Nowhere in that comment does he say that his post was or contained a “math error”. The closest thing I can find is this:
Great point about the step function. That convinces me that Bach would not have drawn a different qualitative conclusion if he had used a different functional form, no matter which one. I’ve updated my post with a note about this.
[EDIT: AFAICT Douglas_Knight is saying that Nostalgebrist’s initial guess that Bach’s post was sensitive to the functional form is a “math error”. I wouldn’t call it that, but perhaps reasonable people could disagree about this.]
What did his post originally mean? I’m not allowed to read people’s minds. He admits that no one took from it what he wanted them to take from it. Lanrian said that it was “a reasonable critique...that it doesn’t make sense to assume a normal distribution.” That was a qualitative complaint and he admitted that it was qualitatively wrong.
Nowhere in that comment does he say that his post was or contained a “math error”. The closest thing I can find is this:
[EDIT: AFAICT Douglas_Knight is saying that Nostalgebrist’s initial guess that Bach’s post was sensitive to the functional form is a “math error”. I wouldn’t call it that, but perhaps reasonable people could disagree about this.]
You’ve lost track of the object level here.
What did his post originally mean? I’m not allowed to read people’s minds. He admits that no one took from it what he wanted them to take from it. Lanrian said that it was “a reasonable critique...that it doesn’t make sense to assume a normal distribution.” That was a qualitative complaint and he admitted that it was qualitatively wrong.