Four Way Interview - Matt Brown

Photo by José Farinha

Matt Brown is a former scientific editor and journalist and has contributed to several popular science books. He is the Editor-at-Large of Londonist.com and author of Everything You Know About London Is Wrong, the predecessor to his popular science book Everything You Know About Science Is Wrong, both published by Batsford.

Why science?

It's a combination of factors, really. First and foremost, science has a unique ability to befuddle. So much is counter-intuitive or outside of everyday experience that it's easy to get the wrong end of the stick. At the same time, we're fed a steady diet of misinformation about science. Exaggerated press reports, the spread of pseudoscience and the misrepresentation of science in popular culture all take their toll. The field - or people's perceptions of it - needs a regular debunking to shake out all the nonsense.

On a more prosaic note, I have a long background in science editing, writing and quizmastering, so science was the natural choice as successor to the first volume in this series, Everything You Know About London Is Wrong.

Why this book?

I've always found that learning from mistakes is the most effective way to lodge something in the memory. Why not embrace 'wrongness' as a tool? The conceit lets me turn the usual format of a popular science book on its head. Instead of filling a gap in the reader's knowledge, I hope to challenge what's already there. Plus, everybody loves a bit of nitpicking and pedantry, don't they?

What's next?

There's a whole universe of false facts out there to be debunked so I'm now moving on to other volumes in the series. Expect books specifically covering space and the human body, in the near future. I'm also working on a volume about the art world.

What's exciting you at the moment?

The prospect of a new Star Trek series has me giddy with anticipation. I'm a life-long Trek fan. Indeed, these Everything You Know books were partly inspired by The Nitpicker's Guide To Star Trek - a favourite tome of my teenage years. I'm also excited to have a 14-month old daughter who's growing ever-more curious about the world. I can't wait to show her all the wonders out there.

Comments

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting. Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...

Robot-Proof - Vivienne Ming ****

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...

Search This Blog