{"id":1652,"date":"2009-05-01T01:56:49","date_gmt":"2009-05-01T09:56:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=1652"},"modified":"2009-05-01T02:11:44","modified_gmt":"2009-05-01T10:11:44","slug":"tossing-the-fudge-into-the-trash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=1652","title":{"rendered":"Tossing the Fudge into the Trash"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yester-day, as I was in the course of writing-up a somewhat less formal discussion of the ideas in my decision-theory paper, I re&auml;lized that I had <em>fudged<\/em> something important in that paper.<\/p><p>More specifically, I had erroneously treated an important property of one relation as <span style=\"font-style: italic ;\">ex definitione<\/span>.  That property does follow from the combination of the definition with some propositions in the paper, but it's not a fully <em>observable<\/em> property, where&auml;s I had tried to make each of the relations as observable as was possible, even at the cost of using somewhat cluttered definitions.<\/p><p>I was, unsurprisingly, very unhappy with the re&auml;lization.  The confusion had been an act of incompetence on my part, in an area where competence is quite important to me.  It meant that I had increased the potential burden upon those who have been or will be kind enough to check-over that work.  And I didn't immediately know how much work I would have to do to repair the model.<\/p><p>As to the last, when I buckled-down and started the revision, it proved to be fairly easy.  I removed the mistaken assertion in the discussion of the definition, and inserted a quick proof of the property amongst the theoremata.<\/p><p>Had the error not been caught before the paper were submitted to a journal, it might well have caused the paper to be rejected.  A referee might have been bright enough to pick-up on the mistake, but (for various possible reasons) not seen that it weren't truly fundamental to the work.<\/p><p>One lesson that is re&iuml;nforced by this experience is the value, for one's own understanding, of <em>explaining<\/em> ideas to others.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yester-day, as I was in the course of writing-up a somewhat less formal discussion of the ideas in my decision-theory paper, I re&auml;lized that I had fudged something important in that paper.More specifically, I had erroneously treated an important property of one relation as ex definitione. That property does follow from the combination of the [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[117,36,5,4],"tags":[299,445,446],"class_list":["post-1652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication","category-economics","category-personal","category-public","tag-decision-theory","tag-papers","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}