u/Humble_Warthog9711 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Fair point How about if I had to guess, id bet that someone lied along the way?
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
People can say incorrect things with good intentions.
Problems happen in two cases:
1. You have bad intentions (these are the words like 'fraud', 'defamation')
2. You are negligent in verifying your statements. This one is trickier because people with good intentions might say false statements and not realize it. If you do that a few times and you promptly correct and you act in good faith... that's called being human. If you make the same mistakes or typos over and over and over despite being corrected in the past, or you repeat statements that a reasonable person doing reasonable research would not consider hard facts but you call them facts, then you start entering the gray area.
\#2 is most of Reddit. People who think they are right and they probably aren't. Bootcamps that make math mistakes and they didn't mean to.
The problems happen if you make math mistakes every time you publish numbers, and it's called out and you fix it and then you keep making math errors, then that could actually become negligent even if you didn't mean it to be.