Albert-László Barabási’s new book “Bursts” is out, and according to its subtitle it’s about “The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do”. I really do admire Barabási’s scientific work, and I really appreciate his efforts to make it available to a wider audience, but why do popular science books so often have to have these extremely sweeping subtitles? Barabási is certainly not the only one: we’ve seen books that claim to reveal to us the Hidden Side of Everything, how mass Collaboration Changes Everything, how Disruptive Innovation will Change the Way the World Learns, or how [social networks] Shape Our Lives. From journalists we would perhaps expect such hyperboles, but what happened to academic nuance and modesty? Unless Barabási really means it, I think this habit would lead to skepticism among to general public about scientific claims, and a devaluation of words like “everything” or “explain.” I mean, if Bursts’ subtitle is true, we could as well stop doing research in social science…
(Disclaimer: I haven’t actually read Barabási’s book yet, so I cannot exclude the possibility that it actually does explain the patterns of everything we do.)
the “explains everything” puffery doesn’t bug me nearly as much as the “unprecedented and completely new” puffery you often see. just once i’d like to see a back cover that says something like “a solid contribution to fleshing out the paradigm.”
btw, my understanding is that with trade books the subtitles are chosen by marketing people not authors.
I definitely agree on that.
For some reason the authors of these books decided that the best-selling strategy is to formulate the title in the way the pop-psychology and general motivational literature does. Like “Learn to be a good manager within a month, 2 hours a day” etc. Is the content of, say, “Freakonomics” so uninteresting substantively? For some reason popular science books in natural sciences do not look like that. I wonder why.
Perhaps Social Sciences still await their own Richard Dawkins…