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RobertLumley comments on December 2012 Media Thread - Less Wrong
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Nonfiction Books Thread
"The Emperor of Scent" was a very entertaining and well written book about Alan Turin and his vibrational theory of scent. It really highlighted some of the problems with the scientific community's model for publishing and how theories are accepted, and it's a great read as well.
I read The Beginnings of Western Science for a class. It's excellent and I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of science.
What other history of science books does it compare favorably to?
It covers very similar material as the first two parts of Russell's A History of Western Philosophy, since for a long time there was little distinction between philosophy and natural philosophy. I've only read parts of Russell's book but Lindberg does a better job.
We also read Mott Greene's Natural Knowledge in Preclassical Antiquity, which was also excellent but much more specialized. I found its discussion of Hesiod's volcanos fascinating.
The rest of the books focused on later stuffsies.
In descending order of quality:
Would you care to give some indication of their quality in terms other than comparison to one another?
Well, if you want more I suppose you could look at my Goodreads account. For Silver, I excerpted each chapter.
Aha. So, for the benefit of others who are curious, Gwern gave Cowen and Ehrman 4 stars (out of 5), Cowen 2 stars, and Hayes 3 stars. That's somewhat informative. The excerpts are interesting too. Thanks!
This would be more helpful if I knew which of those authors wrote which of the books in the great-grandparent.