People are Finally Noticing the Vapidity of Popular Science Books
Joel Spolsky has it right: the nonfiction popular science books of recent years are really not that good.
The formula is to resemble a book by, say, Jared Diamond, but to have no actual intellectual content. Come to surprising conclusions based on anecdotal evidence. Give catchy names to your ideas (alliteration is a must).
I first noticed this when reading The Long Tail, a book written by a Wired magazine editor who decided to turn a poorly reasoned article into a whole book. It amazed me that someone could write a whole book about economics without betraying any actual knowledge of economics.
It’s sort of like the string theorists who keep writing the same book over and over about how great string theory is. In Malcolm Gladwell’s case, however, it’s like a string theorist writing a cookbook. Yeah, he’s probably smart in his own field, but why should you listen to him about anything else?
It’s a symptom of intellectual laziness. We want to think we’re reading some intelligent nonfiction book, when it’s really just pure entertainment.
What’s worse is that it makes the author look like he takes himself too seriously. The world can’t be packaged up into neat little theories with clever names. Moreover, the parts of it that can be simply aren’t that interesting!
