"Detect hidden behaviors by tracing propagating errors Tao describes a clever study that measured how often scientists actually read the papers they cited by tracking whether citation typos — wrong page numbers or punctuation — were copied verbatim from one paper to the next, allowing researchers to infer whether an author was 'just copying and pasting a reference without actually checking it.' This lateral thinking — using the propagation of small errors as a proxy for an otherwise invisible behavior — is a general technique: when you cannot directly observe a process you care about, look for a small artifact that would only appear if the process happened a specific way. Source: Terence Tao, Dwarkesh Podcast, Terence Tao – Hardest Math Problems, AI's Limits, and Scientific Progress"