More on Gladwell -- His Style of Thinking ...

Duncan Watts uses Lazarsfeld's ruse to frame the central concern of "Everything Is Obvious": that common sense is a shockingly unreliable guide to truth and yet we rely on it virtually to the ­exclusion of other methods of reasoning...
He is especially interested in the mistakes we make when we reason about how people influence one another—such as our tendency to think of groups in terms of representative or important members rather than as whole entities. The writings of New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell take heavy fire in "Everything Is Obvious."  ...
"The Tipping Point" reads so well that its explanations have been widely accepted. At first blush they seem novel, but they mainly reflect what common sense tells us about how social networks work. The problem with the Hush Puppies story is that the computational analysis of actual networks, such as a study that Mr. Watts conducted of 74 million Twitter message chains, shows that influencers, if they exist, are more common and less special than Mr. Gladwell thinks. Paying Kim Kardashian $10,000 to tweet about a product may well buy less buzz than paying 10,000 ordinary Twitter users $1 each. The Hush Puppies tale is a just-so story ­written after the fact—and an example of what Mr. Watts calls the "special ­people" fallacy.