And yet I find his responses very convincing, especially this one and the response to the Ask A Korean! article. I don't know, maybe I'm just easily swayed or maybe it speaks more about how persuasive Gladwell is.
Yea, I had just graduated from college and was binging on popsci. I felt really smart because all the popsci authors seemed to reference each other and when I saw the references I thought I was very well read. Obviously, I don't think that anymore.
This is an embarrassingly accurate description of me at that time: http://xkcd.com/863/
Do other people's comments and criticisms make you change your mind about something that easily? If you thought it was a good book when you read it, why would anything anyone else says change that? (Short of, say, Gladwell made up the entire thing or has been rampantly plagiarizing without attribution.)
Gladwell's books are very well-written narrative combining summarized research studies, anecdotal stories and histories to support his overall thesis. It is not a scientific study. He "connects the dots" of what he believes to be the central theme of his book. I haven't seen anywhere that he "lied".
There will always be detractors to any non-fiction author, especially one so popular. (See Nassim Taleb's books as another example.) If you can find a non-fiction book without major detractors, it probably isn't very good.
It's an interesting illustration of his "narratives often begin in one place and end in another" that his Slate piece begins with calling his detractors ill-read and careless ("I didn’t want to debate them. I just wanted them to read my book all the way to the end."), and ends with the implicit argument that criticizing his work is the same thing as calling his adherents stupid ("I was simply saying that all writing about social science need not be presented with the formality and precision of the academic world...My point was that the people who read my books appreciate this.").