m unsure about my own error rate, and maybe I do want to let people estimate my unknown-error rate as a function of my “irrelevant details” error rate.
I’ve had this happen to me before, and it was annoying...
...but I still think that it’s appropriate for people to reduce their trust in my conclusions if I’m getting “irrelevant details” wrong. If an author makes errors that I happen to notice, I’m going to raise my estimate for how many errors they’ve made that I didn’t notice, or wouldn’t be capable of noticing. (If a statistics paper gets enough basic facts wrong, I’m going to be more suspicious of the math, even if I lack the skills to fact-check that part.)
This extends to the author’s conclusion; the irrelevant details aren’t discrediting, but they are credibility-reducing.
(For what it’s worth, if someone finds that I’ve gotten several details wrong in something I’ve written, that’s probably a sign that I wrote it too quickly, didn’t check it with other people, or was in some other condition that also reduced the strength of my reasoning.)
This makes sense, but I don’t think this is bad. In particular, I’m unsure about my own error rate, and maybe I do want to let people estimate my unknown-error rate as a function of my “irrelevant details” error rate.
I also don’t think it’s 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 didn’t