Here's my take on this, if you're curious.
Writing a paper without learning the context of the field, or learning about previous related research, is shoddy scholarship. It drastically increases the chance that your work will be worthless, or at least ignored.
But!
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I think people (like me) should be free to do shoddy scholarship, to invent bullshit models or engage in speculation way outside their area of expertise.
Most of the time this will result in useless work that makes no real contribution. But on rare occasion ...
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... there will be something unusually creative or valuable. We should welcome all possibilities for that, no matter how unlikely.
The only crime a researcher can commit is pretending that shoddy work isn't shoddy, or speculative work isn't speculative.
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Posing, or refusing to admit the limitations of what you've done is (in my mind) the one great crime in research, that I think should not be tolerated.
But I have no problem with people being naive, speculative, and/or lazy, so long as they admit it.
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very much agreed :) - I hope the fact that I really appreciate you having done this work comes through!
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One more point, neither for or against the case you set out here - you may want to be careful with words like lazy, they tend to be ableist - doing a *full* literature search is hard, disproportionately for some groups (e.g. dyslexics, ASD and ADD)
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and non-native language speakers!! and people without institutional access to journals, or even reliable internet (and probably many more)
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Your point is well-taken, and to be honest for these reasons the only person I ever really feel comfortable accusing of laziness is myself
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that's very fair - i don't think there's any external offense in what you said - but I question if it's even a fair put-down on yourself*?
ascribing something to laziness is, paradoxically, lazy
*you of course are the final arbiter of this
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Laziness is good. I like Shalizi and Tozier but I don’t buy their theory in that note at all. I’m in favor of aggressively ignorant rediscovery/reinvention (much more robust guarantor of QA than formal replication). Full lit survey is an especially dumb burden on preprints.
I have a long rant about this is a Facebook group somewhere. This is one of the reasons I gave up on academia and turned to blogging. It is perversely hostile to rediscovery.
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You don’t actually know if your phase transition result is already known in mathematical sociology do you? The lazy but principled way to diligence this paper is to send it to a friendly mathematical sociologist to vet, and then collaborate/co-author to beef it up if needed.
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