I’ve always liked the idea of having a public mistakes page, in which you own up to mistakes that you’ve made and apologise. Some people even go so far as announcing that they will pay bounties for mistakes you alert them to.
In the spirit of intellectual honesty, I’ll be adding my mistakes to this page as I find about them, along with the date I added them to the list (dd/mm/yy). If you have found an error in something I’ve written, please email sam [at] progressireland [dot] org. If I agree with you, I will buy you a beer.
I’m reminded of the umeshism that, if you’ve never regretted publishing a blog post, you don’t have an interesting enough blog. In everything I do, I try to always be improving, and to have friends willing to point it out when I err.
2/06/25: Not making a mistakes page sooner. I’ve wanted to start a page like this for a long time, but always got stalled by the fact that I wasn’t recording my mistakes anywhere and wouldn’t know where to start. As per usual, I was afflicted by the sunk cost fallacy, and it’s better to start late than never.
2/06/25: Accidentally plagiarising CGP Grey. I wrote a (since deleted) Fitzwilliam piece about the story of why Northern Ireland has no official flag. I had subconsciously internalised CGP Grey’s video on the topic, and made my article far too similar. I also gave my post a confusing title that made it sound like I was trying to make a political point. Sorry.
2/06/25: Mixed up history of Guinness. I let a few minor historical errors slip when editing Will O’Brien’s history of Guinness. The most egregious was not catching that “nearby rail links” played a factor in the choice of the location of St. James’s Gate Brewery, even though passenger rail didn’t exist at the time. Whoops.
29/07/25: Misreported data on Brazilian electricity generation. Lazily repeated the idea in Links for June that electricity generation per capita in the European Union is now lower than in Brazil, which is not true (yet!).
Sam Enright 