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This is very important. Kahneman/Gladwell etc are selling attractive and novel conceptualisations and stories, not complete science. A lot of what they are sa
by learnstats2 11y ago
This is very important.
Kahneman/Gladwell etc are selling attractive and novel conceptualisations and stories, not complete science.
A lot of what they are saying attracts attention and becomes more likely to be researched further. This is important and great and sometimes leads to disproofs such as the example here.
There is a bias here: the ideas presented in popular science books are more likely to be disproven, just because they are more likely to warrant further study. It's not that the ideas are necessarily more likely to be false - this is an important distinction and I think the article misses this point.
But, even when disproven, the popular science books still remain on the shelf and the wrong ideas from them still get repeated widely. On forums including HN.
The authors still want to sell their old books, even when they contain ideas now known to be wrong. And the stories they tell are still attractive, even if they are misleading a whole generation of people.
- wellpast 11y ago> There is a bias here: the ideas presented in popular science books are more likely to be disproven, just because they are more likely to warrant further study. If you're a researcher are you going to pursue Malcolm Gladwell's latest crackpot associations simply b/c they're popular or a substantive problem that appears and stands on its own merits.
- facepalm 11y agoJust because one story in his book was wrong, it doesn't invalidate the whole book. That's like saying evolution theory is wrong because you have found some paleontologists wrong interpretation of a random artifact. I suppose science is never really complete, that's what people should keep in mind.
- cousin_it 11y agoPlease, please, pretty please don't lump in Kahneman with Gladwell. One is a Nobel laureate scientist, the other is a hack writer.
- rcarrigan87 11y agoI could not agree more
- learnstats2 11y agoI agree totally with your point, but they do belong together in the context I wrote about. Each of them have the goal of selling books.