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Comment by stdbrouw | Hacker News Reader

Going off on a tangent here, but there's an inherent tension to "make no claims without support" when support typically refers to citations. The academic literature has become so large that you find support for almost any claim whatsoever, which makes it possible to string together an entire spiel that supposedly builds on existing science but is actually completely unsupported and void of any argumentation. Whenever you read "Method A has been shown to be a great way to investigate B" with no arguments, no summary, only citations, and especially when those citations don't mention page numbers but are meant to support hyperspecific claims, be suspicious.

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Citations aren't proofs of the new paper claims. Sources are pointers to sarguments in support of your claims. It's the reader's job to evaluate those sources' arguments, and by citing sources the author is saved the effort of rewriting that part of the argument.

> It's the reader's job to evaluate those sources' arguments, and by citing sources the author is saved the effort of rewriting that part of the argument.

Hold on. I think it's the author and editor's jobs to evaluate the source's arguments before publishing them. The reason to demand accountability and responsibility from journalists is because we have to place a certain amount of trust in them. Trust but verify, sure, but it's not possible—let alone practical—to evaluate the sources used by every article you read. As it turns out, even journal reviewers don't have time to do that for a handful of quarterly articles, even when they are paid to. So, I don't know how lay readers would be expected to do this for every single article they read on a daily basis.

And I am not interested in saving authors the effort of rewriting parts of an argument, I think I want them to do that if it is necessary for their article.

This is so true. I review for conferences and it is not rare that I am forced to read half a dozen papers to verify what authors wrote and I get disappointed frequently because the interpretation was wrong or authors barely read the cited material in the first place.

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