Trying to See Through: A Unified Theory of Nerddom

My issue with Malcolm Gladwell, and others like him, is that he distills information down to a thesis that is so easily digestible as to make it seem like commonsense. You don't really think when you read a Malcolm Gladwell book. You just sort of scan it, page by page, your critical and evaluative faculties turned off, and nod your head. It's like the highly refined white flour of insight.

I admire Gladwell the man, and I think he probably has a net-positive impact on most people who read him. But he's highly disappointing for those who want a real spark of insight, or an intellectual exercise. (Also, tangentially speaking, his books are pretty repetitive; most of them could be summed up adequately by a single paragraph, if not a single-sentence logline).

I guess the real question is: are we, the self-described nerds of the article, really better off in a world full of Gladwells? Or were we better off when insight was hard to come by, and you had to go off looking for it? We have a lot more information and insight at our fingertips, but have our critical thinking skills atrophied accordingly? I realize you could take this line of thought a little too far and follow a sort of neo-Luddite vein with it. But that's not my intent. Rather, I'm just asking if all this ready-to-eat insight is actually good for us. I think it's good for the averages, but we probably think of ourselves as being at the margins.