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RichardKennaway comments on Great Explanations - Less Wrong
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I see that the physics list consists of math-free pop-science books. I don't see how these can possibly count as "great explanations," since it's impossible to gain any real understanding of physics from such materials.
For example, a good explanation of relativity would first present the concepts of Minkowski spacetime and proper time, and then show how all those "relativistic effects" follow from these reasonably simple concepts. (This as opposed to a bad explanation of the traditional sort that confuses the reader with various "effects" and "paradoxes.") Then it would explain how a curved metric with a Minkowski signature can make the geodesic lines look like the free fall curves of Newtonian gravity, thus providing an intuitive grasp of the whole "gravity is geometry" business. Beyond that, you just have to get into the hairy tensor stuff, and even this minimum requires a solid knowledge of algebra, analytic geometry, and basic calculus. Anything less than that is just rambling that may have a lot of entertainment and signaling value, but won't move you one millimeter closer to any real insight.
I agree, and I wonder how much more widely it applies than the mathematically based subjects. Just because something is expressed in words rather than formally manipulable symbols does not, I suspect, make it any easier to arrive at sound understanding based on sound assessment of evidence and argument. However, it does make it easier to mistakenly think that you have done so.
It is easy to just go with the narrative flow, nodding along to it without asking "is this true?", "is this cherry-picked evidence?", "is the writer working to a hidden bottom line?", and so on, and even if one does, it's a lot more work to answer these questions in a subject such as history than in mathematics, where you can and should work out the proofs yourself, or in physics, where a short trip to Google will turn up reliable sources about the red shift of stars.
I agree -- that's why I sometimes point out that for people who imagine themselves to be so much more rational than average, a real test would be to try and make some sense of such fuzzy and controversial topics.
Also, in subjects outside of hard sciences, the danger isn't just that you may fall in with the flow of a well-written bad argument, but also that a valid argument might have such bad ideological or signaling implications that you'll desperately grasp for any excuse to reject it without due consideration.