Last night, while spending hours writing up my post on medium term male contraception, I made a fundamental error and didn’t read the header of the table I was quoting from. I then applied additional calculations to the figures which meant the result was an unplanned pregnancy rate five times less than reality on the basis of ‘typical usage’ of male latex condoms.
I find my error serious but amusing, considering I’m mid way through reading Bad Science by Ben Goldacre where he points out the frequent mis-representations of studies due to stupidity, subversive agenda and other reasons.
I most definitely briefly popped into the ’stupidity’ category there, and while I’m annoyed I made the error I’m also happy to admit it publicly (semi-related: previously). If you read the original post before I added updates, it’s worth re-reading as I correct the errors end up being even more concerned than I already am.