What do you think about this book and the works of Michio Kaku? Is it worth the read...

What do you think about this book and the works of Michio Kaku? Is it worth the read. I hear it's better than most popular science books.

Other urls found in this thread:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4436199/
youtube.com/watch?v=E9RmAo6XVAA
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Never read it, but based on the sub-sub-title, I'm calling bullshit.

Understand - fine
Enhance and empower - gtfo deepak chopra

>Has anybody on Veeky Forums read this?

no

Wasn't he a physicist? I'm not saying he can't have other interests, but what are the chances that he actually wrote something meaningful on the subject of mind and not just Sci-Fi daydreams?

He's a pop-scientist desu

I did

His daughter is a neurologist if I remember correctly, and she helped him with the book. Either way, it's filled with sci-fi daydreams as you say. He explains things briefly (wouldn't expect otherwise from a popsci book) and then goes on and on about how awesome would it be to have the tech from Star Wars , Star Trek, and other scifi in the near/far future.

He also references himself a lot -- I tried to look up the studies he cited, and found out some of them are basically talks from his radio show. So I listened, hoping to gain more understanding of the subject than what was written in the book, but it was the same fucking bullshit.
He invited a neurologist to talk with him in his show, asked him a simple question about one of his studies, the neurologist says "Yes it's like that but not exacly--" and then Kaku moves on to the next subject like a brat. He doesn't give you the full story, not in the book or his show, and ultimately you end up with a half-assed picture of things that might not even be correct.

I'm not going to say the book is terrible, it gives you some basic understanding of the brain and the current technologies, and if you're a scifi fan you might even enjoy Kaku's fanboyism. It's a short, simple read that might spark your imagination and interest in neurology - which in my opinion is a big plus. But if you really want to get into the subject, pick up an actual neuroscience book.

I don't understand why Kaku gets hated on. He went to harvard, berkeley, and built a particle accelerator as a teenager. Listening to his youtube videos where he speculates on shit makes me feel like a monkey for not doing physics.

He doesn't get shit on for his scholarly or teenage achievements, nor for his contributions to physics (as far as I know), but because his opinions outside of his field, like those of many of his pop-sci colleagues, often coincide with those of easily impressed and completely oblivious autistic Sci-Fi fanboys.

>haven't read the book
>know nothing about the subject
>talk shit about it and its author anyway

same Veeky Forums, different day

are you seriously taking your time to post this on every thread?

So can anyone recommend an actually good Pop-sci book on Neurology? I've read Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior and Music the Brain and Ecstacy. Both were pretty informative, but they felt very entry level. I'm looking for more.

>they felt very entry level

That's the point of popsci though. They're supposed to be accessible.

The entire effect of popsci is not to educate but to make people content in their ignorance by giving them the barest veneer of understanding.

You want to learn something about how the brain works? Study molecular biology. Psychology/psychiatry, hell, AI if you're up to it. Read the primary literature.

Trying to extract anything useful from these books is like expecting The God Delusion to give you a solid understanding of the epistemology of religious belief.

>pop science

lol

that's a huge generalization. Some of them have a lot of details and examples of studies, experiments, and applications. I'm not looking for university education on a given subject, but a basic understanding of it or simply because I find it interesting. Are you gonna read primary literature on the japanese porn industry and take classes at your local University because you jerk to it? no, you're gonna go to pornhub and search Azn gets fucked in her tight butthole all day bukkake"

I understand where you're coming from, but I think you're overgeneralizing. I agree with
but let's bear in mind that it honestly is better to spread curiosity and knowledge to people who don't necessarily have the time and background to become "literate" if you will in a specific field. I haven't read the book, but then neither have you. Perhaps check out a review by a neurologist/neuroscientist? It might be OK, but then it might be, as you say, quite shallow.

>you gonna read primary literature on the japanese porn industry and take classes at your local University because you jerk to it?
This isn't a great analogy
Science is at its core about models with predictive capability. Sensationalism and misrepresentation strike at the very heart of "basic understanding." You can see this clearly in most science journalism.
Though these two factors are my definition of the term "popsci" itself and are not things I'm arguing apply to everything intended for a general audience. A lot of skeptic blogs are intended for very broad audiences indeed without falling into these traps.
>review
Here ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4436199/
A lot of idle speculation, very selective presentation of evidence and claims outside his area of competence. This is always a potential pitfall when you don't have a basic grounding in the field - you are trusting your author not to overstep because you don't yourself know what to call him on (see Reza Aslan - youtube.com/watch?v=E9RmAo6XVAA ) Many people without a basic understanding of research methodology don't immediately see the problems in Seralini's paper either, for instance. The accountability mechanisms of literature reviews and successful teaching textbooks just aren't there.
>better to spread curiosity and knowledge to people who don't necessarily have the time and background to become "literate"
Certainly a worthy goal. I just disagree that's what it does.
>I don't have time to read the book itself so I'm reading the sparknotes analysis section

Why are you quoting me? I said the same thing. Am I the only one who actually read the book

>Certainly a worthy goal. I just disagree that's what it does.
I don't know if I fully agree with you here. I think it does give basic knowledge, but it also gives a very skewed prespective of the field and its future -- to the point of misinterpretation (and I think most of it is on pupose)

>Sensationalism and misrepresentation

again you are generalizing and saying all of these books just want to dazzle and reddit the crap about whatever subject. you are also saying that if you are interested in neuroscience then you should dive deep in scholarly papers and textbooks. For what purpose? I do not want to be a neuroscientist or a nerologist or even seem like I know about the subject to entertain the idea that I'm smart, I simply want some broad themes and mechanisms. there is nothing wrong with that. Why would I embark on a year long academic journey to fulfill a simple interest or curiosity?

>Why would I embark on a year long academic journey to fulfill a simple interest or curiosity?
You've answered your own question. I mean, why do you put effort into reading and critically engaging with serious works of literature?
But you certainly shouldn't need to invest a year of intensive study. Wikipedia is excellent for overviews of technical subjects that don't involve heavy math formalism, and background can be easily filled in as needed. Take this article for instance en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process which can be easily understood by a non-chemist, and the general conceptual sense of "equilibrium" and "catalysis" you get from following the links gives a good idea of what process chemistry is, without having to dump 400 hours each into thermodynamics and transport phenomena. Essentially your broad themes and mechanisms. I advocate this over a narrow guided journey.

>generalizing
I'm saying that this is a valid critique of the specific book you asked about, that this fits a wider trend, and that there are general-interest materials which do not fit this trend. I haven't tried to explicitly construct what falls into this trend and what doesn't (that would be silly) merely said that you should be aware of and watch out for this trend or risk self-sabotage. I mean, you're not going to break your mind or anything by reading Kaku or Kurzweil, but you have better options if you want genuinely empirical broad themes and mechanisms.

>it's better than most popular science books.
"It smells better than most types of shit".

The effort I put into reading and critically engaging with serious works of literature isnt to forward the great human cause or better understand the human condition or even to become a better person. Some people might pour their efforts into that sure, but not everyone. are you saying that all reading should be done only for the greater good? I just want some entertainment, I like writing, I like prose, I like interesting plot, complex characters, I wont necessarily use what I learned from literature to try and bend other's will to those ideologies, just as I wont start correcting anyone in discussion about black holes and how they'll turn my body into spaghetti because Neil Degrassi Tyson used it as a simple offhand analogy.

the way I see it is these books are sort of like having one of those "fun" high school teachers that made the class interesting by equating larger concepts to small scaled experiments and comparisons. They are certainly not end all sources, but they are excellent in sparking interest in the subject, and unless you are trying to become a neurosurgeon, I would much rather learn about the inner workings of the human brain in small increments, watch documentaries, read about experiments, and learn from PEOPLE rather than fucking Wikipedia articles holy shit did you actually recommend wikipedia? hahaha

Top af physicist. But he has a particular ideology that I guess is like Francis Fukuyama, the evolutions of politics, economics and to some degree culture are more or less over. He also seems to believe that technology stems almost purely from scientific development. That's not to say that in pragmatic ways he isn't somewhat informed about elements of these things (like he has had good opinions on the hb1 visas), but in general he's naive on these points/forces.

On the other hand he is a world class physicist. Almost anything he says about physics, especially M theory or string theory, you can take as gospel. There almost isn't anyone else like him in the world.

jesus, this nip is such an hack...
he is famous only because relate physics with popoular amerifag/manchildren cultures like star wars or transformer...
definetively top meme-scientist

>solid understanding of the epistemology of religious belief
is it still a joke once you have an understanding?