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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.