An agent wanting to search for truth with bounded resources is better off looking somewhere that isn’t a known cesspit of bad evidence presented as if it were good.
That aside, I still don’t think your hypothetical world captures the essence of the proposal. The Gish Gallop is primarily an asymmetric resource exhaustion strategy. Evaluating the first(*) couple of arguments to judge the quality of the evidence is a defense against that strategy. If they’re only presenting their own two arguments then this isn’t a Gish Gallop, and the defense is inapplicable.
It seems to me that a better strategy would be to first quickly check that they do in fact already know the standard not-obviously-wrong arguments or other evidence, and then proceed with your own information. If they don’t already know it, then presenting the well known information first is a good thing. If they do know it, then you now both know that you’re working from a common base before starting on the new information of unknown value. In both cases your situation is stronger.
(*) They need not be the first strictly, but shouldn’t be cherry-picked. Reliably choosing the first few makes it obvious that they’re not cherry-picked, and establishes a useful norm of communicating strongest information first.
An agent wanting to search for truth with bounded resources is better off looking somewhere that isn’t a known cesspit of bad evidence presented as if it were good.
That aside, I still don’t think your hypothetical world captures the essence of the proposal. The Gish Gallop is primarily an asymmetric resource exhaustion strategy. Evaluating the first(*) couple of arguments to judge the quality of the evidence is a defense against that strategy. If they’re only presenting their own two arguments then this isn’t a Gish Gallop, and the defense is inapplicable.
It seems to me that a better strategy would be to first quickly check that they do in fact already know the standard not-obviously-wrong arguments or other evidence, and then proceed with your own information. If they don’t already know it, then presenting the well known information first is a good thing. If they do know it, then you now both know that you’re working from a common base before starting on the new information of unknown value. In both cases your situation is stronger.
(*) They need not be the first strictly, but shouldn’t be cherry-picked. Reliably choosing the first few makes it obvious that they’re not cherry-picked, and establishes a useful norm of communicating strongest information first.