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I just read Good Gut, it's a very very very bad book. About 10% enlightening accepted science and about 90% rampant and very wild speculation. Filled with lit
by OldSchoolJohnny 11y ago
I just read Good Gut, it's a very very very bad book. About 10% enlightening accepted science and about 90% rampant and very wild speculation. Filled with little chapters that take in many cases very tenuous unproven theories (they come out and say that) and then use weasel words to then write a whole speculative chapter about it.
I learned a lot about how digestion works and then a lot about how to make a book out of very thin gruel.
- scholia 11y agoViews obviously differ. Both the authors (1) have very senior positions at the Sonnenburg Lab in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University, so I'd be quite surprised if the book is as bad as you claim. Also, Amazon reviewers have given it 4.7 stars out of 5, which suggests quite a few people found it useful. (1) Justin L. Sonnenburg. Principal Investigator, and Erica D. Sonnenburg. Senior Research Scientist.
- Joof 11y agoMaybe, but remember that the process of review is removed. Even the most brilliant people quite happily believe dumb things.
- scholia 11y agoSure. But brilliant people generally don't believe dumb things that in their core area of expertise....
- Joof 11y agoSure, but a PhD's area of expertise is increasingly narrow.
- scholia 11y agoThe authors are well beyond PhD level. They are supervising PhD students and post-doctoral fellows. http://sonnenburglab.stanford.edu/people.html http://sonnenburglab.stanford.edu/people.html
- Joof 11y agoLook, I haven't read the book in particular. All I'm saying is that the success outcome of a book has completely different requirements than the success outcome of an academic paper. It's entirely possible that the most well-educated person in a field writes a book that is more interesting to read than it is well-proven. Even so, I don't personally have enough background in the area to tell you much more than they publish in Journals with a reasonable impact factor. I can assume they know what they are talking about, but no matter the school, no matter the prestige, they could still be wrong and/or poor researchers and/or poor writers. They study ultra-specific things within an ultra-specific field. Personally, I'd probably enjoy the book.
- scholia 11y agoI don't understand why you're arguing about a book you haven't read. > no matter the prestige, they could still be wrong and/or poor researchers and/or poor writers Sure, but those are generalizations, and they don't apply in this case. As you would know if you could be bothered to read it...