[trabant00]

How to really be a "know-it-all": be curios, ask questions about the information you come across in your life, especially if you come across it multiple times in your daily life.

Having an idea about the birth of the universe, dinosaurs, etc is not bad to have and you certainly can spend your time in worse ways than reading pop science books. But most of the time you will take almost nothing from these books as the information does not come as an answer to a question that bugged you, so you value it close to worthless. Water tastes the sweetest when you are thirsty and so on.

[kashunstva]

Alternatively, possibly for some, these little introductions are the first, albeit imperfect and incomplete step toward answering those recurring pesky questions. By developing a skeletal cognitive framework on a subject that relates to a relevant question I have, I can better map a route to the answer(s).

[xyzzy123]

IMHO facts "come to life" with more context, e.g:

* How do we know that fact / how was it measured or determined? How sure are we that the fact is true? How accurately / precisely do we know it?

* Who figured it out / generated / measured the fact? Why did they do that?

* What is the "distribution" the fact is drawn from? e.g. for "height of highest mountain", what are the next 3 tallest mountains, etc, what is deepest trench, how far to space? etc.

[abecedarius]

I'm mildly curious: about how many of the books in this series have you read?

I'm with you on feeling jaded by pop science in general, but I'm struck by the lack of specific comments on this specific series in the HN reactions here.

My opinion from reading 10 of them in the last few years: 3 were worthwhile to me (The ice age, Stoicism, and planetary systems), and a couple more in the sort-of-OK range. An 11th I quickly gave up on (Anatomy: A VSI -- I'm still on the lookout for a book in that niche).

I'd really value a series like this which presumed a reader comfy with basic freshman math for a STEM major, or even high school math -- it's some kind of indictment of modern education that educated adults are taken by the whole industry to be repelled by even that much math in pop science.

[bluetomcat]

Once you've read a couple of those pop-science and "big history" books, every other such book tells you the same story. It always starts with the Big Bang, the forming of the stars, the Earth, life, agriculture, writing, the Industrial revolution and the modern era. You can certainly do better than spend significant amounts of time on books with that narrative.

[teddyh]

Compressed to under 20 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs