> But as the Brookhaven team accrued 10 times more data, their measurement of the muon’s g-factor stayed the same while the error bars around the measurement shrank. The discrepancy with theory grew back to three sigma by the time of the experiment’s final report in 2006.
Any change in the theoretical estimates could in principle drastically change the number of sigmas mismatch with experiment in either direction (but as the scientific endeavor is human after all, typically each helps debug the other and the two converge over time).
“Similar” is doing a lot of work there - what constitutes similar basically dictates if error correction has any future proofing benefits or none at all.
Systematic errors can easily remain hidden. The faster-than-light neutrino had 6-sigma confidence[0], but 4 other labs couldn't reproduce the results. In the end it was attributed to fiber optic timing errors.
So if you don't know you have a system error, then you can very easily get great confidence in fundamentally flawed results.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino#Superluminal_neutrino...
Isn't that exactly what you just did?
There's nothing wrong with showing only small quotes, the problem would be cherry picking them in a way that leads people to draw incorrect conclusions about the whole.