Links for 2021-12-26
Even a low-end car now has 100 electronic control units and over 100 million lines of code. https://spectrum.ieee.org/software-eating-car
An excel error led to an estimated 1,500 deaths in the UK in 2020 https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/workingpapers/2020/twerp_1314_-_fetzer.pdf
The Existential Risk of Math Errors: "Any useful discussion will be rigorous, hopefully with physics and math proofs; but proofs themselves are empirically unreliable...this sets a basic upper bound on how much confidence we can put on any belief." https://gwern.net/The-Existential-Risk-of-Mathematical-Error
"People show a level of trust in computed outputs that is completely at odds with the reality that nearly zero provably error-free computer programs have ever been written." https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4629271/
13% of papers may have a math error large enough to potentially change the paper’s conclusion. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/9/30/13077658/statcheck-psychology-replication
One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Microsoft Excel https://sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/one-five-genetics-papers-contains-errors-thanks-microsoft-excel
A Single Punctuation Mark Has Been Skewing Our Entire System of Scientific Ranking: Regardless of the quality of academic papers, if they include hyphens in their headlines, they end up getting counted less by the indexing systems. https://sciencealert.com/hyphens-break-our-entire-system-of-scientific-ranking-new-analysis-reveals
"History is full of examples of undetected errors and important omissions even in the most widely examined proofs. It has been estimated that at least a third of all mathematical publications contain errors." https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1402-4896/aa7ca8
A Widely Cited Statistic That Supposedly Proved Student Debt Was a Rich Person Problem Was the Result of a Coding Error https://slate.com/business/2019/04/elizabeth-warren-college-debt-plan-bad-stat-urban-institute-code-error.html
Researchers find a bug in Python script may have affected hundreds of studies https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/chemists-discover-cross-platform-python-scripts-not-so-cross-platform/
"The effect that we thought we had discovered was just a programming bug." https://elemental.medium.com/amp/p/a130eacb4235
Number Theorist Fears All Published Math Is Wrong: "I think there is a non-zero chance that some of our great castles are built on sand," he said, arguing that we must begin to rely on AI to verify proofs. https://vice.com/en_us/article/8xwm54/number-theorist-fears-all-published-math-is-wrong-actually?utm_source=mbfb
Confidence levels inside and outside an argument: "One must distinguish between levels of confidence internal and external to a specific model or argument." https://lesswrong.com/posts/GrtbTAPfkJa4D6jjH/confidence-levels-inside-and-outside-an-argument