So, a colleague once told me of a story where an important academic paper (well important in its respected field) presented results that turned out to be false. Not exactly NEWS (think more first-world-problem) but this paper was peer reviewed and appeared in a prominent journal but still managed to slip through. This paper turned out to be cited in many places and only when my colleague tried to reproduce the results many years later did it become apparent things were not right – it turned out to be a bug in the original authors code that caused skewed results in his empirical analysis.

The thing is though, this kind of shit happens all the time, and it’s really fucking annoying. If you attended any conferences, meetups, usergroups, etc this practice is rife. Someone standing in front of an audience says something and it’s almost always instantly taken as fact, without the need to provide sources of proof. The audience then believe this to be true, as in many causes they are in no position to prove otherwise, and those that do voice an opinion are seen as being “aggressive”. The sad fact is that most of the time errors/hearsay go uncorrected, and people walk away misinformed.

The fact of the matter is that you really need assume what someone has said might not be true, do your own follow up and make decisions based on what the evidence supports. Remember that many people have agendas, and also that it’s very possible that speakers are talking about something that they have only a rudimentary understand of. Don’t blindly assume that what someone purports to be be true is actually the truth.