I'm only human. And so is science.

. . . not reading the papers one is citing or arguing from is pretty common. It happens all the time in science and blogging too. We rely to an amazing degree on surface information, skimmed impressions and inferred contents. Very human, not always wrong, but risky. One should increase one's intellectual due diligence proportional to the stakes of the claims.

I wish that more papers were open access so that we could all read them. We'd still skimp and skim, but perhaps less.

Update: The right place for science

Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.

Nobody appeared in a cloud of smoke and taught scientists these virtues. This behavior simply evolved because it worked.