Why this shit is a best seller again?

The early chapters were fascinating as I’d never delved into the topic of pre historic humanity. Even some other parts were really cool like mentioning how chicken are some of the most successful species on earth (huge population) but all live in miserable conditions.

However, the book soon takes a dive as he refuses to touch specific topics and views humanity “as one”. He explicitly states there’s NO EVIDENCE what so ever of any biological factors in cognitive differences between races which is just false. I understand not going full hitler on the subject but to not even mention opposing viewpoints considering how much evidence exists is a deal breaker.

After reading The Bell Curve, sapiens feels like a sci-fi fiction book.

Hawking and Dawkins are not textbooks nor are they scientifically rigorous.

Haven't read Hawking's books, but The Selfish Gene is still pop-sci. The valuable ideas in there could have been summarized in a 5 page paper.

I think it's a great introductory for the subjects it covers. It was a book made for people that don't read a ton that's for sure, but I gave me tons of ideas for subjects that I wanted to read more deeply about.

A brief history of time is not rigorous. It's been dumbed-down for the general audience. I'm not so sure about the selfish gene other than it being a meme.

It's a /pol/ meme on Jewish liberal propaganda made flesh (or rather paper). It really reads like satire.

why does Yea Forums regard every book not targeted towards PhDs as "pop sci"?

It's interesting in how much of an emphasis it puts on considering intersubjective realities and their impact on the development of human history. He really milks that concept for all its explanatory potential, which I appreciated. But it deteriorates in the later chapters when the realities he discusses stray from basics that make up all human societies and go into specifics, such as modern ideologies, where his analysis is just way too surface level.

Because that's what it is? Excluding textbooks, technical manuels and other specific types of books, academic literature is targeted towards fellow academics. Things that are targeted at non academics are therefore targeted towards the general audience which makes them pop-sci.

Yea Forums doesn't but you're delusional if you think this book isn't pop sci

Do you think the "fi" part of sci-fi means fidelity or something?

that's one of the most retarded things I've ever heard. It sounds like 0.001% of scientific literature is one category and 99.999% of it is the other. It's way more nuanced than that

Specialized knowledge broken down into reifications easily grasped for mass consumption is the very definition of a popularization. If you unironically read the book in OP's picture and others like it, you are giving yourself a heavily distorted view of the field while convincing yourself that you know something you don't

>not targeted towards PhDs
More like anything not targeted towards someone who actually studies the subject.

And the answer is because that is the definition of pop-sci. "Popular science" books aimed towards the lowest common denominator. Which is your average scientifically illiterate everyman with the attention span of a house cat. Full of inaccurate simplifications, opinions sold as facts, stupid jokes and anecdotes.

> It sounds like 0.001% of scientific literature is one category and 99.999% of it is the other.
That's how it is. The vast majority of scientific literature is hard to understand and irrelevant unless you too are in the business. There are papers that receive attention from the general public but they are few and far between (like that shitty vaccines cause autism" paper) and a relatively small amount of pop-sci stuff that aims to give the public a broad and necessarily shallow overview of something.

imagine being such a retarded gatekeeping elitist that you hate the idea of people who know nothing getting to know something about your field

scientific literature aimed at non-scientists can range from coloring books to Brian Greene theoretical physics (just without most of the equations). How can you possibly come to the conclusion they're all the same thing

The equations are an important part. If you take scientific literature and strip it of scientific rigour, it becomes pop-science.

I'd rather someone actually put in the effort to grasp the nuance of the field than have them regurgitate misleading factoids they learned from a popular science book

>Brian Greene

if you actually believe that his work is not riddled with inaccurate simplifications then you don't even know what you don't know and there is no helping you

scientific rigour is not synonymous with pages full of equations. As long as the concepts are explained in a fairly accurate way the work can easily be rigorous

every single explanation of scientific phenomena using human language is an inaccurate simplification. Chew on that for a while

I can absolutely bet on the fact that you regurgitate misleading factoids about every field you have an opinion on besides the one you study

yep and that's exactly what you won't learn from reading popular science

if that were true, it would not be an incentive to engage in works that lack rigor

>yep and that's exactly what you won't learn from reading popular science
or really from reading science at all since papers are also written in human language

this might be the most dangerous book ever written. it takes a very lamarckian perspective on human evolution to basically make the argument that it was destiny for humans to expand and consolidate into bigger and larger networks. it's not badly written at all, and his arguments always preempt my criticisms which cements my feelings even more. Why do I even know about this book? Why do Bill Gates and Obama have quotes on it? Yuval Noah Hararri writes like if Lucifer from Paradise Lost was a Jewish history professor, frankly, and this feels like the most soulless tradition-divesting, "change as gospel" book I've ever read. His analysis of ww2 as an evolutionary war is also fucking retarded and harmful.

>that you hate the idea of people who know nothing getting to know something about your field
Who said that, though? Calling pop-sci what it is doesn't automatically come with a condemnation.

You can read your pop sci and get the equivalent amount of information of a wikipedia article lead section, stretched out to 500 pages. Maybe that's the only way some people can digest that information. Good for them. The same is true for children's picture-books. But you won't find people who actually study these fields praise these books as great introductions to the field or call them rigorous scientific texts. Especially when they distort the facts and sell opinions as facts, as many popsci books do.

OP asked why this pop-sci book is a bestseller instead of a more scientifically rigorous book and people answered. Why do you get buttblasted about it now?

My point is that popular science is not careful in introducing the mathematical apparatuses that physical theories use as frameworks for making predictions about the world. You end up with a situation where you have public scientists using careless language in their primers that confuse the model for its physical interpretation. In the sciences themselves, there is a broad tendency to recognize that the map is not the territory.

to elaborate. I think it is dangerous because of its sincerity. This isn't a friendly sincerity. This like if you were taken prisoner by a man and he told you the first night in his captivity he was going to kill you in a week, but fed you well, and engaged you with pleasant conversation. It is fucking hopeless.

>Calling pop-sci what it is doesn't automatically come with a condemnation
>he writes this as he proceeds to condemn pop-sci books in the rest of the post

Is describing a prostitute a condemnation of a prostitute?

no but describing a woman, then comparing her to prostitutes and describing how disgusting they are, is

by any chance does it occur to you that the scientists that write these books by and large have vastly more experience teaching than you do (and let's face it, all of them are more skilled in the field itself than you) and therefore are infinitely more aware of how to convey information that is accurate enough but still understandable to the public?
Is it that you don't want the average person to even know about your field OR do you think that they do but you could do a better job?

I did not turn pop-sci into what it is. If reading a description of it reads like a condemnation to you then you might want to reevaluate your love for the genre.

you make a vast assumption that your opinions are descriptions. They are not.

So there must be many examples of pop-sci books that do not share the properties described by me?

I still reject the categorization of "pop-sci" to begin with. There is no such thing. There are papers by Stanford PhDs and there are glow in the dark books about the Moon and everything in between.
You're just looking at where your particular knowledge lies, then drawing a line directly below that and call everything else pop-sci dismissively

>by any chance does it occur to you that the scientists that write these books by and large have vastly more experience teaching than you do (and let's face it, all of them are more skilled in the field itself than you) and therefore are infinitely more aware of how to convey information that is accurate enough but still understandable to the public?

No. See Krauss's failure to describe "nothing" in its proper sense and subsequent temper tantrum, Hawking's simultaneous jab at philosophy and implicit commitment to model-dependent realism, Greene's obsession with his manifestly unscientific typology of multiverses masquerading as the "deep laws" of an established science or his discussion of "warping" spacetime without first acknowledging the debate between substantivalists and relationalists. I could go on but it's pointless. Either do a better job of understanding the field you're interested in or give up. Visit any real discussion forum on science and you'll be laughed at for bringing up the things in these books.

>Is it that you don't want the average person to even know about your field OR do you think that they do but you could do a better job?

I would love it if we could all have an informed debate on these topics. And if we can't, I'd prefer they know what they don't know than peddle inaccuracies at best and outright falsehood at worst.

Do you think Yea Forums invented the term? It's an actual genre, used to describe books like the one in OP.

Here, let's ask wikipedia:
>Some usual features of popular science productions include:
>>Entertainment value or personal relevance to the audience
>>Emphasis on uniqueness and radicalness
>>Exploring ideas overlooked by specialists or falling outside of established disciplines
>>Generalized, simplified science concepts
>>Presented for an audience with little or no science background, hence explaining general concepts more thoroughly
>>Synthesis of new ideas that cross multiple fields and offer new applications in other academic specialties
>>Use of metaphors and analogies to explain difficult or abstract scientific concepts

>Either do a better job of understanding the field you're interested in or give up
This is exactly what I expected as an answer.
>if you don't know anything about physics, start with Hawking's implicit commitment to model-dependent realism
You might understand your field but you have no grasp on how to teach it, except maybe to a room of 3 other people who know almost as much as yourself.

Wikipedia also has an article on the flat earth theory, I'm not sure why that means it's legit. All the features described in your post are arbitrary and can be applied to almost every scientific book out there. And if that's the case the attempted categorization has failed

You teach people who are willing to put in the effort to learn the subject. There are no short-cuts here. Anyone debating the contents of OP's book or any book like it may as well be flinging shit at each other and smearing it over the walls, for all they're worth. There is no such thing as "astrophysics for people in a hurry", sorry to burst your retard bubble

>All the features described in your post are arbitrary and can be applied to almost every scientific book out there. And if that's the case the attempted categorization has failed
No they can't and it doesn't. It doesn't apply to a scientific textbook or other scientific publications. The texts you actually should read to gain knowledge about the subject.

I dont understand why /it/ hates pop-sci so much. If you are curious about a topic you dont have to spend hundreds of hours in research or read scientific tomes in order to just kinda know what its on about. That shit is for people that want to actually contribute to it or have a huge deep interest.

scientific textbook or other scientific publications don't even represent 1% of scientific literature out there. If your category covers let's say 999 in 1000 items it's not a legit category because it doesn't manage to differentiate in a successful way

Just because it is a popular category, doesn't mean it is not a category.

>You teach people who are willing to put in the effort to learn the subject
if there's one thing you want as a writer, it's your readings putting in effort. Lmao. But how noble of you to not compromise on your principles while never writing anything for the general public and therefore never actually having to put your educational ideas to the test

if the category doesn't differentiate almost any representative of the set it's not much good for anything

>It doesn't apply to a scientific textbook or other scientific publications
a vast number of textbooks have
>Use of metaphors and analogies to explain difficult or abstract scientific concepts
and
>Synthesis of new ideas that cross multiple fields and offer new applications in other academic specialties
and arguably
>Generalized, simplified science concepts (to a degree)
>Exploring ideas overlooked by specialists or falling outside of established disciplines (to a degree)

>If you are curious about a topic you dont have to spend hundreds of hours in research or read scientific tomes in order to just kinda know what its on about
on 4chin, if you spent autistic amounts of time learning something, everyone who didn't is a retard and shouldn't even try.

Just like a disease you need to check off several symptoms to get a positive diagnosis. If it's not aimed at the general public, then it's not pop-sci. Maybe if you cut out the introductory chapter of a proper textbook about a subject and publish it on its own, it could be considered pop-sci as well.

And I just posted that snippet to show that it is an actual genre and not just something invented by Yea Forums. I could come up with a better definition than wikipedia.

It's aimed at the general public and not at the people who study the subject. What more differentiation do you need?

Just look at the amazon bestsellers for books in the category of science and math, that's pop-sci.

It's pop-sci that's sprinkled with the author's shit personal opinions presented as fact.

Because garbage literature sells, no one reads to think or learn they read to be entertained or feel something, every modern author of non-fiction outside of textbooks takes a specific number of ideas between one or a dozen and stretches them across three hundred pages of repetition and regurgitation in terribly simple English to sell their self-help or pseudo-self-help to a mass of brainless consumer husks who only read articles online or other garbage literature - if they read at all. Authors write to sell, not to relay a message or to spread knowledge but to make a buck as that is the single incentive of everyone in this capitalistic hell-scape we're in.

A textbook on the field in question. Any introductory or general textbook in that field at all.

This is the sort of book pseudointellectuals who listen to NPR and smell their own farts love. Definitely Obama's favorite book.

It's well written and enjoyable, but the author will just randomly throw out his left wing opinions whenever he feels like it with no support or thought behind them.

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>every single explanation of scientific phenomena using human language

That's every explanation of scientific phenomena ever (it would make more sense to write "scientific explanation of phenomena" btw).

Do you think scientists routinely talk in equations ? They're only a small (if absolutely necessary) part of the scientific discourse.