The following extraordinary paragraph comes from Knuth’s TAOCP Volume 4A, right before the last set of exercises.
Many of the exercises below ask a modern reader to find and/or to correct errors in the literature of bygone days. The point is not to gloat over how smart we are in the 21st century; the point is rather to understand that even the pioneers of a subject can stumble. One good way to learn that a set of ideas is not really as simple as it might seem to today’s computer scientists and mathematicians is to observe that some of the world’s leading thinkers had to struggle with the concepts when they were new.
This reminds me of when I told the story (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/09/03/disagree-turing/) of how Alan Turing in the 1940s was overconfidently credulous about ESP (“I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.”) and Daniel Kahneman in the 2000s was overconfidently credulous about social priming (““You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.”)
As I wrote when relating these episodes:
Turing and Kahneman both made big contributions to science, almost certainly much bigger than anything I will ever do. And I’m not criticizing them for believing in ESP and social priming. What I am criticizing them for is their insistence that the evidence is “overwhelming” and that the rest of us “have no choice” but to accept these hypotheses. Both Turing and Kahneman, great as they are, overstated the strength of the statistical evidence.
And that’s interesting. When stupid people make a mistake, that’s no big deal. But when brilliant people make a mistake, it’s worth noting.