There’s been an ongoing spat against Malcolm Gladwell by the scientific community:

To try my hand at Gladwell’s technique: Conventional wisdom suggests that if getting Gladwell’s level of popular traction means sacrificing aspects of both science and journalism, it might be better to have no Malcolm Gladwells at all.

Gladwell is great at communicating fairly complicated issues to normal people by simplifying, and it’s led to an incredible level of popularity for him. In the course of doing that, sometimes things can be over-simplified, much to the chagrin of the archetype scientist.

We often have the same issues on the web. The web is a complicated place, and there are lots of moving pieces, most which a given client has no chance of understanding. So clients often understand and rely on the simplest of rules, many of which simply aren’t sturdy enough to rely on. See Jakob Nielsen.