I too am underwhelmed by the article, but I don't think it's fair to call the books he describes "mediocre pop science books". By way of reminder, they're Dawki

I too am underwhelmed by the article, but I don't think it's fair to call the books he describes "mediocre pop science books". By way of reminder, they're Dawkins's The selfish gene, Kahneman's Thinking, fast and slow, and Diamond's Guns, germs and steel. These are definitely pop science books. Like any pop science books, they can reasonably be accused of simplifying their material, favouring a particular interpretation of science that can be looked at in different ways, etc. The underlying science is (like all science) fallible too. But all this is just to say that they're pop science books. That doesn't make them mediocre pop science books, and it seems to me hard to deny that they are all unusually good pop science books. It's not relevant for this purpose whether all the science turns out to be correct, nor whether Dawkins & Kahneman & Diamond let their own opinions obtrude too much; Matuschak's complaint isn't "I learned all this stuff and some of it turned out to be wrong", it's "I read these books and it turned out I'd learned less than I thought". It is relevant whether the books present a nontrivial amount of content, whether they're explained clearly and engagingly, whether the ideas in them are (or were when the books were written) at least somewhat unfamiliar to nonspecialist readers. On all those counts, all three of these books do well. So I don't think he'd have got better results by reading other less-mediocre popular science books. I also don't think the results would have been any better if he'd done the same thing with books on (say) philosophy, or history, or language. The problem is with some combination of (1) what he did and (2) what he hoped to gain from it, not with the particular books he chose. I do agree that there is a big problem with (1) and (2). If you actually want to learn something then you need to do more than read one book on it; and reading a good book (even if it's what you call a mediocre popular science book) once will do you some good but what it does for you won't be to enable you to expound in detail on its contents at parties.