Nothing gives me more pleasure than seeing mirthless optimizers taken down the garden path.

Calls for retraction have become yet another avenue of redress for an affluent society, which has exhausted the legal system, and which increasingly yearns for perfection, is intolerant of uncertainty and can’t handle variation. Americans might introspect this November how they became more hyper regulated than the French, indeed more hyper regulated than Stalin or Mao thought it might have been possible to be hyper regulated.

. Knowledge grows by error, not perfection. Perfection merely picks out the lowest-lying fruit which everyone can agree about. Makary’s study received several online comments on the BMJ website. Voices were heard, which would not have been heard but for this paper. Were I the editor of the BMJ I’d open a bottle of champagne and celebrate a job well done.