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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.

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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.

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