I do agree that the bigger picture of learning non-fiction is richer. We now have other ways to learn non-fiction: Wikipedia, Veritasium, Gemini, etc.
But only books can provide you something we may call a "coherent worldview". They are the ones that stitch together different pictures into a coherent whole.
I can think of a lot of books that gave me that: E.Gombrich's "Story of Art", Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death", ... honestly, even Julia Childs' "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" or Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" (his other books are crap, b.t.w.).
True, we still have universities' textbooks. But they're very narrow in scope.
The thing about non-fiction books is that nothing else can provide the same combination of depth and scope.
https://archive.ph/2026.03.23-164808/https://newrepublic.com...
Do they believe someone cannot lie because it’s written down in a paperback? Authors lie in books and books do nothing to help someone who “embraces” ignorance
The bigger issue is the attempt to rewrite history as if the falsehood was never there, which is in my opinion a much bigger lie. As I see it, this can be handled by third party archives and by us as a society actually attaching repercussions to such outright lying.
I think maybe the idea that a single author spending months or years on their research, which the publish as a single bound and polished work is misguided -- an academic trying to do similar work in multiple articles would have gotten review from peers on each article, and hopefully have not spent so much time working under a correctable misunderstanding.
(Or at least shove it off onto an imprint with less of a reputation. Or into a category, like Self Help, where people know its shaky relationship to truth.)
It was far from perfect. But these days the publishing gatekeepers have largely lost the battle. People prefer the hot takes they get from tv and social media.
Hell, now I work for a uni press, and I'm seeing this in our own list more and more--writers are giving up on deep analysis.
Supposedly traditional publishing has become more and more conservative (not necessarily politically) with the risks they take on things they publish, so they'd be less likely to push back against widely-held ideas that are outright wrong. They'll really only publish authors with an established following or works that have a large base of interested consumers.
Edit: I just wanted to add that since I've heard these things so much, going to a bookstore like Barnes & Noble feels super weird. The books look nice, but they're all expensive and I have no sense that the selection has been curated for genuine quality or informational content. It's just what happens to being published now.
I greatly prefer the experience of going to thrift stores like Goodwill where the selection is chaotic, there's no real expectation of curation aside from maybe broad categories, and the books are gloriously cheap. You can find great stuff there!
But there is a difference in efficacy. It is harder to lie in books than it is in social media. Books are like trees, they grow slowly, they're a discourse that spans months or years. On this timeframe it is easier to debunk lies. Social media is different. A lie can pop and spread there in one or 2 days. Once someone debunks it there are already 200 more replacing it. They are like bacterial infestations or japanese knotweed, much harder to combat and control.
Though you can probably post rage bait 500 tweets in that time. So maybe the overall point still stands when thinking about it.
They just offer something worse, like a youtuber who convinced them that eating plants was bad for them.
In my impression people peddling distrust in modern science are not exactly in it to improve its honesty, nor are they calling out genuine gaps most of the time. It's more a side effect if and when it happens at all, with the actual goal being political control play instead.
which totally fits, did HN's title algorithm cut that off? If so it seems silly. "Than ever" is an important modifier, otherwise someone is apt to think that the subject is more important than some other opposing subject, in this case that Nonfiction publishing is more important than fiction publishing. Anyway I think the "than ever" should be added back in
Another title currently on the front page has 74 characters: "The Many Roots of Our Suffering: Reflections on Robert Trivers (1943–2026)"
The point is that IA it is an anomaly soon to be dead or worse, taken over.
Many nonfiction authors will hire a fact checker separately. They don't want to look like they missed something. Errors still happen, of course.
Academic books are also peer-reviewed.
I hope this changes. There is much need to question modern science using a higher epistemic standard.
It has been tried for centuries but the best we got is science itself.
If you can create such an "higher epistemic standard" you'll be just upgrading science.
Until recently that would have marked it as likely done by simplistic automation. These days, it's hard to tell, because humans seem more likely to make simple errors of grammar.
I agree, but in this case I'm trying to be the person who's trying to improve its honesty. There's so many lies in modern non fiction (and science) and I hope they will all be uncovered soon and a nice post-mortem will take place. It is important to understand how much we were misled.
This is after all the scientific process and it will continue and get better - I have no doubt in it.
I'm trying to clarify my position here: I won't name them but there are obvious things that non fiction (by elite academics) got wrong before but were only uncovered as wrong when society evolved to understand the subject matter intricately enough to criticise it. Until then we all had to pretend as if the elite academics pushing their jargon laded slop in non fiction columns as obviously correct.
I don't want to go on a tangent here but an important part of uncovering truth is by the emergent property of a critical mass of people understanding a concept. Society itself takes part in uncovering truth. Until then elite academics either produce gems or slop because there's only so much intelligence that comes from a single person (or a few people).
What exactly are you talking about? Psychoanalysis, acupuncture and homeopathy? I think science already has produced a solid body of criticism for these.
Or are you trying to take a shot at creationism, vaccines' skepticism, global warming denial, deny that cigarettes cause cancer or flat earth bullshit? Because these "ideas" don't really deserve any serious intellectual respect.