The number of experiences I’ve had of reading an abstract and later finding that the results provided extraordinarily poor evidence for the claims (or alternatively, extraordinarily good evidence—hard to predict what I will find if I haven’t read anything by the authors before...) makes this system suspect. This seems partially conceded in the fictive dialogue (“You don’t even have to dig into the methodology a lot”) - but it helps to look at it at least a little. I knew a senior academic whose system was as follows: read the abstract (to see if the topic of the paper is of any interest at all) but don’t believe any claims in it; then skim the methodology and results and update based on that. This makes a bit more sense to me.
The number of experiences I’ve had of reading an abstract and later finding that the results provided extraordinarily poor evidence for the claims (or alternatively, extraordinarily good evidence—hard to predict what I will find if I haven’t read anything by the authors before...) makes this system suspect. This seems partially conceded in the fictive dialogue (“You don’t even have to dig into the methodology a lot”) - but it helps to look at it at least a little. I knew a senior academic whose system was as follows: read the abstract (to see if the topic of the paper is of any interest at all) but don’t believe any claims in it; then skim the methodology and results and update based on that. This makes a bit more sense to me.