This seems more like sour grapes. Is "A Brief History of Time" in this category? Who's to say. There are a ton of non-fiction books that are written for popular audiences that do not make it big. If they are all equal, than all the ones that don't make it should also end up being wrong. That doesn't seem right, why is it only the ones that do become popular must turn out wrong.
This seems more like moralizing on the public being idiots, and so if a book is popular it must be wrong.
“A Brief History of Time” is a standout here, as it’s dealing with really well-defined, well-studied, well-tested physics theories. (Well, except for Grand Unification stuff.)
But Diamond’s work, and other authors that are in this middle-brow reviewed-in-The New Yorker mold, deals with really complex sociology and psychology, which aren’t reducible to equations. (There’s no Lorentz transformation for colonialism.) Malcom Gladwell really comes right to mind here—lot of pop-sci stuff which gets in all the right publications and then ends up being just wrong in all the ways.
This seems more like moralizing on the public being idiots, and so if a book is popular it must be wrong.