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felix_using_reddit OP t1_jduhkxe wrote

Reply to comment by shillyshally in How do I find out who knows what they are talking about? by felix_using_reddit

Maybe that’s sort of a misunderstanding with reception I didn’t really mean Amazon reviews. I‘m talking about books that were so popular that when you google them you get a wiki article about the book with a section labelled reception and that states how tbe book‘s been received by the public / journalists / the scientific bubble that book was related to. And then ideally I‘d want books where that Wiki section is mostly people saying positive things instead of things you commonly see such as book failed to adress x, y or disregarded/neglected z ..

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shillyshally t1_jduizd9 wrote

I would want to know the author's educational background, what other books they had written, what awards they garnered. I'd Google them, read the wiki, see if their works had been covered in important book review publications. I would do that to at least sort of determine their legitimacy and if they looked ok and the topic interested me I would then buy the book.

I do not discount Amazon reviews in making that assessment as they can often be quite informative, especially regarding non-fiction.

The thing is, so much of what I learned in college and grad school fifty years ago has now been deemed bullshit. Plate tectonics was heresy. Genes never changed. Animals were Pavlovian mechanisms. And so on and on and on. You can only do the best with info available at the time and know that nothing is written in stone. Education never stops.

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