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Notes -
That wasn't Gladwell's idea, the very beginning of his essay attributes it to Gregory Trevorton. As someone who identifies strongly with your caricature of a midwit, I have to say this is what annoys me most about Gladwell fans, that they think he came up with anything original.
I think there’s a place in the world for popularizers like Neil DeGauss Tyson, Bill Nye, or Gladwell. They aren’t breaking new ground, but they aren’t trying to do that. Their role is to digest research and high level publications and to break it down to about a 7-8th grade level where the median American can read it and get something out of it. And the value is in generating interest in the subject, and to help people understand how science affects their lives.
Now if you’re basing everything you know about a subject on a popularizer’s body of work, I think that leads to blind spots because people have biases that color how they simplify a subject. It also tends to give a false sense of how much of a subject you actually know and allows pseudo scientific and pseudo intellectual ideas to slip through the cracks by sounding enough like the popular ideas to make sense to the lay public. They’re generally a good starting point, but not good enough that they create a good feel for what is and isn’t reasonable in a subject. This is why I tend to find the IFLS types so annoying. They like science, but they don’t understand it at all. It’s just consumed for entertainment.
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