Errors, Apologies, and Thoughts on Publishing Perfection

“Please do not 1) send me your papers or other “interesting material” to read, 2) ask finance questions (not my specialty), 3) make me to rewrite sections of my books (I write books, not emails), 4) ask for a list of “other interesting books to read,” 5) ask me to provide career or educational advice, 6) send me passages from Tolstoy or the Ecclesiast on luck and randomness, 7) send me the list of typos in my drafts. Note that I almost always reply (but ONLY to short messages), time permitting (but once) – even to nasty emails. Finally, note that, thanks to my new keyboard, I sometimes reply in Arabic, particularly to academics.” – From Nassim Taleb’s home page

If you don’t recognize the name, hopefully you will recognize the work of Nassim Taleb, the author of the books Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan. I suppose when you are demonstratably smarter than everyone else around, you can be very picky about your correspondence. Today I’m most interested in #7 above where he instructs us “not to send him a list of typos in my drafts.”

My own process for finding all of the typos in my book included having a professional editor, test readers, a professional line editor, and personally reading the manuscript about 1,000 times. The book itself is 110,000 words and includes 80 Figures and Tables, and reasonable people in the publishing profession have patiently explained to me that every book is published with some amount of errors. I, however, was aiming to eliminate any and all errors in the text, preferring of course to deal with readers who took issue with my thesis, as opposed to those who found errors in the text.

As of last week the tally is 2 errors in Figures and Tables, and 5 errors in the text. Readers will note the random plus and minus signs in Figure 2-1 have little to do with the up and down arrows mentioned in the text, and the tiny numbers in the middle of the chart in Figure 9-7 are the numbers for the right side scale of the chart which somehow got misplaced. Some of the text errors include attributing my associate’s, Michael Kitces, work on withdrawal rates to a piece he wrote in 1998, a somewhat amazing feat since I’m pretty sure Michael was still in college in 1998 (the correct date is 2008). I used the word “mute” when obviously the point was “moot.” And last week a client pointed out that I had astonishingly morphed the name of Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas to John Lucas in several places in the text, a strange phenomenon that combines the name of John Muth, the originator of the Rational Expectations Pricing theory, with the name of Robert Lucas, the brilliant professor who ultimately won the Nobel Prize for expanding his work. I would have hoped to get the name of a Nobel Prize winner correct.

To Professor Lucas, and Michael Kitces, and to my readers, I apologize for these errors. Unlike Nassim Taleb, I do welcome your comments about the book in just about any form, length, or point of view. And somewhat masochistically, I welcome you pointing out any text errors you find. They will go on the list of things to correct if we publish another version of the book.