If you read a patent, you or your company becomes liable for triple damages, since it is considered willful infringement. Since you can't know what patents you might already be accidentally "infringing", the sane policy is to avoid reading or learning about any patents. This is explicit policy at many technology companies.

It's perfectly safe to read expired patents or patents that you otherwise have a right to. That's supposed to be why they exist, actually. The question is whether you've read expired patents to learn about the inventions in there or if you've ever actually used the knowledge in a patent your company has licensed (rather than just use it as a CYA).

I believe the OP's hypothesis is that software patents don't serve the patent system's primary purpose of disseminating useful knowledge, and he wants to test this.

That is correct. If the safest policy is to avoid touching patents altogether and people come up with similar solutions to problems without having any information whatsoever about a related patent it begs the question: what knowledge did the patent bring to the world?

When I was working in finance I used to read patents filed by exchanges so I could figure out how their matching algorithms worked, but never to find out how to solve a particular problem.