Pop Science is science for the masses.
The stock and trade of this industry are quick insights, surprising facts, and conclusions that both amaze and entertain. Pop Science brings the scientific fire from Mount Olympus to mere mortals below — all in a way that won’t bore us to death while giving us talking points for cocktail parties.
Pop Science is basically the market’s answer to our willingness to get maximum sciencey insights with minimum effort.
Most people want to learn only the bare minimum to appear learned. And, most importantly, they don’t want to be pestered by something called “counter questions” when they make bold conjectures to show their “expertise”.
The upside is that Pop Science serves as an introduction to subjects that people would otherwise know nothing about. Pop Science can give you a good headstart and get you curious to go deeper into the subjectmatter.
But, that all said, I think it’s worth talking about its limitations because the genre has certain constraints and incentives that make the whole scene slightly icky, especially when certain sciencey writers (the likes of Adam Grant, Malcom Gladwell, etc.) push it too much.
In 2009, Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol W. Greider, and Jack W. Szostak were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery of telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.
(Telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes which play a crucial role in maintaining the stability and integrity of genetic information during cell division, while telomerase is an enzyme that replenishes and maintains telomeres, which is essential for cell longevity.)
When I picked up The Telomere Effect (written by Blackburn herself) I was expecting this book to talk about the science behind telomeres and how it was discovered. I was basically expecting something on the lines of The Code Breaker (which is the story of another Nobel Prize winning scientist Jennifer Doudna and her invention of CRISPR — an easy-to-use DNA-editing tool). But instead what I got was a Pop Science book giving advice on how to remain healthy and live longer.
But to be honest, The Telomere Effect is not the worst offender. At least Blackburn is a real scientist who has done real work. The real problem with Pop Science starts when journalists start selling entertainment in the name of science.
Pop Science has three essential traits:
Confirming Or Subverting Weakly Held Beliefs: Pop science often confirms what you kind of already believe. When it challenges you, it doesn’t challenge you too much.
Simplicity: Pop science simplifies complex ideas to cater to a lay audience. It focuses too much on memorable takeaways (à la, the 10,000-Hour Rule) and uses catchy phrases to summarise topics.
Science Backing: Although Pop Science claims to be backed by science (thus suggesting what is presented is the gospel truth, and not just somebody’s opinion) scientific rigour and accuracy is often sacrificed at the alter of sensationalism.
Take Adam Grant and his best selling book Originals for example. Originals is the quintessential Pop Science book — it’s full of sciencey stuff, backstories, and studies made to amaze, one of which is that procrastination can actually boost creativity.
And apparently, a lot of people think this to be true. That procrastination can sometimes boost creativity is already a weakly held belief. When Grant wrote about it, they ate it all up. This idea has since been circulated in The New York Times, Fortune, Business Insider, and the rest.
But what was the science behind this claim? Well, it’s a little shady. You see, the best studies on the relationship between procrastination and creativity aren’t exactly supportive. There are a lot of maybes and perhaps. Basically, no study confirms that procrastination actually boosts creativity. So why does Grant say that this claim is backed by science? It’s because Grant relies on unpublished research from one of his grad students.
Now, if a research hasn’t been published yet, it didn’t have to go through a rigorous peer review process, which means you basically could’ve written whatever you fancied. “Procrastination boosts creativity” is as good as “Procrastination is a good aphrodisiac.”
The problem is that most people who read that chapter on procrastination take Grant’s word for it and don’t even realise that this is a very questionable claim built on dubious evidence (i.e., there’s actually no real science behind this claim.)
Malcolm Gladwell is a successful author who writes about successful people. Gladwell uses several anecdotes in his book Outliers while introducing the 10,000-hour rule: one research is focused on violin students at a music academy in Berlin. The study found that the most accomplished of the students had put in 10,000 hours by the time they turned 20. Gladwell also estimates that the Beatles put in 10,000 hours of practice playing in Hamburg in the early 1960s, and that Bill Gates put in 10,000 hours of coding before founding Microsoft. Hence the 10,000-hour rule was born. Lack of scientific rigour at its epitome!
Not only that, Gladwell doesn’t understand basic statistics (or rather, he ignores them for his own benefit). The 10,000 hours the violinists had put in was just an average, i.e., not all the best violinists had put in this number of hours by age 20. In fact, half of them hadn’t put in the required hours. There goes the efficacy of the whole “rule” out of the window.
Gladwell is not alone. The gritty Angela Duckworth too has a poor sense of statistics (or possibly, she intentionally lies with statistics , falsely assuming her readers are too dumb to notice).
In her book Grit, Duckworth famously claims that United States Military Academy West Point cadets who had more grit (i.e., scored higher on her (trademarked) “grit scale”) were 99% more likely to get through a training camp called the Beast Barracks.
But the joke is that 95% of all cadets made it through anyway, gritty or not. I’m sure when you heard “99% more likely to get through,” you were expecting something much more dramatic.
But these are stupid mistakes that any amateur researcher would be able to debunk in no time. What’s really dangerous is when sciencey writers cherrypick data just to prove their point.
Scientific studies often contradict each other, especially when it isn’t hard science such as Physics and Mathematics. Therefore, it’s just as easy to prove something as much as it’s easy to disprove something. For example, if you cherry-pick the right studies, you could easily conclude that coffee, pickles, mustard, and ketchup cause cancer. This isn’t simply unethical, it’s evil.
If you happen to pick up a “science” book, but instead you see the author trying to sell you a quick fix, an easy hack, or is sharing some worldly wisdom backed by sciencey stuff that’ll bring you money and happiness; if you discover that the book has tonnes of references to studies that only confirm the central idea and not one study that contradicts it (not even a little bit); if the book feels too easy and simplistic to follow, put it back to never touch it again.
Read books written by scientists, not salesmen. Good science books present both sides of the research, in their entirety. They never try to sell you anything, or push a certain agenda, or forcefully build a narrative. Least of all, they’ll never talk about a study with R^2 = 0.003 as the gospel truth, like Grant has done.
(R-squared, represented as R^2, is like a score in statistics that tells us how well one thing can predict another. If R^2 is 0.003, it means that very, very little of what we’re trying to predict can be understood using the information we have. In simpler terms, the stuff we know doesn’t really help us predict the outcome.)
Science books can be interesting (good science books are always interesting) but they are entertaining only as a side-effect. Whenever any science book tries to entertain as a primary goal, it has most likely been written by a charlatan.
Science is not about narratives. Science is not about entertainment. Science has no agenda. Science doesn’t care about your “personal growth” or feelings. Science only cares about the truth, and what defines the scientific process, more than anything, is rigour.
Pop Science has no rigour. Its whole purpose is to sell packaged sciencey entertainment, not offering truth. Pop Science is Popular Science, and everything popular is wrong.