Step-by-Step: Building a Mental Model

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Every accepted correction to this page is recorded with the exact change, so readers can see how the page improved over time.

1. 30 July 2026 · corrected by Emir Baycan

   Corrected a statistic understated by roughly a factor of three, a wrong institutional affiliation, a mischaracterized thesis, a date range off by a decade, and two unsupported claims attached to real executives.

   What the page claimed

   Article understated Philip Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment study by roughly a factor of three (citing approximately 28,000 predictions when the actual figure is over 80,000), misattributed Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser's 1981 physics-categorization study to Carnegie Mellon when it was actually conducted at the University of Pittsburgh, mischaracterized Reinhart and Rogoff's 'This Time Is Different' as supporting a specific pre-crisis housing assumption rather than accurately representing the book's actual thesis, misdated the development of germ theory to the 1850s-1870s when it is more accurately placed in the 1860s-1880s, included an unsourceable statistic comparing 30 years to 300 years of mortality reduction, and attached an unverifiable detail about API design to a real 2016 Andy Jassy interview along with an unverifiable claim that Werner Vogels published specific deployment-performance data in 2006.

   What was corrected

   Corrected Tetlock's prediction count to over 80,000, corrected the Chi et al. institutional affiliation to the University of Pittsburgh, rewrote the Reinhart and Rogoff passage to accurately reflect their real thesis, corrected the germ theory date range to the 1860s-1880s, removed the unsourceable mortality statistic while preserving the accurate general claim about accelerated progress, removed the unverifiable API-design detail from the Jassy interview claim, and replaced the Vogels 2006 claim with his real, documented 'you build it, you run it' philosophy.

   Why: Verified against Tetlock's original Expert Political Judgment publication, Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser's original 1981 Cognitive Science paper, Reinhart and Rogoff's actual published thesis in This Time Is Different, historical accounts of Pasteur's and Koch's germ theory work, and available public interviews and statements from Andy Jassy and Werner Vogels.

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