An alert reader (Grant) has pointed out that, in a post a couple of weeks ago, I used a figure of $20 million for the cost of saving lives, for which I didn’t give a basis. I can’t exactly reconstruct my error now, but I think I must have used BTRE estimates of aggregate cost in billions. Regardless, the estimate is certainly higher than it should be. In the preceding post, I present and defend an estimate in the range $5 million to $10 million.

Obviously, it’s embarrassing to get things wrong, but I regard blogging as somewhere between conversation with friends/colleagues and the circulation of draft papers. That is, it’s a chance to test out your arguments and detect errors before committing them to print in, say, a newspaper or refereed journal article. In this case, correcting the error doesn’t fundamentally change the argument in the post concerned, though what looked like an overwhelming case is now more like a strong balance of probabilities. In any case, it’s more important to get things right in the end, than to maintain a pretence of always being right.