
Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry - howsilly
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/business/publishing-books-errors.html
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darkerside
I'd always assumed publishers _were_ doing this already. If not, whence the
whining and chagrin over low rent "bloggers" somehow not being comparable to
deal authors and journalists?

I realize this isn't as widely held a view as it was 10-20 years ago, but
bloggers used to be looked at with disdain, untrustworthy because of the lack
of reputability that came with published materials.

This makes me further question whether there was much gatekeeping at all even
before this fake news, post truth era.

~~~
dhosek
Most (if not all) large magazines fact check their published material. The New
Yorker even fact checks the poetry (seriously!)

~~~
Chris2048
Do "fact checks" include oversights and misleading premises? Would a fact
check have caught the bias in a recent NYT article, for instance?

~~~
dhosek
Nope, it's generally a case of looking up things asserted as fact or otherwise
independently verifying them. Quotations may also be verified with the
interviewee. If I had known that such a job existed when I was in college, my
career path would have been very different.

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buboard
This was inevitable and is the culmination of two things:

\- Too much hypothesis-driven science that results in statistically
significant, but untrustworthy results. It's easy to find statistically
significant data to backup whatever crazy thing your brain comes up with.

\- Too much pseudo-scientifically backed popular press. Popular science is
useful for disemminating science that has been solidified through decades of
falsiability tests, not last month's papers.

~~~
Finnucane
Some years ago, when I was working as production editor in New York, I had to
manage a manuscript for a book of new-age woo that was trying to pass itself
off as pseudo-science (one of these 'quantum magic' type books). Not only was
the premise crap, but the author clearly did not understand even basic
historical facts about science. I brought this up with the editor, who seemed
surprised to be told that the author did not know what she was talking about.
I'd guess the editor had not really read the manuscript very closely. I worked
with the copyeditor to try to straighten some of it out, but it was pretty
much futile.

The NY publishing system is set up so that editors spend most of their day
doing tasks unrelated to actually editing their books, of which they have too
many. It gets worse as you go up the food chain.

~~~
coreypreston
Was the book ever published?

~~~
Finnucane
Yes.

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tyri_kai_psomi
Add to this Richard Dawkins new book, "Outgrowing God" which is rife with
inaccuracies, baseless conjecture about the motivations behind some of the
ancients civilizations he talks about (an assyriologist posted a pretty
pointed takedown of some of the inaccuracies on twitter
[https://twitter.com/GHeathWhyte/status/1175081067943997440](https://twitter.com/GHeathWhyte/status/1175081067943997440)),
and theology so bad you would question whether or not he himself has ever
actually opened up a Bible.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
Great... so now I can't trust Richard Dawkins OR the people who review his
books.

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tyri_kai_psomi
As the twitter thread notes, he seems to have gotten some of his historical
information about ancient Mesopotamia from a website called historywiz
([https://www.historywiz.com/flood.htm](https://www.historywiz.com/flood.htm)),
which I suppose is good if you are writing a 8th or 9th grade paper on the
topic, but not a book.

~~~
Shorel
Interesting and informative.

However your previous remark about Richard Dawkins opening up a Bible is a bit
worrying.

It is obvious that the missing historical information is not in the Bible, and
that remark can be interpreted a bit like the point of view of Jehovah
witnesses, that all you need to read is the Bible.

~~~
zaque1213
I think their statement about Dawkins’ apparently having never opened a Bible
was in regard to his theological understanding, not historical.

Having read Dawkins, my primary critique of him overall is that he regularly
demonstrates a willful ignorance as to what religious people actually believe.
He’s content to attack straw men and not the propositional truth claims at the
heart of religious belief.

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ANPEQ-1
It is always entertaining when the 'newspaper of record' shames other
publications for their mistakes and failings.

~~~
ReptileMan
They are working hard to lose the newspaper of record status.

They omitted some critical information last week in the Kavanaugh story and
blamed it on editorial process.

 __ _Reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly said in an interview on MSNBC
that they wrote in the draft of their Sunday Review piece that a woman who
Kavanaugh was said to have exposed himself to while a student at Yale had told
others she had no recollection of the alleged incident. Their editors, they
say, removed the reference. “It was just sort of. . . in the haste of the
editing process,” said Pogrebin._ __

Couple more of these and they will be in Buzzfeed level of trustworthiness.

~~~
hkhanna
> Couple more of these and they will be in Buzzfeed level of trustworthiness.

This is unnecessarily harsh. The New York Times is a massive company with
hundreds of journalists and editors.

If every once in a while a journalistic organization makes a mistake, I think
it's reasonable to point it out, have them publicly correct the record, and
then let it go.

Harping on every honest (if sloppy) mistake as if it is evidence that an
organization is totally incompetent or dishonest is something autocrats do to
de-legitimize journalism itself. So long as 99% of the time, they don't make
mistakes, and so long as they promptly acknowledge and correct the mistakes
when they are called out, I think journalism done in good faith (like the work
done at The Times) deserves our benefit of the doubt in an era when it is
under unprecedented attack by leaders worldwide.

~~~
ANPEQ-1
As a former NYTimes employee, I can assure you that 99% of the work is not
done in good faith. It's all activism now, top to bottom. There's a few good
eggs granted, but the newspaper has an agenda and uses their pseudo-
objectivity/newspaper of record as cover and concealment.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Newspapers have always had an agenda. Op-eds particularly have always been a
cesspool of political nonsense.

The difference now is the agenda is obvious because more viewpoints are
available online, and in the past the agenda would - sometimes - be supported
with hard journalism from real sources, including field reporters.

Now there's a lot more newswire and PR copy pasta and Google searching.

~~~
ANPEQ-1
"Newspapers have always had an agenda"

I'm fine with this, so long as they don't insist on their objectivity.
Otherwise everything they say must be filtered through an undefined lens that
readers either a) don't have time for and are thus victimized by the 'untruth'
or b) believe and desire the confirmation bias and are thus victimized by
misinformation.

~~~
cwkoss
"activist with an agenda" or "defender of truth", you can't be both at the
same time, yet many journalists think their role should be both.

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NavekM
The Naomi Wolf one is most excruciating listen on radio I've ever heard.

[https://mobile.twitter.com/thymetikon/status/113170257787850...](https://mobile.twitter.com/thymetikon/status/1131702577878503425)

~~~
RankingMember
Awkward surely, but in this day and age I can at least give her credit for
listening and not trying to bluster past it like so many public figures when
confronted with inconvenient facts.

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ratsmack
I have a problem with "news" sources that don't allow commentary on their
articles. It seems that many eliminated the comment sections when the articles
were too often found to be incorrect and/or pushed a blatant narrative, rather
than just reporting the facts.

~~~
burntoutfire
That's my impression too, specifically with the Guardian. If I'm not mistaken,
you used to be able to comment under most articles, then they started to
disable comments under articles on "inflammatory" subjects (read: about
immigrants etc.) and now you can hardly ever comment. Which makes sense,
because o lot of their articles would be just torn to pieces if commenting was
allowed.

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the_watcher
> But a factual controversy can also be costly, driving down sales and, in
> extreme cases, forcing the publisher to recall and destroy finished copies.

Are there examples of this happening? Michael Wolff's book was a bestseller,
for example, despite many of the factual disputes coming up prior to its
release.

In theory, lack of fact-checking would seriously hurt a traditional media
outlet, as it could reduce traffic or subscriptions. For authors, however,
it's not exactly the same calculus. Once the book is sold, it's sold (I
realize it's a bit more complex than this with advances and returns, my point
is that convincing someone to keep paying them monthly isn't a concern). Once
they become a best-seller, they'll be able to put "best-seller" in their
"About the Author" section. While there's a future credibility argument (which
can be partially mitigated by the value of being a "best-selling author"), I'd
argue that from a pure "maximize returns from this publication" perspective,
there's really only an incentive to fact check things that are so egregious
that it could lead to a recall or stop the book from being published in the
first place.

This is not a good situation to be in, but the job a publisher is hired to do
is to take a manuscript and turn it into something that can be sold in
bookstores. I'm not really sure that it _should_ be their role to police this,
unless it's published by a media outlet explicitly as journalism.

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btrettel
Even in science there is too little due diligence.

I'm nearly done a PhD in mechanical engineering. Recently I was writing the
review section of my dissertation and I decided to check one of the most used
results in my field, the most common empirical equation for the boundary of
the "atomization" regime in the breakup of liquid jets into droplets. This
dates back to the late 1970s. Turns out that it's off by a factor of about 4
due to a math error. Out of the hundreds of people to examine this result, I
think I'm the only one to notice the error. I spent a fair amount of time
checking the literature to make sure I'm not crazy but seems no one noticed
the problem.

A result being highly cited is no guarantee that it's correct.

~~~
mrguyorama
Is that "off by a factor of 4" result still "useful"? Can you still create
products/devices/things/science with that incorrect result? Even epicycles
still allowed reduced-accuracy prediction of the movement of heavenly bodies

~~~
btrettel
Yes and no.

The result was a factor of 4 too high (edit: 3.3, to be more precise), which
is conservative for certain applications. But for those applications I'd argue
that you are typically confident that your device is in the atomization regime
_a priori_ and don't need to check.

But it's extremely inaccurate for my application, where you don't want your
device to be in the atomization regime. In fact, I only started examining this
in more detail because my own experiments clearly contradicted the textbooks,
review articles, etc. If someone blindly applied this result then they'd
potentially make a bad device.

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dhosek
I'm intrigued by the claim of "dropped footnotes" (and its passive
construction). How exactly were these footnotes dropped? There seems to be an
implied blame of the word processing software and I find that rather dubious.

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6gvONxR4sf7o
I wish there was some mention of major newspapers in this. It seems like a
glaring omission. Through all the "fake news" stories in the last years, I
have yet to see someone like NYT openly talk about e.g. the gell-mann amnesia
effect that the rest of us so openly agree is a thing.

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wwqrd
I'd settle for spelling and malapropism checks.

~~~
carlmr
Yeah, I'm not sure if this is true, but I have the impression the error rates
have increased in the last decades, despite spell-check becoming more
effective at finding them at low cost.

~~~
__s
I recently read all of Philip K Dick's novels. Spotted typos in every book. I
log typos in my goodreads reviews

In the past it wasn't even the author's fault necessarily. The worst case of
this was an anthology of Ursula Leguin, "Five Complete Novels" where I quit
recording the typos as there would be multiple per page

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RandomBacon
If the typos are in a legitimate eBook copy, it's because sometimes the people
who make the eBook don't have the source file(s), and instead have to OCR a
printed book.

If the typos are in the printed book, that's bad.

