For my part, I took the “with Jeremy Bentham” clause to be a concise way of saying “Incidentally, this isn’t a strawman example intended to artificially support my point; this is a real example of a significant player who made this particular error.”
Relatedly, if you had done that research and came back and objected to Luke that his example of Bentham was a bad example, because Bentham is not actually arguing what Luke summarizes him as arguing, I would judge that as doing research that improved the quality of the article.
And relatedly to that, if you were deciding ahead of time whether to do the research, and you estimated that reaching that conclusion was a likely outcome (which it sounds like you did), I would judge that deciding to do it was a sensible decision if you wanted to improve the quality of the article.
Now, whether improving the quality of the article is itself worth doing or not is of course a separate question, but if it isn’t, then your comment is itself a shiny distraction (as is mine, and indeed most of my activity on this site, and elsewhere), and we’re no longer talking about any special property of scholarship.
After all, sitting around working out solutions from first principles can also be a shiny distraction.
For my part, I took the “with Jeremy Bentham” clause to be a concise way of saying “Incidentally, this isn’t a strawman example intended to artificially support my point; this is a real example of a significant player who made this particular error.”
Relatedly, if you had done that research and came back and objected to Luke that his example of Bentham was a bad example, because Bentham is not actually arguing what Luke summarizes him as arguing, I would judge that as doing research that improved the quality of the article.
And relatedly to that, if you were deciding ahead of time whether to do the research, and you estimated that reaching that conclusion was a likely outcome (which it sounds like you did), I would judge that deciding to do it was a sensible decision if you wanted to improve the quality of the article.
Now, whether improving the quality of the article is itself worth doing or not is of course a separate question, but if it isn’t, then your comment is itself a shiny distraction (as is mine, and indeed most of my activity on this site, and elsewhere), and we’re no longer talking about any special property of scholarship.
After all, sitting around working out solutions from first principles can also be a shiny distraction.