In Defence of Popular Science
I.
I recently read a great piece by Dwarkesh Patel (who is rapidly becoming one of the best podcasters) titled 'The myth of the myth of the well read person'. It's a topic I think about often and he does a great job of laying out the no-brainer benefits behind building a consistent reading habit. Dwarkesh argues that reading a reasonable number of books in one topic, specifically picking those that focus on books that advance or challenge explanatory theories rather than weighty academic books that focus on brute facts, can give you a deep understanding of a field.
It is actually possible to understand a wide range of topics and fields with a reasonable number of books. In most fields, you really could understand the most important ideas by reading a dozen books (or depending on the technical complexity of the field, a textbook or two plus a handful of seminal papers). If you took reading seriously and read a book a week (approximately an hour or two of reading a day), that’s just 3 months of reading. Half a semester to understand much of an entire field. That is unreasonably effective.
While I do agree with this wholeheartedly, I want to raise two additional thoughts. Firstly, the devil is in the detail when it comes to curation. In any field, it is an overwhelmingly difficult task to pick the right roster of a dozen books that will give you a true understanding of a particular field. This goes for both broad topics (e.g. artificial intelligence) and specific niches (applications of LLMs in consumer-facing foreign language learning apps). The probability of getting the right set of books that give you the full picture is likely lower than you think, so you'll probably have to sift through a few duds. (Note: I've yet to see a high quality book recommendation engine that can feed you exactly what you'll like, factoring increasing complexity. Why can't we use something like the TikTok algorithm for good?). I'm speaking specifically about self-directed learning outside of traditional education where you don't have a carefully curated syllabus designed by an expert that you can follow incrementally to build your knowledge of a subject.
Secondly, I want to draw a distinction between 'a deep understanding' and 'expertise'. Today's social media world has given rise to a phenomenon of 'pseudoexperts' - i.e. people who speak about a specific topic as though they are an expert, when in reality they have a very surface-level understanding propped up by buzzwords. You only need to spend five minutes on LinkedIn to see the overwhelming sea of AI experts who have inserted themselves into the conversation with a superficial take that adds nothing other than generating views and clicks for whatever they are self-promoting. In doing what Dwarkesh suggests above, you may gain a deep understanding of a topic that puts you ahead of the vast majority of non-specialists in the field, but it doesn't make you an expert. It is only through continuing to build on this knowledge and having first-hand engagement with the subject that you can begin to build expertise. While this sounds obvious, I think it's non-trivial based on the superficiality I see daily. (Note: I have a high exposure to venture capital through my job and the VC world is disproportionately rife with pseudointellectuals, so maybe I think the problem is larger than it actually is).
II.
There was one thing Dwarkesh says that I couldn't stop thinking about.
People choose the wrong books. Either they become bored of uninteresting details or entertained by unenlightening stories and metaphors. I suggest the following strategy for reading about science in my post on barbell strategies: Instead of reading mid-wit pop-sci books which just offer vague metaphors or irrelevant anecdotes, read books that are either pure fun (fantasy, sci-fi, manga, etc), or actual hardcore science (textbooks and review papers.)
I don't think this is the right approach at all. I have seen similar dismissals of pop-sci amongst friends and colleagues and I definitely find myself trying to avoid pop-sci in general, however I think there is a place for it, and that the strategy of avoiding anything between the spectrum of fun and hardcore science is misguided.
I'll start by expanding on why I generally agree that pop-sci should be limited. One of my gripes with non-fiction today is that there are huge swathes of bloated books that could have been blog posts. It was no more obvious to me that popular non-fiction was broken than when I read 'Start with Why' by Simon Sinek, which is often touted as a must-read for anyone in the corporate world. It was the least enjoyable reading experience of my life and I found myself audibly groaning with every new chapter adding nothing beyond the very simple concept that one must start with a clear sense of purpose or 'why' in both personal and professional endeavours. That's it. That's the whole book. Yet it has propelled Sinek to stardom and wealth (it sold over a million copies). I made a similar point after the reading 'The Mind is Flat' by Nick Chater.
It's easy to see why. Neatly packaged books with attractive covers filled with stories and anecdotes sell, blog posts and tweets don't. If I can turn a simple idea into an accessible 300+ page book, I'm going to make a lot of money, speak at talks and on podcasts, get lucrative consulting gigs, etc. This is exemplified by authors like Malcolm Gladwell and Nassim Taleb, who have made careers out of doing exactly that, and have been largely responsible for ushering in the current state of non-fiction. At the same time, I don't love the new wave of 'short-formism', where complex ideas are boiled down to a bland summary or a superficial twitter thread. There is no market that exists between the two ends of this barbell that has brevity without sacrificing nuance. The closest thing we have are long-form blogs.
This is not just limited to pop-social science, much of pop-traditional science (Biology, Chemistry, Physics) dumbs down complex ideas and translates them in to anecdotal, misleading, fluffy packages that trade grounding in science for accessible story-telling and engaging narratives. This doesn't just happen within individual books, but across genres. I made the mistake of reading far too many popular neuroscience books which all fundamentally said the exact same thing.
Erik Hoel has a good take on why this happens:
In the science section of the average bookstore rests a bunch of overhyped and uninteresting books. There are a slim number that are original and interesting—they’re there, but they’re rare. Most are instead the outcome of a long game of pretend. The writer pretended to have something original to say. The agent pretended to be excited. The editor pretended to love the umpteenth book on how cool black holes are or how amazing it is that the brain is plastic. And now the cover, pretending that any of this is important or original. They are not so much driven by their contents but rather from it being a certain time in the author’s career. In every wannabe public intellectual there’s a clock ticking down internally. If you lean in to their chests you can hear it tick away. . . book time . . . book time . . . A couple years after your TED talk? It’s ringing and won’t stop, it’s waking you up at night. So here comes the nonfiction book, with all those little Gladwellian asides that authors don’t realize work poorly if your name isn’t Malcom Gladwell. Does the sum of the non-trivial information and cutesy story padding in the book mean it’s really a lecture disguised in book form? To find out, go to their talk, tickets are only $75. They’ll tell you some anecdotes and platitudes so buckle in tight.
As Dwarkesh righfully points out, there is an opportunity cost to reading one book over another, leaving 'no time to spare for the mediocre' bloated pop-sci books that stretch out an idea and beat it to death adding absolutely nothing to our understanding. In these instances, I advocate for avoiding popular science as much as possible.
III.
Despite the criticism above, I don't suggest we rule it out entirely, nor that we look upon the whole category with elitist scorn, we just need to be more thoughtful about our choices.
Since we're talking about pop-science, I'll start with a personal anecdote. I can trace my entire career back to a defining moment that shaped the decisions I made. At around age 15, I wasn't feeling great so skipped Wednesday afternoon's cricket practice and had three hours to kill before I could be picked up. I sat in the school library and randomly picked up the copy of ‘The Tipping Point’ by Malcolm Gladwell that happened to be sitting on the table. I was hooked. Gladwell has a masterful way of effortlessly gliding between stories that engage and entertain and I happily devoured the book in one sitting. The next day I went straight back to the library and took out ‘Outliers’ and flew through it. I needed more, so I searched for similar styles of books and found 'Predictably Irrational' by Dan Ariely, and of course, 'Freakonomics'. I discovered that the emerging (at the time) discipline of behavioural economics was absolutely fascinating to me so I dug deeper, realising that economics wasn't just limited to the finance and money, it was fundamentally a discipline focused on human choice and resource allocation that had wide-ranging human applications, but was grounded in rigorous mathematics and statistics. Sure, I may have reached this conclusion by any other means, but a completely serendipitous placement of a pop-science book led to a cascade that sent me to LSE to study Economics.
I don't believe that this is an isolated story. I could ask any university student what inspired their choice of discipline, and a significant proportion would likely reference some form of accessible popular book which sparked their curiosity. Think for a moment about how many astronomers were inspired by Carl Sagan, how many physicists were inspired by Stephen Hawking, how many philosophers were inspired by Steven Pinker, and how many doctors and scientists were inspired by Siddhartha Mukherjee. I could go on.
In his post on Curiosity, George Seabridge writes:
Once motivation exists, students could be guided towards asking the interesting questions themselves - out of a genuine desire to know more - rather than merely being told the answer to questions they never asked. Proceeding to the material without the requisite motivation might be so inefficacious as to not be worth the time.
I liken the entry point of a popular science book to this initial step of developing adequate motivation to study something. To be really passionate about learning, we need to have an innate curiosity that drives us to dig deeper and deeper. I believe that popular science is often extremely effective at doing exactly this. It can be a gateway from which we begin to peel back the layers of our curiosity and find the topics that we feel naturally inclined to understand with a higher level of rigour. I spend a lot of my time reading neuroscience out of interest and I can trace this back to first reading 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat' by Oliver Sacks - one of the most famous popular science books of all time. This led me to more popular science that gave me a baseline narrative understanding, which took me to the more academic bibles on the subject (1, 2, and 3). Without the journey of having my curiosity sparked, I'm not sure I would have got to the same result. If I started with any of the weighty tomes from day one, it would have been near impossible to remain engaged without first developing the very basic ideas in an accessible and engaging way.
Before you take the conclusion that 'pop-science is fine for young people, not for adults', I don't think that's the case. It can be useful for experts in any field to dive into an entirely new subject. If I gave my doctor friend with no economics background a copy of ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’ by John Maynard Keynes (which could easily stake a claim to be one of the dozen essential works for anyone wanting to understand the fundamentals of macroeconomics), he would struggle a lot more than if I gave him a copy of ‘Animal Spirits’ by Akerlof and Shiller, which discusses the role played by emotions in economic decision making while also giving an excellent and accessible overview of basic Keynesian ideas. Even something that is far more 'pop Economics' like the Undercover Economist would give him a real-world understanding of how economics plays a role in every day life from which he could contexualise the discipline and use it as a launch point to learn more. What good is slogging through technical and complicated texts without grounding them and giving them real-world relevance? Without a baseline level of context, all you would do by skipping straight to 'hardcore science' is convince yourself of your competence without having a thorough understanding.
A final case for popular science is when you just want a broad surface-level foray into a topic and don't necessarily want to gain a deep understanding. This can be helpful in all sorts of scenarios, if I want to fix my diet and need a trusted figure to give me a whistle-stop tour of what to do quickly, I could read ‘Food for Life’ by Tim Spector. If I want an entertaining and informative base understanding of grammar to help my writing but don't want to deep-dive into language structure and syntax, ‘Dreyer's English’ by Benjamin Dreyer is perfect. Intellectual curiosity doesn't necessarily need to have layers of complexity, you can simply enjoy an introduction to a subject and leave it at that.
IV.
So how do you differentiate between the bloated repetitive fluff and the gems. Unfortunately it's difficult, and there isn't ever going to be a panacea. It will depend on your reason for reading the book, your prior knowledge of the subject, the legacy of the book in its field, the background of the author, etc.
Looking at some of my favourites and some of the most well-regarded, I think there are a few markers of a high-quality non-fiction book.
Is there a reason that this is a book? Can you get the core ideas from a TED talk or a scientific paper from the author? Or is this something that requires 300+ pages to convey a holistic idea? What is the motivation for this book being published at this time?
Could this book be a launching point for further study? Some of the greatest popular science books are a whistle-stop tour of the 'history of x' (Emperor of All Maladies, A Brief History of Time). These stand the test of time because they sow seeds of curiosity that allow the reader to nurture their curiosity and provides table stakes for further exploration. If you believe that you will come away with a new set of avenues to explore, that's a good sign.
Is the book presenting a new perspective to an existing field? Quite often, the most insightful advances in a field can come from an outsider approach. Economics hero Robert Shiller wrote: “In the longer run and for wide-ranging issues, more creative solutions tend to come from imaginative interdisciplinary collaboration.” - I could not agree more. I would much rather read a fresh idea from an interdisciplinary perspective than an insider repeating familiar ideas. So long as the outsider is well-researched and not spewing nonsense, it can let you view existing topics in a new light and strengthen your understanding. An additional sense-check is whether the book is well regarded by people in the field.
Did the book move the field forward? In ‘The Selfish Gene’, Richard Dawkins reformed our understanding of natural selection and the entire discipline of social biology took a forward step. This makes it essential reading in the subject.
Am I getting an intimate first-hand account? Sometimes popular books can give you insight that academic books simply can't provide. The DSM-5 isn't going to give you what Oliver Sacks can, law textbooks can't give you the entertaining inside-look that The Secret Barrister can. Often there are gems from genuine experts in their fields sharing wisdom that is inaccessible for outsiders.
If just one of these questions returns a yes, then it's a good sign that the book is worth your time.
V.
We need to gatekeep knowledge less and drop any snobbish attitudes that we're too intelligent for genuinely good popular science. Everyone has something to learn. Here's how I am approaching it going forward. Follow your intellectual curiosity - if a popular science book in an unfamiliar topic piques your interest, run through the checklist and if it ticks at least one box, read it unashamedly. If you continue to be curious, resist the urge to impulse buy every other popular book on the subject because you will experience diminishing marginal returns. Instead, dig through the references in the book, watch talks on the subject, listen to podcasts from the author, read detailed reviews from subject matter experts and not the general public, read specialist blogs. Take more time before your second step into the subject to figure out which books or papers moved the field forward, and which just regurgitated old ideas. Remember that there is an opportunity cost to every book you read, so it pays more to be thoughtful.