This is a good little rant by Joel Spolsky (of "Joel on Software" fame) about what he sees as a trend in current science books. He starts off by commenting on a review of Malcolm Gladwell's latest book...
Friedman and Gladwell's outsized, flat-world success has lead to a huge number of wannabes. I was really looking forward to reading Simplexity, because it sounded like an interesting topic, until I settled down with it tonight and discovered that it was chock-full of all those amusing bedtime stories about the map of the cholera plague in London in 1854, which I've heard a million times, ...
Link: Anecdotes
I haven't read anything by Malcolm Gladwell, but I have read Jeffrey Kluger's Simplexity and I also found it disappointing for similar reasons. I expected Kluger to get around to explaining some actual theory or scientific work going on at Murray Gell-Mann's Santa Fe Institute, but Kluger never got beyond anecdotes and simplistic "storifying," if that's a word.
Update: After more thought, and after reading some comments on Joel's post and a good counterpoint by Dan Saffer, I feel like clarifying my opinion on this... I think there is great value in pop science books, in articles written by non-experts, and in anecdotes. I read Joel's piece not as a rant against all those things but against those things badly done. Where you draw the line on that is probably a personal thing -- it depends on the reader. I was probably not the intended type of reader for Kluger's book (I think this is partially the fault of the publisher for marketing that book in the science category instead of business).
My point in quoting Joel's article here is not to bash non-experts or "soft" science writing. I think he's probably right that there are more and more "big think" books out there that are not very original or substantive.
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Posted by: Indika | Thursday, November 27, 2008 at 02:37 AM