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I like to read popular science book. Does that mean that I have to give up reading popular science and read dreary academic papers?

• desireco42 14y ago
  Kind of... that is my conclusion. Imagine :)!
• fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago
  Only if you are intellectually ambitious.
• rscale 14y ago
  If I see an interesting pop sci story, I'll track down the original research that it's based on. Generally speaking, if the concept was interesting to me in a pop sci context, it's even more interesting to me in depth. If I can't find the original research, I try to treat the information as tainted, because even honest and intelligent writers often oversimplify concepts when presenting them to a lay audience.
• lmm 14y ago
  Only if you want the truth. More seriously: you're probably ok with books written by scientists who are respected as scientists, such as Kahneman mentioned in the article. But be very wary of books written by journalists.
• cousin_it 14y ago
  I've been bitten by this several times. I would hear about an exciting result in psychology or something, tell my friends about it, then double check the original study just to be sure, then call up my friends with apologies and corrections. So my advice is, if you like popular science books, at least don't retell their conclusions to others!
• npsimons 14y ago
  No! Not by any means. But don't take them at their word. As with everything you read (or hear, or see . . .) you should question it. It should encourage you to investigate more of the subject at hand, to look up the references (no references is a bad sign). If nothing else, it can provide a valuable lesson in skepticism and the depth required to truly understand these fields; you didn't really think that such complex topics could be properly addressed in a twenty minute TED talk or a single non-reference book, did you? These things are teasers, meant to whet your appetite or let you know that there is a broader world out there.
• nollidge 14y ago
  There's plenty of popular science books that are written by respected scientists - Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Stephen Hawking - as well as books that are effective summaries of accepted information by laypeople, such as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (which interweaves the history with first-person narrative of the author's interactions with Lacks's living relatives) or The Big Bang by Simon Singh. There's also lots of blogs written by laypeople or former researchers who carefully distill and contextualize individual scientific papers, such as many of the folks at Discover Magazine blogs (Phil Plait, Ed Yong). Moreover, there's a larger problem of lay journalists, public, and many university PR people treating every bit of research as a groundbreaking answer to a huge question, when the reality is that each paper is merely a bit of dialog in a massive conversation about the nature of our universe. This leads the public to become rightfully distrusting of the massive overstatements, and therefore tragically disinterested in the nuanced conversation behind it all. So perhaps the single best thing to do is become part of the conversation! Follow authors and bloggers on social media, talk to your friends in science, furrow your brow at bombastic university press releases and seek the nuance. This will lead you to the best books, articles, and science communicators out there.
• ArbitraryLimits 14y ago
  No, just limit your popular science reading to books written by scientists instead of journalists.