ignoring that it was, yet again, just a signal in the noise of what remained a ton of folklore and bad ideas.

Thanks for that reminder. I’ve been getting a teeny-tiny bit more skeptical every time I hear NDT gush over how scary it was that Newton figured out so much — never with any caveat (perhaps just not clipped, if it exists).

That said, I haven’t seen/heard those flashes of hagiography attached to anyone hawking his alchemical or theological exercises … yet.

Oh, absolutely, I personally really appreciate reviews that aren’t just glowing and tell me faults and then sell me on the book even given the faults. The fossil book seems particularly interesting, as it’s the kind of thing I naively would have thought the ancients may not have had really good access to but when you think about it becomes the kind of thing you realize they must have seen sometimes and would, with any dedicated curiosity and academic background, have started thinking about and reasoning from. I just also would have loved hearing about the specific merits of each book and what they do right and how they may correct our misunderstandings!

Fair enough. I fear boring audiences with random tours of things that don’t make sense except in aggregate. So it’s better, I think, if readers are just warned what they will get and then read the books, so they get the information without getting misframed by it.

This is because there aren’t any particular “mistakes” to call out. It’s a global effect across a whole book, not specific errors to correct. The problem with them is simply that they tour everything indiscriminately, without a more particular interest in errors and successes, but mixing science with folklore, as if there were no difference. Which can get you into the ancient mindset (as that’s how they did see it). But it can mislead as to the undercurrent of real science and that, and why, it made progress. A reader can “miss” that by reading books like these, unaware of how the information is being organized.

In a way, I wrote Scientist to counter this tendency in hist-sci literature, so readers can start to see the signal in the fog.

Conversely, it is still important to get this information, even the folklore and error and its extent, since to know all the things they were still asserting unscientifically keeps you from being misframed in the other direction—as happens when modern scientific histories ignore all the bollocks that we still believed in the age of Newton (and indeed that even Newton himself believed) and misframe the matter as all scientific success and triumph, ignoring that it was, yet again, just a signal in the noise of what remained a ton of folklore and bad ideas.

The literature has this tendency to oversell success when it’s modern science and undersell success when it’s ancient science. And there isn’t any way to convey that except in a rather extensive book. So really all you need is an awareness that this is happening. Then, with that awareness, you can become immune to the framing effects in both bodies of literature.