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Kaj_Sotala comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - Less Wrong
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I would presume that most papers will include a number of references to sources that the authors have only briefly skimmed, only read the abstract, or not actually read at all.
I saw an article somewhere (I wish I'd remembere where) about a widely-read paper making a mistake when it cited one of its sources, claiming that the source said something which it didn't. A number of later papers by other authors then repeated this mistaken claim, presumably because their authors didn't bother checking whether the prestigious paper was correct in its cite.
I'm about .90 confident that Luke hasn't actually read all of his cites in entirety.
I think it is not rare for errors in citing to be repeated because no-one bothers to go back to the original source.
Not reading the paper at all can be dangerous. I once read a paper in which the authors had unwittingly rediscovered, but in inferior form, mathematical results that were already proved in one of the papers they cited. Fortunately for the authors, I was refereeing their paper, and had read the paper they cited, so I was able to save them the embarrassment of publication.
Correct. You win some Bayes points.
"source X claims/proves statement Y" - the author should have read source X carefully
"For general background information on subject A, see e.g. source B" - the author tries to make the paper more accessible to people from other fields by providing some context, but they do not need to have read source B in detail. Not reading all of your sources is not necessarily evil
This is quite true, and I didn't mean to imply that it was evil.
Also, and especially in the physical sciences - "Other techniques for achieving similar goals include..." or "A complementary measurement of the same quantity..." In these cases knowing what they're doing/trying to do is sufficient.
Of course, the more relevant it is, the more important it is to actually read it. By the time you get to things that you claim actually support your argument, you had better have read them several times carefully.