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timkam 3 days ago

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.