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Science Is Full of Errors. Bounty Hunters Are Here to Find Them
A new project is paying researchers to find errors in other scientists’ work. The only problem? Even error hunters make mistakes.
In 2010, two famous economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, released a paper confirming what many fiscally conservative politicians had long suspected: that a country’s economic growth tanks if public debt rises above a certain percentage of GDP. The paper fell on the receptive ears of the UK’s soon-to-be chancellor, George Osborne, who cited it multiple times in a speech setting out what would become the political playbook of the austerity era: slash public services in order to pay down the national debt. The end result is that published science is littered with all kinds of very human errors—like copying the wrong value into a form, failing to squash a coding bug, or missing rows in a spreadsheet.
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