In the Gish Gallop, you present a bunch of perhaps somewhat related, but fundamentally independent arguments for a position. In the classic Gish Gallop, you give just one or maybe two to start with, wait for people to debunk it, then ignore the knockdown and present another one. Usually you act as if the new one is support for the old one, or as if the new one was what you were saying all along… but you’rereally giving a completely different argument.
The idea is to eventually exhaust the opponent, who is forced to invest time and effort to refute every new argument. It works best if the arguments are hard to understand and even better if they claim to be supported by facts, so the opponent has to do research to try to disprove factoid statements.
Presenting a single argument with support for each step isn’t really like a Gish Gallop. And the hyperlinks in the story are a lot more like a single argument with support for each step than they are like independent arguments for a single position.
If you don’t allow any complicated arguments with lots of steps that need support, you degrade the discussion even more than if you let people change their arguments all the time. And tossing around phrases like “Gish Gallop” (and “Sealion”) is its own kind of rhetorical dirty pool.
In the Gish Gallop, you present a bunch of perhaps somewhat related, but fundamentally independent arguments for a position. In the classic Gish Gallop, you give just one or maybe two to start with, wait for people to debunk it, then ignore the knockdown and present another one. Usually you act as if the new one is support for the old one, or as if the new one was what you were saying all along… but you’rereally giving a completely different argument.
The idea is to eventually exhaust the opponent, who is forced to invest time and effort to refute every new argument. It works best if the arguments are hard to understand and even better if they claim to be supported by facts, so the opponent has to do research to try to disprove factoid statements.
Presenting a single argument with support for each step isn’t really like a Gish Gallop. And the hyperlinks in the story are a lot more like a single argument with support for each step than they are like independent arguments for a single position.
If you don’t allow any complicated arguments with lots of steps that need support, you degrade the discussion even more than if you let people change their arguments all the time. And tossing around phrases like “Gish Gallop” (and “Sealion”) is its own kind of rhetorical dirty pool.
Yeah, I think this is part of why the claim seemed out-of-left-field to me.