thatguy posted:

What is gish gallop and why do they keep saying it?

quote:

The Gish Gallop (also known as proof by verbosity[1]) is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort. The Gish Gallop is a belt-fed version of the on the spot fallacy, as it's unreasonable for anyone to have a well-composed answer immediately available to every argument present in the Gallop. The Gish Gallop is named after creationist Duane Gish, who often abused it.
Although it takes a trivial amount of effort on the Galloper's part to make each individual point before skipping on to the next (especially if they cite from a pre-concocted list of Gallop arguments), a refutation of the same Gallop may likely take much longer and require significantly more effort (per the basic principle that it's always easier to make a mess than to clean it back up again).
The tedium inherent in untangling a Gish Gallop typically allows for very little "creative license" or vivid rhetoric (in deliberate contrast to the exciting point-dashing central to the Galloping), which in turn risks boring the audience or readers, further loosening the refuter's grip on the crowd.
This is especially true in that the Galloper need only win a single one out of all his component arguments in order to be able to cast doubt on the entire refutation attempt. For this reason, the refuter must achieve a 100% success ratio (with all the yawn-inducing elaboration that goes with such precision). Thus, Gish Galloping is frequently employed (with particularly devastating results) in timed debates. The same is true for any time- or character-limited debate medium, including Twitter and newspaper editorials.
Examples of Gish Gallops are commonly found online, in crank "list" articles that claim to show "X hundred reasons for (or against) Y". At the highest levels of verbosity, with dozens upon dozens or even hundreds of minor arguments interlocking, each individual "reason" is — upon closer inspection — likely to consist of a few sentences at best.
Gish Gallops are almost always performed with numerous other logical fallacies baked in. The myriad component arguments constituting the Gallop may typically intersperse a few perfectly uncontroversial claims — the basic validity of which are intended to lend undue credence to the Gallop at large — with a devious hodgepodge of half-truths, outright lies, red herrings and straw men — which, if not rebutted as the fallacies they are, pile up into egregious problems for the refuter.
There may also be escape hatches or "gotcha" arguments present in the Gallop, which are — like the Gish Gallop itself — specifically designed to be brief to pose, yet take a long time to unravel and refute.
However, Gish Gallops aren't impossible to defeat — just tricky (not to say near-impossible for the unprepared). Upon closer inspection, many of the allegedly stand-alone component arguments may turn out to be nothing but thinly-veiled repetitions or simple rephrasings of the same basic points — which only makes the list taller, not more correct (hence; "proof by verbosity"). This essential flaw in the Gallop means that a skilled rebuttal of one component argument may in fact be a rebuttal to many.

thatguy posted:

What is gish gallop and why do they keep saying it?

Milky Moor posted:

the way they all latch onto weird sayings like that (and things like FUD) really makes me thinks it's a small number of people with multiple accounts

also, there's no way someone with a username like messi_knessi isn't into some weird deviantart fetish poo poo

Mr Fronts posted:

David Braben: Click "BUY CARGO". Your inventory list will show the cargo. Click LAUNCH.

Shitizens: That's not fidelitous at all.

Dementropy posted:

Lladre posted:

Please do not invite old school commander here. my scrolling thumb is already tired.

thatguy posted:

Isn't some guy named Cradle Robin a regular poster there?

Tippis posted:

Wait. Thumb?!

notoriousman posted:

Mobile user supremacy, never even saw that gross green CSS for April fool's.

Sarsapariller posted:

In not-trolling-the-new-people news,

OldSchoolCmdr posted:

If I were a betting man, I would bet that you had no knowledge of the existence of the original July 3rd blog on Tumblr because it was never advertised, nor propagated, or shared. I came across it via a proprietary deep search tool that uses phrases and heuristics to match data patterns from a deep scan stored local repository (a data dump, if you will). It creates a visualization of the data, with interconnected links. In this case, the data patterns revealed an orphaned context (that's why you can't find that Tumblr blog easily on Google) in a separate branch. Expanding that branch took me to the blank Tumblr page with no data, because he had wiped it, moved it elsewhere, and left a redirecting link and message. From that point (this was last weekend), I was able to put together a timeline of the creation of that "War Genesis" (as I refer to it in my notes) blog, which enabled me to link it to it's second publication on Reaxxion, and which had a different article headline. This enabled me to adjust my own timeline to show that the blog was not originally published on July 6th (the date on the website and Reaxxion), but on July 3rd.

Also, Dr. Smart's own blog and social posts detailing the early days, has various statements by him that he was working on the blog "through the July 4th holidays", that he had "reached out to Chris Roberts and peers" etc. To anyone, that would have meant that he worked on it, then published it on July 6th. But as a basis of fact, he wrote and published it that same holiday weekend; just as he had stated. That discovery finally brought context and consistency to my knowledge of the facts surrounding that original blog.

Lladre posted:

what the duck is wrong with you people.

milk milk lemonade posted:

OldSchoolCmdr more like DrDerekSmart

thatguy posted:

Other Interests: da ladies, politics, ladies, religions,ladies, video games, animation, comic, ladies, and da ladies

thatguy posted:

I doubt that's actually the same guy from r/ds but I'm looking forward to the QCS thread anyway.

thatguy posted:

I doubt that's actually the same guy from r/ds but I'm looking forward to the QCS thread anyway.

thatguy posted:

Isn't some guy named Cradle Robin a regular poster there?

starkebn posted:

They use gish-gallop as tl;dr but it's not the same thing

Dementropy posted: