Just Finished Reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Back on Sunday June 27th I was watching Fareed Zakharia on CNN and he had on as a guest Malcom Gladwell, a podcaster/author who tends to focus on trends in society and his special take on history.  Intrigued, I checked out his 2000 first book, The Tipping Point, to get a better idea as to what his mindset was/is.  In it he claimed that in society there are movements whose "infection" mimic that of epidemics in that once they pass a certain threshold, i.e. the "tipping point", they explode among the population.  Citing numerous examples of different trends he thinks fit this model, Gladwell then goes on to outline the various parameters of such phenomena.  First he posits three rules: the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.  From the first rule, his belief is that only a relatively small number of people are responsible for exploding a social "epidemic": Connectors (people who know people), Mavens (people who know information), and Salesmen (persuaders with great negotiating abilities).  With his second rule, Stickiness refers to the memorable value of something, that "sticks" with people and keeps the trend in conversation.  And with the third, it is essential that whatever movement or trend is being advanced must be relevant to the time, place and circumstance surrounding it.  The author cuts across many areas with his examples, from the drop of crime in New York City in the 1990s to a syphilis outbreak in Baltimore to Paul Revere's ride to John Wesley's evangelism to Rebecca Wells' bestseller Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood...to mention only some of the more prominent cases.  The Tipping Point is loaded with a sense of scientific and statistical authority to its premises...which automatically sounds off warning bells in my head.  In the end, I regard Malcolm Gladwell's assertations as his own well-informed opinion, and think that in this day and age of QAnon, pandemic and vaccine conspiracy theories and election denial, belief trends also may follow this model he laid out...and clearly not for the better...