The Gish gallop (/ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/) is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by abandoning formal debating principles, providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments and that are impossible to address adequately in the time allotted to the opponent. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper’s arguments at the expense of their quality.
I disagree that focusing on the central point is a recipe for Gish gallops and that it leads to Schrodinger’s importance.
Well, I think that it in combination with a bunch of other poor epistemic norms it might be a recipe for those things, but a) not by itself and b) I think the norms would have to be pretty poor. Like, I don’t expect that you need 10⁄10 level epistemic norms in the presence of focusing on the central point to shield from those failure modes, I think you just need something more like 3⁄10 level epistemic norms. Here on LessWrong I think our epistemic norms are strong enough where focusing on the central point doesn’t put us at risk of things like Gish gallops and Schrodinger’s importance.
Focusing on the “central point” in the midst of a lot of other “unimportant” points is a recipe for Gish gallops because you can claim that any point which has been refuted is an unimportant one. This forces your questioner to keep refuting point after point until you run out of them. That amounts to a Gish gallop.
If the point was important enough to strengthen your argument—and presumably it was or you wouldn’t have used it—it’s important enough that refuting it weakens the argument.
I just looked up Gish gallops on Wikipedia. Here’s the first paragraph:
I disagree that focusing on the central point is a recipe for Gish gallops and that it leads to Schrodinger’s importance.
Well, I think that it in combination with a bunch of other poor epistemic norms it might be a recipe for those things, but a) not by itself and b) I think the norms would have to be pretty poor. Like, I don’t expect that you need 10⁄10 level epistemic norms in the presence of focusing on the central point to shield from those failure modes, I think you just need something more like 3⁄10 level epistemic norms. Here on LessWrong I think our epistemic norms are strong enough where focusing on the central point doesn’t put us at risk of things like Gish gallops and Schrodinger’s importance.
Focusing on the “central point” in the midst of a lot of other “unimportant” points is a recipe for Gish gallops because you can claim that any point which has been refuted is an unimportant one. This forces your questioner to keep refuting point after point until you run out of them. That amounts to a Gish gallop.
If the point was important enough to strengthen your argument—and presumably it was or you wouldn’t have used it—it’s important enough that refuting it weakens the argument.