[tw1010]

It's not "not getting the basics right", it's a simple typo. A thing like that shouldn't invalidate a whole article (unless you have skin in the game for the opponent argument).

Why does HN have a pattern of dismissing whole articles due to simple typos? It's as if we're so habituated to skim and do tldr-reading that our brain is working overdrive to find the slightest excuse not to have to do any type of reading beyond surface level.

[mattlutze]

Critical and technical literature needs to be held to a standard.

When the rhetor introduces errors in the artifact, the rhetor's ethos with the audience is diminished.

The more fundamental the error (getting a basic equation wrong I guess?) the more trust you lose with a knowledgeable audience. If the author doesn't see that a fundamental issue was introduced, they may not have been expert enough to not introduce additional errors; the reader must spend more time double-checking the components of the argument rather than thinking about the argument itself.

If someone comes to this article as a novice in the topic and stores the error as a fact, they may end up at least confused when approaching it again in the future. HN tends to have an audience representing deep knowledge in many fields, who end up providing a thorough and varied set of quality filters. These quality filters are also really helpful to the novice who may otherwise miss the typo.

[jph00]

> Critical and technical literature needs to be held to a standard.

That's a sloppy statement. You haven't defined what standard. Clearly, everything is held to "a standard"; making that an entirely empty claim.

> When the rhetor introduces errors in the artifact, the rhetor's ethos with the audience is diminished.

A "rhetor" is a teacher of rhetoric. This is not the correct word in this case. In this case, the correct word is the more general "author", since the post was not teaching rhetoric. Further, the entire point of "ethos" in rhetoric is that we shouldn't be so lazy as to allow minor issues cloud our judgement.

> The more fundamental the error (getting a basic equation wrong I guess?) the more trust you lose with a knowledgeable audience.

Quite the opposite. A knowledgeable audience can decide whether to trust something based on the actual content, rather than minor surface issues. Only a lazy or uninformed audience need get distracted by typos.

[mattlutze]

> That's a sloppy statement. You haven't defined what standard.

Actually, I think I established a basis of discussion then later illustrated this basis with the way HN has grown and tends to enforce its standard.

> A "rhetor" is a teacher of rhetoric. This is not the correct word in this case.

A rhetor is a person practicing rhetoric, or a person delivering persuasive or effective communication. Teachers are indeed a subset of that, but also public speakers, negotiators, and e.g. authors who write to influence their audiences' understanding or perception.

I think you may also misunderstand the function of ethos in rhetoric.

> A knowledgeable audience can decide whether to trust something based on the actual content.

Perhaps we're in agreement? If the content reflects reflects clear understanding it can improve the efficacy of a rhetorical artifact, while sloppiness can reduce its persuasiveness.

Errors can diminish ethos. Correcting errors can amplify it: https://jacobbuckman.com/2020-01-17-a-sober-look-at-bayesian...

[sjg007]

I mean it’s kinda a big typo.

[tw1010]

Not really, it's one of the most common mistakes I see in bayesian calculations. If the author was basing a lengthy series of calculations on that first step, it would be worse (but in this case the expression is quickly replaced by a corrected version for the classification discussion).

[toxik]

Do you have data to support that it’s the most common mistake? It seems obvious to me from P(A|B) = P(A, B)/P(B) and P(A, B) = P(B|A) P(A)

[tw1010]

I didn't say it was one of the most common mistakes, I said it's one of the most common mistakes I have observed. Purely subjective.

[macleginn]

I have a similar experience, but precisely because of this I am very careful to check the formula each time I have to type it. Mistakes in the formulas are not "just typos", they are a very annoying and potentially harmful kind of typos, and we must take great care in order to avoid them.

[tw1010]

Like I said above, "typos" in sequences of calculations are obviously problematic, and lead (almost always) to mistakes in the final result. In this case that's not applicable since there's no "second arithmetic manipulation" following the typo:ed one. (The author replaces the incorrect one with the correct bayesian equation in the next section.)

[mbeex]

> unless you have skin in the game for the opponent argument

I stated explicitly otherwise (I'm not even in research), something you certainly couldn't miss. I'm not quite sure, if your allegation backfires.

Especially in hot temper, people make errors. But just then they should avoid making an easy target. The authors site also has some problems with rendering math (some does, some shows still dollar signs) and this adds to a first impression of sloppyness. I t is his decision to go public - but then he has to take the consequences.

[j7ake]

It's unfortunate the first equation was mistyped, one way to check is that the Bayes's rule can be derived from a rule in conditional probability:

P(A,B) = P(B,A)

P(A|B) * P(B) = P(B|A) * P(A)

The formulation in the blog post would say instead:

P(A|B) * P(A) = P(B|A) * P(B)

which does not really make sense.

[cgel]

Author here. Sorry that the typo and the render errors affected you so much. We don't see any rendering issues on our end, if you tell us what browser you are using maybe we can replicate and fix them.

[mbeex]

> Sorry that the typo and the render errors affected you so much.

It seems to concern some commentators here to a much greater extent, concluding from the whole downvoting dance. I'm old-school, I received my master in mathematics more than 25 years ago. Being in stochastics, I simply spotted an error and also some dispute, the latter from the context in the article. I want to mention, that in the past people had considered a behavior like mine as helpful, rigour was a value and especially when under fire, people were expected to try even harder.

> what browser you are using maybe we can replicate and fix them

FF 72.0.1 on Win 10 here. If it helps, in the following sequence:

--- snip ---

Bayes’s Rule simply says that for any two non-independent random variables $A$ and $B$, seeing that $B$ took a specific value $b$ changes the distribution of the random variable $A$. In standard lingo, the term Pr(A=a) is called the prior, Pr(B=b∣A=a) is the likelihood, and Pr(A=a∣B=b) is the posterior.

---snap---

all the single capitals (A,B...) appear embraced with dollar signs, all the Pr(...) expression are correct (even after removing uBlock/noScript restrictions)

[cgel]

Thanks! We just fixed an issue. I was able to test it on FF for MacOS but it would be very helpful if you could confirm the problem is fixed in your end.

Also, I'll admit that messing up Bayes rule in a blog post criticizing Bayesian Neural Netowrks is pretty comical. Should have taken the time to proof read the whole thing.

[mbeex]

> if you could confirm the problem is fixed

Yes, it's working :)

[sjg007]

What is the takeaway from this article anyway?