There are quite a few well-read and worldly intellectuals in this community, and I respect that. But a recent pit thread about the inaccuracies of a certain book got me wondering about something.
If you know a lot about a certain subject, and you know enough about it to the point that you can point out every little inaccuracy/urban legend/bias in the book, why are you wasting your time with that level of subject matter? Obviously your knowlege of the subject is to the point that the book wouldn’t offer anything new to learn, and thus the only benefit is to pigeonhole the author for being yet another moron who published something and warning others against reading his material (the word ‘hack’ often gets thrown around at this point).
Maybe I’m missing something here, but I had assumed that an intelligent person trying to learn more about something would already have enough knowlege to know reliable sources. I’m always left scratching my head when people make pit threads about bad authors.
The obvious reason is that they would be concerned that other, less informed readers will come along and take the bad author’s words for the truth. In the case of authors whose scholarship is extremely weak, this could generally lead to increased ignorance. I’ve visited the thread you are referring to, about the Norman guy who should fuck off and die, and from what was said, he seems to be one of those ignorance-increasing guys. I haven’t read any of his books myself, but I would now approach with caution.
I’ve read popular books in my field for a number of reasons. Often I just need to see if they’re worth assigning or recommending to my students. Once I read one at the request of a TV producer considering making a show based on the book. And several times I’ve been asked by the editor of a journal to write a book review that the journal can publish.
The rewards of this type of labor, even if the book is unenlightening crap, include the satisfaction of providing guidance and help to others, the glow of conscious superiority when the author exposes his/her ignorance, and the opportunity to show off your superiority by trashing the book’s errors in public print.
If you don’t think that’s a sufficient motive to tempt somebody into wasting their time on bad and uninformative books, I admire your nobility of spirit, but I’m not sure I could emulate it.
There are several reasons I read books on subjects I am well-informed about, beyond the hope that I might acquire more information to add to what I already have. I enjoy reading for its own sake. It is a pleasure. I enjoy reading the thoughts of authors on topics I know a lot about. Their interpretations of facts may differ from mine, their arguments for their points of view may interest me and even persuade me. I may choose a book explicitly because I expect to disagree with the author. Many of these reasons are diminished or erased when it becomes obvious to me that the author doesn’t have a grasp of the basic facts.
Because people care about how their profession is being thought of by laypeople.
I’ve found that even in areas which I have knowledge at far above the level of a book I’m reading, I can usually pick up at least one new thing which I didn’t know before. Plus, it’s always good to go back to the basics and be reminded of some stuff which you hadn’t thought about for some years. Often reading like that is just a form of decompression and relaxation.
I do book reviews also, but just being an expert does not mean you know everything. While I would not read an elementary level book in my field except to review it, for an advanced book the author might well have gone deeper than I ever had. Other opinions are useful also. Finally, sometimes you are expected to keep up with works in your area - if you haven’t read it, how do you know whether or not it has anything to teach you?
I would like to add that reading published work with incorrect information in it is irritating to me for reasons beyond the disappointment I feel when I realize that the pleasure I anticipated in reading the book is not to be. It bothers me to think of less-informed people reading the misinformation and believing it.
I could understand if it were bad medical advice or the disinformation could lead to some kind of personal harm, as well as if you were looking to use something as a teaching aid or research material.
But if other people are not going to take the extra step to at least consider everything they’ve read, instead of simply believing it at face value, why waste your time? If they are naive enough to embrace it so strongly, then chances are few people will be able to convince them.
As I’ve said, I’m not against this kind of scrutiny; in fact I always have high hopes that libraries I frequent are stocked with accurate information. I just feel its a waste of effort to try to warn people who would be too dim to question the accuracy themselves.
I remember once reading a pomo book (The War between Desire and Technology, I believe). It was engaging, interesting, and well-written. Best of all, the author claimed to have spent eight years as a participant-observer in a roleplaying game group. Okay, that’s a silly description on hanging around watching D&D nerds, I thought, but still, cool!
Until I read her description of the game. It started by describing how Steve Jackson invented D&D back in the seventies, as an offshoot of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and it went on from there.
These inaccuracies–which were really in a small part of the book–called the rest of the book into question for me. I knew next to nothing about computers back then, or about human-machine interfaces; so in this respect, the book was chock full of information for me. However, I knew scads about D&D, and she’d majorly fucked up her description of it in a way that showed she’d done no research at all (Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson are acceptable answers for the founders of D&D, as even Fox Television knows; it grew out of wargames, not the SCA). How could I trust that she’d done any research for the rest of her book?
So even trivial inaccuracies in a book can make me doubt the entire thing, if they’re inaccuracies that are both blatant and well-known. They show the reader that the author has not done her research.
Well first of all that’s seems to me to be an exceptionally pessimistic assessment of the average person reading a popular work.
But even beyond that, a person may question the worth of what they are reading but still value feedback from another more informed source on the specific flaws of what they are readsing or where to look to get a better perspective on the topic.
I believe there was an article around this in the NY Times not long ago, inspired by a book coming out with error corrected. It said, IIRC, that errors in books are particularly dangerous because people tend to give books more credence than possibly warranted. For instance, fact checkers at the New Yorker stop when they find confirmation in a book. I think the article mentioned an error that had propagated through many books. Newspapers have errors too, but they get corrected in later editions and people understand that under deadline pressure errors will creep in. Books don’t go through as thorough a fact checking process as people think - definitely not as thorough as a peer reviewed paper.
Sometimes the issue is just chronology. I read a bunch of Norman Cantor books before I knew anything about the field of medieval history. Over time, I became a little more aware. Occasionally I would read something that to my recollection, interpreted the period substantially differently than had Cantor. So I revisited some of his books later on and to my surprise, were not as helpful as they once were.
It’s very hard to pick up factual inaccuracies in a text if you are not already an expert. If a history textbook hinges their argument on Columbus landing in America in 1429 then, unless you know he landed in 1492, the argument would seem perfectly convincing to you. If a book is backed up by a seeming profusion of cites, then unless you find an expert to debunk the book, you generally have to accept the premise of their arguments at least. And even if you do find a debunker, you then have to try and find a debunker for the debunker since usually everybody has an agenda.
An example I remember was reading Stephen Levitt’s freakanomics. He seems to present a seemingly solid argument for the link between legalised abortion and the drop in crime rate. However, there was a conversation between Levitt and another economist who disputed his conclusions. He raised several caveats about Levitts data, drilling down into specifics which would appear to contradict his apperent claim. Without that expert knowledge, there is no way I could have picked up on that.
Stumbling on a book that was supposed to provide more information and being put off by dumb errors;
A need/requirement to preview a work to see whether it should be recommended to a less informed group;
Looking for errors against which to warn others.
In addition, if one engages on a topic with regularity, one needs to know the sort of error that is being promulgated. Some number of professsional biologists have to wade through Dembski and Behe just to see what sort of illogic or distortions they will encounter in the outside world.
I would also quibble about one assumption made in the OP. It is possible that one is not an expert in an area. It is quite possible to have just a basic understanding of some aspect of a work. In that case, the errors stand out in the way that Left Hand of Dorkness noted. How can I trust a work on an area in which I am ignorant if the areas on which I am informed are constantly wrong?
This happened to me with Stuart Berg Flexner’s I Hear America Talking and Listening to America. Both books provide a wealth of information about slang, colloquialisms, catch-phrases, figures of speech, and cliches in American history. Unfortunately, there were several places where the information was clearly wrong. On the section on WWII of I Hear America Talking, he misidentifies weapons and aircraft, gets the actions or fates of several key people wrong, and describes several events or objects incorrectly. I do not expect a word-smith to be overwhelmingly familiar with WWII trivia, but I expect a person publishing a reference work to meet some minimum standard of fact checking. The errors in that section now cast doubt on his claims for the meaning, usage, and popularity of the hundreds of other definitions and descriptions that he provides. If he cannot get correct information that is widely published in numerous books from recent (almost contemporary) history–history that he lived through–why should I believe him on arcane terms from the frontier of the 1840s?
