"Only Three Books" question set

Question

So far there are two of these, one on There are now 4 of these: Chemistry, Physics, Grain, and Medicine.

Essentially the question is:

Which three books should be preserved, in the event that our current civilisation collapses, in order to give the survivors the best chance of getting back to our level?

(My paraphrasing of the questions)

Now, to me, this doesn't fit within worldbuilding. The questions are both opinion based and very broad. Despite this there are no current close votes and the upvotes are fairly high - 28 for chemistry at the moment.

Is there something I've missed and these questions are, in fact, not opinion based or broad?

Answer 1

I was once a regional manager for a small retail chain. In a manager's staff meeting one day we were discussing how to improve the shopping experience with music. Managers were complaining that they didn't have the equipment necessary to pipe Pandora to their customer's ears. I knew they all had CD radios in inventory and suggested they set one up and bring in some of their favorite disks. After a moment of silence, one manager (very much a smart aleck) raised his hand and asked, "what's a CD?"

What's a book?

We are on the verge of never using printed books again in the fundamental education process. The technology is that good... that close... the time when all of Humanity's knowledge could fit on a single CD-ROM passed a long, long time ago (if it were ever true). And yet we're asking about three books... Yes, it's in just one field, but still....

I believe the biggest problem with this kind of question is that it's basically asinine. What three books about electrical engineering would I take (being a EE) that would bring my survivors back to the original level in as short a time as possible?

It doesn't matter! The amount of time needed to re-invent what's missing from those three books is so long that having the three books won't significantly speed you along.

Please understand, it's not enough to have a textbook about semiconductor physics, you also need to know how to build and operate a fab. That takes more than just one book! Then you need the chip assembly plant (more books!), then you need the computer assembly plant (more books!), then you need an operating system (more books!) and finally a book on programming (have you seen what it takes to program C in the Windows environment lately?) And that's ignoring the entire computer design process (the more complex EDA tools used to ship with an entire shelf of user's guides)....

Technology is a massive mountain.¹ Today, right now, we're standing on the top of that mountain. What's below us is a nearly unfathonable amount of knowledge and experience. Choosing "just three books" (at least one of which must teach you what a resistor is... that's not the book that will help you build a fab) is like picking up three rocks on the mountain (presumably one at the bottom, one in the middle, one at the top) — and then expecting those three rocks to lift you high enough that you can rebuild the mountain in less time than it took to build it in the first place.

The premise of the question is worldbuilding from the perspective that recovery from an apocalyptic event is always about worldbuilding. The first problem is that without a "point of entry" the question is utterly meaningless and irrelevant to answer.

The "point of entry" is the amount of surviving, sustainable technology. The OP would need to explain exactly how far back the indicated science (chemistry, physics, EE, etc.) is set. Knowing where to start tells you how far up the mountain you need to climb.

But even then, just three rocks books?

Let's say the point-of-entry was 1977 (we were still using LS7400 NAND chips back then folks! Do you have any idea how many generations of CPU have come and gone since I last saw an LS7400 NAND chip on a motherboard?) The technological difference between the LS7400 and today's CPUs (we don't use "microprocessors" anymore because the prefix "micro" hasn't been valid for 20 years) is massive. There aren't three books that can get you from the LS7400 to today's CPUs without reinventing a lot of wheels — and that takes time.

Let's be more practical and say the point-of-entry was 2005. The technology in the cellphone sitting next to me right now (NOT a top-of-the-line phone!) did not exist in 2005. And not just the knowlege, the manufacturing ability didn't exist, either. Not for the chips, the display, the software, the NVRAM, the battery, nada. Zip. Zilch.

And that's the second problem. The time required to reinvent what didn't arrive in those three books is so great that it might not matter which three books you picked. Any three would do.

Which makes the question primarily opinion-based by definition. But I'm not done....

There's one more problem. The odds of the OP being schooled in my EE expertise is darn close to zero. Why does this matter? Because if the OP is expected to judge which answer is best. Any OP that could do that wouldn't need to ask the question in the first place. Every OP that can't do that is picking an answer, not on the suitability of the books, but on the trust the OP has in the answerer.

Here's an example, the odds are very much in my favor that no one but myself (on this site) has experience in the physics of and design of BiCMOS ICs. It's a very specialized field of engineering, but it's important for satellites (among other applications). I could suggest a book title that would reinstate the lost knowledge of BiCMOS design. But how many of you could read the title and a couple of sentences of description and judge if it is the best book? (it was in the late 90s) or even a necessary book? (it isn't). The average participant on this site probably wouldn't even know what I was talking about.

The third and final problem is that the OP is almost certainly selecting an answer in a manner that is "primarily opinion-based." I know that's not the original intent of the VTC reason, but it's just as relevant.

Which is a long and fancy way of saying, what's the point of allowing these questions in the first place?

TL;DR

These questions should be arbitrarily closed.

That these questions are being asked proves the OP has no blooming idea what it takes to climb the technology mountain.

• Without a point-of-entry we must assume technology has been set back to the 1940s or earlier. But even with a PoE...

• Three books in every field wouldn't hold enough information to rebuild the tech mountain quickly. The time required to reinvent what's missing would overwhelm whatever advantage you had with the books.

• The answers can't be judged in a meaningful way by the OP.

Three books... the only valuable way to ask this question might be (MAYBE!) "which three university libraries...?"

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¹ Moore's Law originally stated that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years. Most people today think of it as "technology doubles every two years," but that's because they have no idea what it takes to double that count. What far too few people realize is that the knowledge it takes to meet the expectation of Moore's Law far exceeds simple doubling because of the number of fields that must advance just to double the number of transistors on a chip. The mountain of knowledge grows exponentially, not geometrically, and to make it worse... people have discovered that the transistor count is doubling faster than every two years....

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EDIT

I came back and re-read this post quite some time after writing it — and I can't even imagine what had darkened my mood that day. Somebody or something obviously moved my cheese, kicked my cat, called my baby ugly, and beat me at Trivial Pursuit all at the same time. I'm going to leave the answer in its original condition because modifying it would change more than a few of the comments. However, I would like to offer a sincere apology to both Lio and Green for being a bully. That's not the kind of person I want to be and I failed to listen to the better angels of my nature when I wrote this.

Answer 2

I think they are worldbuilding all right. The problem is - is there really a way to answer them objectively? Or for the answers to be good subjective? I'm really unsure about this, and seeing what kind of answers these attracted I tend to be on "no" side: partial answers, strange opinion answers, low quality frame challenge, write your own - between these we can clearly see bad ones, but which one is actually good? Why would writing the perfect book be a better / worse answer than pointing out an existing one...?

For the "best book" bullets, first it might be a matter of opinion what "where to go" is worthwhile and what isn't; second is about showing something is possible - again, might be a matter of opinion what's worth showing; and finally 3rd and 4th only points out lack of constrains. If it can be edited to more clearly show what's really needed, and which answers are better, I believe it should. If it is on the "good enough" side already, I can't tell.

Answer 3

Like any other series of questions, each should be taken on its own merits

There are some fundamental subjects, maths, physics, chemistry, where it's potentially possible to answer the question.

Other subjects are more derivative, medicine for example, requires so much fundamental knowledge of chemistry, maths, and physics that in its own right it could well not be answerable.

Answer 4

[Updated]

Many of the complaints have centered on a lack of background knowledge that we can assume the reader to have, which is a fair complaint. I've chosen the year 1800 as a stage for when these books will be found. I hope that helps with the too-broad and opinion-based complaints.

Not too Broad

While the 'universe' of possible books and articles is broad, limiting them to 3 selections forces decisions. If I had not provided selection criteria, it would easily be too broad.

Not opinion based

While opinions certainly figure into an answer, the books presented can be objectively compared for fitness to the purpose. Granted, I'm not usually fit to make those judgments but that's why I asked WB.

Answer 5

"Too Broad" would mean that any question that would try to answer the question would have to write books to do so. In the case of these questions the answer only has to reference three books (and explain their reasoning).

"Opinion-based" means that basically every possible answer is exactly equally valid. But there are enough constraints to show that certain books are better than others (see the very explicit "The best book choices will:" part with four constraints) and we as a community can therefore judge which answers are better and which are worse. There may be lots of possible answers, but as long as we can somewhat objectively rank them against each other the question is fine.

Therefore I think these questions are on-topic.

Answer 6

"Too many".

Three Four questions of the same kind lead me to wonder whether there is going to be a question for each one of the fields listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_academic_disciplines

Should there be a specific stack-exchange open for the "three-books" section?

If we think that these three books series is useful/not-opinion-based, then it could be more usefully re-done in a single wiki answer for the question "three books for..." where each answer provides three books for each field listed above.

What would limit someone else to then start the "one animal for..." section, or the "two tools for...", or "three famous historical figures for...", or the "four ingredients for..."?

Answer 7

The question cannot really be seen as too broad; indeed, it is very, very narrow. Possibly too narrow.

Opinion-based though, perhaps. However, not to the degree that some suggest here. For example, someone said elsewhere that there are way too many college textbooks about the same thing so how do we choose which one to use; you don't! I skimmed over one of the questions linked, and I did not see a request for a specific ISBN. So, if I were to answer this with math as the basis, a very reasonable answer could be (compressed here) "Knowledge of basic arithmetic likely would still be prevalent; that won't just disappear because of an apocalypse. We can probably start with an algebra book. Build on that with a trigonometry book and a calculus book. There will be topics missing, but this will cover most of what you need for applied science."

Likewise, I could answer this type of question from my own field, software engineering, and it need not be very opinion-based - at least not any more than World Building in general. A book on low level systems programming, one on compiler construction, and one that summarizes the linguistic concepts of many programming languages. If someone whose field is in electrical engineering answered the same type of question about their field, you then get the budding electrical engineers together with the anxious software engineers who are waiting for hardware.

If the topics are left to be only the very generic ones provided so far (ie: the "3-book series" is not continued to specific fields), such that the electrical engineers are left to work with only the chemistry books, then the answer becomes "Pick the 2 most crucial fields that rely on chemistry, and provide 1 low-level book per field (ex: an electrical engineering book that covers macro-sized circuits and how to make them), and 1 book that provides a generic chemistry foundation." There's not much opinion to that, and it's difficult to argue: anything else, and your books might as well be paper weights since you cannot implement them.

In World Building, the assumption is that the question has some specific fictional world in mind, be it for book, movie, game, or otherwise, there is a world in mind. So it is not broad to say to the world builder (the OP), "Pick the 2 most crucial fields within that topic for your world". Indeed, that works well with fictional World Building and adds flavor to the world to think of a couple important chemistry-reliant fields, a couple important physics-reliant ones, and so on. And the question remains relevant to others, as other world builders will have a different pair of fields that works well in their world's story. OP gets what they need and interested readers wondering the same get what they need: Stack Exchange has filled its role.

What does strike me as odd is "3 books." If this is on topic, can someone else start a "2 book series," copy-paste all the 3-book series questions and replace all 3's with 2's and post new questions? And again for 4? The series-author did address this issue, however, acknowledging that 3 is arbitrary and chosen as a baseline. Likely, this was done specifically to narrow down the question so that it was not too broad.