what I'm reading (or rather, have just returned)

[silverflight8]

I was reading Genome by Matt Ridley, just before I had to return it to the library. I like to live dangerously. It was published 1999, so just as the Human Genome Project was entering its wildly successful stage. It tells the tale of 23 chromosomes and "stories" I suppose of selected genes on each.

And yes 1999, and yes also POP SCIENCE BOOK but I was reading the chapters about psycholinguistics and intelligence and also evolutionary psychology and I started making >:( faces. I am not a biologist. I am not even studying to be one, although I was a pretty good bio student when I was studying the subject. (Labs don't agree with me. I'll never be a scientist.) But the more he talked about some subjects the more my "uh wait what" sensors went up. Especially--

Um I got to there and now I'm having tab explosion because hm, going after an article on 'interlocus contest evolution' (it was about X & Y chromosomes competing, and had some pretty stereotypical writings about male-female interactions). More research required, I'm trying to navigate JSTOR--takes me ages to get through stupid eJournal sites, they always kick me to the landing page for the whole series of journals which started in 1904 when I clearly clicked the "full text for article in January 2004 issue 294" *complaint*

Maybe tomorrow, I'm tired and it's making me cranky.

I also had objections to how he wrote about evolution. Popular science, I know, but evolution doesn't want to do anything. Was under the impression that Noam Chomsky's ideas about universal grammar getting pushback?

In conclusion, I'm actually not terribly fussed about having to return that book, although maybe I should re-borrow it to look up the bibliography/references in the back. I am more sad about having to return Questioning Collapse, which is a collection of articles written specifically to refute Jared Diamond's Collapse, which in a nutshell argued that civilizations make choices that lead to their eventual collapse (with the parallel to modern day environmental mess.) Questioning Collapse is written by anthropologists and historians, people I'm about five million times more likely to trust than authors who write popular books about a field of study, and the case studies are well-cited and backed up by information, and also very interesting. I was in the middle of an article about the Qing dynasty and the 18th century and the eventual mess of the 19th; I really like how varied their case studies were.

Comments

[ankaret]

I just finished Jared Diamond's The World Until Yesterday which might as well have been entitled Men Until Yesterday except that that sounds like a troupe of strippers. I feel a deep urge to find Questioning Collapse now.

[silverflight8]

Haha, oh dear. I heard about the iffiness of his books and kind of avoided them--I don't read much nonfiction anyway usually. I borrowed a copy of Questioning Collapse from a university library--it's a group of academic writers trying to write a more accessible book, so the university had a copy (they are quite upfront about what the book is about and who it's directed at).

[cherrytide.livejournal.com]

I had to read that book for class a few years ago. It was sort of thrown at us as a sort of 'oh you're an arts student who has to catch up on genetics - here you go!'. I thought it was interesting although the style was oddly dramatised at times, possibly at expense of accuracy? I don't remember specifics though.

(Also: Hi!)

[silverflight8.livejournal.com]

I have an innate distrust of popular [field] books in general, because it's not a very good story if you have to hedge things. You know, like when you do confidence intervals for statistics, and you can only say--we're 95% confident that the average lies between 50 to 58% of the population. That doesn't pack the same punch that 54% OF POPULATION BELIEVES X!! I mean, I guess you need to elide things sometimes but :/, and the dramatic style definitely made me wary. Things don't just fall out like stories do!

(Hi!)

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Oh, I've been meaning to read 'Questioning Collapse'! I've heard really good things about it.

[silverflight8.livejournal.com]

From what I can tell, it's very well researched and written. I liked the diversity of cases--that doesn't hurt :)

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I saw the man who wrote the Rapa Nui chapter give a talk on the topic, hmmm, four or five years ago. He was very funny and lively in person! A lot of the other authors I know from their work, as well, though not in person, so it seems like it should be a very good book.

[silverflight8.livejournal.com]

Oh, cool! What did you study, if I can ask? You seem to be familiar with the field :)

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Archaeology! Which explains why I know so much about 'Questioning Collapse', hee. My specialty is Bronze Age South Asia, but we do a lot of comparison, one culture to another, and nearly everyone in that book is a pretty well-known scholar.

[silverflight8.livejournal.com]

AH HA!

but we do a lot of comparison, one culture to another
That makes sense! And it's good to know that they're respected scholars; I'm kind of wary of experts in one field declaiming in another field.

[cloudsinvenice]

This is why I'm a bit reticent about reading more popular science - I'd love to, but as I don't have any background in that area, I'm wary of swallowing shaky methodology/conclusions...

[silverflight8.livejournal.com]

I'm sure they're not all wrongity wrong wrong or anything, but I just don't think facts always make good stories. Like accuracy doesn't always translate to good/popular narratives, and in the end, the point of the book is to make sales.

Of course this is why my browser is full of 20-page reports full of statistical mumbojumbo, because I think that'll be better *facepalm* Obviously this means I need to learn more statistics. We need a better intermediary form--I think that Questioning Collapse is one of those--especially for fields that are frequently opaque for reasons of not only math but also just terminology (my god, economics, whyyyy.)

[cloudsinvenice]

Yes, there's always that tension between narrative and accuracy. I liked how Ben Goldacre explored this in Bad Science - his take (amongst other things) is that people are easily confused because we tend not to have been taught anything about statistics, and statistics are often used unchallenged to hold up wobbly-but-compelling pop science...

[silverflight8.livejournal.com]

*nods* And stats, it's just there's rules of thumb but you've got to make decisions, too, you know? Like there's no way you could absorb all the individual pieces of data, not meaningfully, so you've got to synthesize it somehow, but how? Multiple measures I guess is a good start (like if you have a really skewed sample, include both median as well as average) but it's just really very fluid. And yet it's all we've got!

his take (amongst other things) is that people are easily confused because we tend not to have been taught anything about statistics
*nods* I think it's the same reputation that math's got--it's hard, doesn't make sense, etc. Which is damaging; I think (like math) it's a really, really useful tool for understanding all sorts of things.