Yep, absolutely! My hunch is that the popular science industry is precisely that — an industry — with all the profit-chasing and corner-cutting that entails. Publishers are in an arms race to put out the next best-seller or discover the next big public intellectual, so I can’t see how that leaves ample time or resources for fact-checking and thorough editing, let alone peer review.
I think it’s best to stick to academic literature (journal articles as well as books). In the humanities and social sciences at least the writing is perfectly accessible to a layperson for the most part.
For popular science books, I’d wait until the dust settles after a new titles comes out and look up if anyone has written a good critique. Ample footnotes/references are also a good sign.
I’d also avoid anything with too broad of a scope. Darshana Narayanan’s article mentions that ‘Harari’s own thesis advisor, Professor Steven Gunn from Oxford […] has made a startling acknowledgement: that his ex-pupil has essentially managed to dodge the fact-checking process. […] Gunn supposes that Harari—specifically, with his book Sapiens—“leapfrogged” expert critique “by saying, ‘Let’s ask questions so large that no one can say, We think this bit’s wrong and that bit’s wrong.’ … Nobody’s an expert on the meaning of everything, or the history of everybody, over a long period.”’
Yep, absolutely! My hunch is that the popular science industry is precisely that — an industry — with all the profit-chasing and corner-cutting that entails. Publishers are in an arms race to put out the next best-seller or discover the next big public intellectual, so I can’t see how that leaves ample time or resources for fact-checking and thorough editing, let alone peer review.
I think it’s best to stick to academic literature (journal articles as well as books). In the humanities and social sciences at least the writing is perfectly accessible to a layperson for the most part.
For popular science books, I’d wait until the dust settles after a new titles comes out and look up if anyone has written a good critique. Ample footnotes/references are also a good sign.
I’d also avoid anything with too broad of a scope. Darshana Narayanan’s article mentions that ‘Harari’s own thesis advisor, Professor Steven Gunn from Oxford […] has made a startling acknowledgement: that his ex-pupil has essentially managed to dodge the fact-checking process. […] Gunn supposes that Harari—specifically, with his book Sapiens—“leapfrogged” expert critique “by saying, ‘Let’s ask questions so large that no one can say, We think this bit’s wrong and that bit’s wrong.’ … Nobody’s an expert on the meaning of everything, or the history of everybody, over a long period.”’