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

[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.