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A particularly ridiculous version of this is "spreading" in debate, where you speak extremely fast so that your opponent has difficulty addressing all your points.
Wired video with some interviews: https://youtu.be/0FPsEwWT6K0
And a transcribed video from a highly-prepped debate: https://youtu.be/JhzwSlK4uEc
To be fair, I remember this being a problem even when I participated in middle school debate ~20 years ago.
If you make a bunch of points that the other team doesn't refute directly, you get to nail them on it later.
Short of you speaking so quickly that even the judge didn't understand you, it was heavily encouraged to speak extremely quickly even back then.
Stuff like this is why I don’t put any weight into whoever “wins” a debate. There is skill involved but in debating but it’s not about who had the facts on their side.
But what about the points you didn't cover? They're correct, right? /s
But yeah, I considered doing debate as I thought it was about logic and truthfulness. After watching a spectacle like this locally, I noped out of it.
It's just a game, right? Would be like concluding which country is more powerful, UK or Croatia, based off a football game.
The online version of this is a whole bunch of 'sources' in a comment. In fact, I suspect that there is a number of sources in an online comment where the truth goes up in sources and then drops.
Sometimes I've seen a "source" given that didn't actually support the claimed point. I think I've only seen that with a single source, though, not multiple sources. But when asked for a source, they just dropped a comment containing a URL that was superficially related, and someone had to take the time to actually read the link to find out that it didn't actually support the disputed point.
In fact, the whole "a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on" idea might be considered a variant of this. Making fine-sounding claims is easy; proving that they are false is harder. If you make claims faster than they can be refuted, you can get at least some people to believe you, even if much of what you say is false.
How do you deal with this strategy? A lot of hyper partisans and conspiracy theorists hammer you with a ton of “facts” that sometimes are correct but most of the times with half truths, misinterpretations and a pinch of things that are plain wrong. If you are lucky you can refute immediately but often it takes a lot of time and effort to research the topic. In a debate or discussion with friends I often feel stupid saying things like “I don’t believe the stuff you are saying but I need to research things for a while before I can tell you what exactly is wrong.” .
The current pandemic is a good example. The “Plandemic” movie is making its rounds in the neighborhood but all I can say is that I can’t imagine that thousands of researchers around the world are part of a conspiracy. It just doesn’t make sense.
I don't think you can. I think misinformation is simply superior at getting traction, especially with the internet where people who are disingenuous can immediately get out ahead of real knowledge.
The human race is doomed if that's the case. There must be a way to fight this.
The only way to fight it is for having false beliefs to have bad consequences, and having true beliefs to have good consequences. But the advance of civilization is basically the continual reduction in bad consequences from false beliefs and good consequences from true ones. Once upon a time, having false beliefs would get you killed and having true beliefs would help you survive. Now having false beliefs gets you Facebook likes, and having true ones gets you downvotes.
There's no way to fight it that won't be considered censorship and a violation of free speech by many people, and that won't be fought against tooth and nail on principle alone.
By not debating with people who use it.
The hard question is how you prevent people who use this strategy from having influence over the opinions of others. We haven't solved that problem.
“By not debating with people who use it.“
That’s what I usually do. But it’s sad to see well intentioned people seduced by nonsense.
Agreed but I'd go further and say that if you are 'debating' someone who is in a Gish Gallop, you really aren't debating and yes, you shouldn't debate them.
Call it out “this is a gish gallop and I will not play this game”
The problem here is that you're still required to engage with some amount of the nonsense, otherwise you're very likely debating in bad faith. And it will absolutely look like bad faith to any onlookers.
The common rejoinder to your reply will be hammering the fact that they provided sources that you didn't even examine by way of appealing to meta-argument, and they'd be right. This tactic ranks roughly at the same level as "responding to tone" on PG's hierarchy of disagreement.
Better would be picking one or two of the more pertinent sources and demonstrating their faults. This has the benefit of casting doubt on the rest of the list. If you can find a citation loop, even better.
If I'm talking to somebody like this I will usually say, "I don't have time right now to respond to all of these points, but here's my take on the first few (or the most salient points)." You will probably never convince the gish galloper, but if a third party is watching the discussion and they see the first few points get outed as disinformation, they'll be more skeptical of the rest of it.
Often, people aren't intentionally try to flood you with crap, they just want to tell their story. And they're told that people should have facts and evidence, so they go find facts and evidence.
The intractable problem is their sources are junk, and you're not going to refute them to their satisfaction.
You want to figure out where you are, and where you can realistically get to.
Much of what's achievable revolves around defeating the caricature. To them, you are a caricature of a person (and you've caricatured them, this cuts both ways) and your goal is to establish that you are a real person who has some relevant experience and views grounded in reality.
And your ideas are often grossly oversimplified, and often by your own side; everyone implicitly engages in the motte and bailey because we all need to develop an elevator pitch for our belief systems. E.g. "feminism is just about equality," "conservatism is simply common sense."
So when they pitch the soundbite version of your beliefs at you, you can expand on it, and explain your point of view.
The third thing you can do is some troubleshooting. For example, people don't go to antivaxx sites because they suddenly have a deep interest in immunology. You can probably find areas of common ground, very few people find large corporations and the government above reproach. And then you just lay out that while you don't implicitly trust large bureaucracies, you've nevertheless had positive experiences, etc.
So, you're not "winning" these arguments, but rather pushing the needle a bit and establishing a few facts in that person's mind. And, understand, they're going to change your mind a bit, too.
I think the problem is that the facts are often very complex and don’t provide a simple solution. So a lot of misinformation is basically information fast food. Very convenient but not good for you.
That's a fair point in two ways: most media outlets can't really deliver much more than a soundbite, and people experienced in communicating with them know this and simplify what they say to a soundbite. That's also true for all the memes, what can you fit into a GIF?
It's also affected by what motivates people to share something:
"Natural products produce fewer side-effects." Interesting.
"Pharmaceutical company disparages a study about negative impacts of their products." Also interesting.
"Big Pharma conspired to shut down revolutionary natural cures and push poisons!" The us vs them aspect is an implicit call to action, as marketing guys put it.
I've noticed that moving the goalposts is extremely prevalent on HN, which makes for pretty frustrating conversations (or just reading). And then sometimes it's a tag team. E.g.:
Person A writes their comment. Person B1 offers a rebuttal. Personal A offers their response. Person B2 offers a second rebuttal that abandons the premise behind B1's rebuttal, and may actually be at odds with it. Person A ends up either deflated or looking defeated.
It's like the cross product of a Gish gallop and a DDoS.
I think of it more as graffiti. Somebody has a new thought, they write it on a wall somewhere (append it to a thread). Not always in 'response' to anything. Is there a better way to expand on a topic? It has to go somewhere, and all there are, is threads.
This is especially frustrating when A's response is only within the context of B1's rebuttal, not A's full position. B2 then attacks the response as if it were A's full position.
I like the DDoS analogy...
It's a long tradition!
https://smbx.org/bsg-guide-for-sending-email/
Proposed Symbolics guidelines for mail messages
BSG 4/11/84
[...]
It is customary to attack the someone by including his or her message, indented (unless you are using MM), and replying point by point, as someone debating someone they are watching on TV, or hearing on the radio.
It is considered artful to append many messages on a subject, leaving only the most inflammatory lines from each, and reply to all in one swift blow. The choice of lines to support your argument can make or break your case.
Replying to one's own message is a rarely-exposed technique for switching positions once you have thought about something only after sending mail.
[...]
You get 3 opportunities to advertise your Rock band, no more.
Idiosyncratic indentations, double-spacing, capitalization, etc., while stamps of individuality, leave one an easy target for parody.
[...]
If people keep submitting (edit: I should really say upvoting) wikipedia.org articles on widely popular topics, we're going to have to penalize Wikipedia submissions again. We used to do that, but I was persuaded to remove the penalty. This case is particularly bad because the topic has long been an internet cliché, and also because it has a meta aspect. Meta is internet forum crack, so we try not to do it here—er, not too much. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114661 is another current thread where the topic is much too well-known to make a good Wikipedia submission.
Good HN submissions from Wikipedia are about topics that have not been widely discussed before, and about which there isn't a good article available elsewhere. (If there is, it's best to submit the latter instead.) Since Wikipedia is the most generic of sources, short of maybe a dictionary, it should be the domain of last resort for a topic.
I appreciate that not everyone has seen the same things. You can always use search as a proxy for how well known something is: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
This has been coming up repeatedly recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089041
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22990237