But once you fact-check him a few times, then you won't be able to trust that his sources support his points anymore, which then raises the question: Is there ANY evidence that supports what Gladwell is trying to say?
If the best evidence that Gladwell could find to support his points, don't support his points, then it really makes me question the utility of trying to find evidence to support Gladwell's points.
It may be that, the reason why no subject matter expert makes the points that Gladwell does is because Gladwell's points are either wrong or not even wrong.
The problem is that Gladwell comes off as trying to be scientific, when really he's just a persuasive storyteller. If you view Gladwell as a purveyor of facts or a science communicator, then he does a horrible job and yes, it's hard to trust whatever he presents because he's at best not very careful about his facts and conclusions. In that case, why would you ever pay attention to him?
On the other hand if you see Gladwell for what I think he is, which is an entertaining storyteller using science as a backdrop to present his view of the world, and willing to twist it to suit his view, then he's really no different than many other writers. In that case you can enjoy him or not, at your leisure, just as you would any other editorial or op-ed piece. Entertainment is entertainment, and his content is entertaining even if I don't expect it to be true (to be clear, I'm approaching this as someone that mostly consumes his podcasts, which some chapters of his books have been directly converted to. I wouldn't want to spend the time reading this content that's not true, but I'm happy to listen to it while on a drive).
Whether he's causing more harm than good overall to the public is another question, but honestly that's a much bigger discussion with a lot of much bigger problems than him, so I'm not sure it's worth getting worked up over.
The problem with "take it or leave it, it's just a story" is that stories are not neutral, or cost-free. Memes compete for attention/proliferation/survival, and false-but-appealing memes outcompete true-but-boring memes. It's a mini DDOS attack on our collective bandwidth to be churning out durable falsehoods disguised as scientific insight.
Thank you for this comment - you have succinctly captured something that I have been feeling but unable to express in words.
Stories/memes/narratives are the most easy/potent form of mental ingestion - so much so that I think humans cannot ingest facts or ideas at all, only stories. And this puts a collective responsibility on all of us to be very careful about the stories we create.
Not just that, but real policy comes out of these books. Gladwell is highly influential among leaders of our bureaucracies. So when it comes time to look at airline safety policies, Gladwell's nonsense about Koreans being too hierarchical to fly safely can worm its way in there.
If the best evidence that Gladwell could find to support his points, don't support his points, then it really makes me question the utility of trying to find evidence to support Gladwell's points.
It may be that, the reason why no subject matter expert makes the points that Gladwell does is because Gladwell's points are either wrong or not even wrong.