Seth in his blog tells what they are:
There are two mistakes you can make when you read a scientific paper: You can believe it (a) too much or (b) too little.
He goes on to discuss how the possibility of believing in something too little almost never occurs to professional scientists and how, that, in turn affects their performance. Take a look!
In the very early stages of research training, the problem I (as well as several of my colleagues) faced was of the first kind: believing too much. There are several factors that contribute to such over-belief (which could be a post by itself); in any case, at the early stages of our research, we are almost always taught not to accept whatever is written in the paper as the final word. I have also found that in the early stages of research, it is much easier to over-believe and then correct your outlook than to under-believe. I think these two factors might be the reason why many of us are aware of over-belief and not under-belief.
Tags: scientific papers
