I’m trying to decide whether it’s worth it to read Carl Sagan’s Cosmos – I love Carl Sagan, but I expect science has moved on so much that it would all be outdated, bad information now. Which made me wonder, are outdated nonfiction books – in fields that advance, like science books – ever worth reading, or is it just a bad idea because you’d be getting bad information – without knowing what information is bad? History, psychology, sociology – do they have any redeeming value, or should all older, outdated nonfiction books be avoided?
by phoenixandfae
8 Comments
I’ve had the same thought. Everything you read should be taken with grain of salt. Even stuff written now written with argument and ideas that are sound by todays standards will be wrong in many ways thirty years from now. And that doesn’t make them less wrong now. The stuff from back then will have ideas that now seem like common sense that were new then.
So even if there isn’t any new facts or ideas to learn, you can get a better idea of where our current ideas come from and how someone you admire thought and put together their ideas, and see how far we’ve come. There is value to be had.
I haven’t read Cosmos, but it’s not THAT old. Plus, most of our understanding of the universe and astrophysics has expanded our knowledge of it, not not made previous understandings outdated or irrelevant. I’d guess that it still mostly holds up, if not entirely.
Depends if you are reading the books for modern academic application, historical context, or just personal enjoyment. Cosmos is much more than just hard science anyways.
Yes, going back to ancient Greek stuff. What you can learn is how people thought in those cultures – both the similarities and differences to now – and trace the development of ideas. Some books from the ancient world are still the main sources for the history of those periods, so even if you’re not reading the people writing modern books on those eras are reading them.
How would you know a book’s info is outdated if you haven’t read it?
I don’t know if this counts, but I love reading really old travelogues, especially when I’m going somewhere.
Out dated books?
I run into this in Sci-Fi books from the 70s and 80s. They got some things right, but boy were they off the mark on a lot. It’s hard to roll my eyes when re-reading an old series and they talk about “Tape” as the storage medium. And I think Asimov, in the Foundation series, had Starships running on oil and coal lol.