Allow me to carry you back to the top of this thread, to a post made by a presumably reasonably well educated member of the Hacker News community, in reaction to this article on the professionally written and edited, reputable website, businessinsider.com.

That user wrote:

> > The theory, which Romeo relied on partly to guide his search, suggests that when Earhart crossed over the international dateline during her 20-hour flight, her navigation system became inaccurate and misdirected her by about 60 miles, potentially leading to a tragic end.

> How would this happen? It's not like her plane would have contained a misprogrammed computer.

So you see, what we have here is a sentence written by a journalist and published by their editor, which says “her navigation system became inaccurate and misdirected her”; juxtaposed with evidence of a reader being confused and trying to work out what the writer was talking about, because the implied technical failure mode seemed anachronistic for Amelia Earhart’s era of flight. Because the way that sentence is phrased certainly sounds like the kind of sentence one would write to describe an automatic system failing when taken outside its design limits, like a millennium bug type of error.

You seem to be suggesting that the only fault here lies with the reader, who should have understood that by ‘navigation system became inaccurate’ the writer expected them to understand that to mean the processes and procedures followed by the crew suddenly stopping working when crossing the dateline - since obviously that would be the sort of ‘navigation system’ used.

That’s a wonderfully generous position to take but I’m sorry it doesn’t pass the sniff test for me. The ‘navigation system’ Earhart was using couldn’t ’become inaccurate’ when crossing the dateline. It could be misapplied; human error could lead to it producing inaccurate results; but the system (looking up celestial ephemera in a book then doing math) was valid and worked.

Writing that the system ‘became inaccurate’ when crossing the dateline communicates to me that the writer misunderstood the system being used as being one which could systematically fail under those circumstances. Such misunderstandings are common! It’s understandable! Writers are reliant on interpreting expert quotes and rephrasing them, dumbing them down, or occasionally adding their own interpolation! It is one of the most common error types you will see in journalism about topics you understand well to see a journalist extrapolate from what they were told and say something completely wrong.

If the writer had understood the dateline theory more thoroughly they would likely have written that Earhart’s navigator made an error in accounting for crossing the dateline, rather than attributing the error to ‘the system’. There was a human being in the plane! You don’t need to ascribe the fault to the weakly passive ‘system became inaccurate’ source. Someone who understood that would not write this sentence in that way.

My attribution of the error here to the reporter is an application of Occam’s razor. The expert sources who found the sonar echo of a plane in the pacific definitely know how Earhart navigated. The reader who was confused on HN when reading something that implied a ‘systemic’ navigation failure at the dateline had a reasonable instinct that such a failure seemed unlikely for the time period. So the issue is with the reporter, who misinterpreted what the expert told them, didn’t realize before the filing deadline that what they were saying made no sense, and so wrote a sentence that caused confusion.