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[Meta] The gish gallops need to end
There’s a post below discussing Governor Shapiro and his state booth, Reflecting Pool liner need, and USAID funding death estimates. I think there’s a temptation here to look at all the upvotes (24, solidly above average), the length of the piece, etc and call this a good post. It isn’t. This is just the conservative equivalent of one of those gish gallop posts with dozens of news links pointing out every bad thing Trump has done, with the veneer of thoughtful debate. For those not familiar, Wikipedia here but all you really need to know is that the idea is asymmetry: drop a lot of stuff all at once that can’t possibly be responded to comprehensively. The live debate equivalent is perhaps Spreading? To the credit of the poster, the arguments aren’t necessarily weak per se, but the end impact is like a firehose, and that’s what I take issue with.
Functionally, I think these posts are bad for the community. There is no through thread at all that I can see beyond cute one sentence transitions like “it’s not a question with millions of lives on the line” which is the type of transition I’d be super impressed to see in a high school essay for its fluidity, but am super disappointed to see in a place like this.
Not only is there no common thread between three full length posts slapped together beyond perhaps a trivial thematic “my team is right and yours is full of liars”, there is not even a concluding paragraph that attempts to tie them together.
Why is that bad? The length is not healthy for discussion and debate; the whole point of a thread setup is for somewhat distinct topics to be somewhat distinct. Set up and packaged like this, it incentivizes a “war of worldviews” which might be fine if the point of the post is to discuss worldviews, but it isn’t - the post is all object level or one step up on the topic ladder. So I feel like this goes against the spirit of the site.
If you have three different topics with something substantive to say, you should post three different comments.
As someone who often is voted negative but rarely gets a mod warning, I find the voting feature rather useless.
The only thing it will tell you is which way the local hive-mind of lurkers is leaning.
More complex voting systems have been tried elsewhere (e.g. slashdot's karma system where users have limited mod points, or LessWrong's separation into comment-quality and comment-agreement), but personally I find the motte well enough moderated that it is readable without additional filters (unlike reading slashdot at -1).
Agreed, I would have preferred one thread about the reflecting pool and one about the death count of USAID.
Obviously conversations will get derailed by comment replies, that is a feature not a bug. I am also fine with comments making a one sentence side claim that will lead to multiple replies. But loosely tying multiple separate topics into one package seems not ideal.
I do find it useful in one small case - if I'm deep down thread talking to one person and im consistently getting one downvote I'll be more likely to bail, it seems rude and is highly correlated with poor productivity in my mind.
FWIW, I've had the situation where I was deep in a thread in a back-and-forth with someone, and then upon checking on it later, I find that someone downvoted every post of the other guy, but did NOT upvote mine, giving the impression that I did the downvoting. If I see that, I'll usually upvote the other guy afterwards, but you need to notice it in the first place.
Oh yeah, it's not a 100 percent thing by any means.
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You can't just assume that your interlocutor is the downvoter in such cases. Lots of users use the "firehose" page to scroll through all comments as soon as they are made, with no regard for how deep into a thread they are, and one of them just as easily could be the downvoter.
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If you think something's a Gish Gallop, show at least one claim that the "gish gallop" made that is false. If you think you can show a post is bad, respond to the post. If you're making a top-level post to complain about another poster's behavior, ping them.
If you think a post has no through-line, at least try think harder about it than a 12B quantized LLM (Gemma4-12B). I actually ran this test before posting (caveat: deleted original chat, this is remade now) so as to make sure I was being sufficiently clear.
If you have good examples of the same process starting from lies from the right, I'd be interested in examples, but everything I could find was either fairly distant history (Iraq War), very arguable (exactly how true the 'defund the police' mechanism was versus not continuing increases), or just stupid (peace in middle east).
I like the way you structured the post and I think it felt more honest than posting them as three separate topics.
Your post was "here is the pattern I'm noticing, here are the data points, here is what I think of the pattern". If you claim to notice the pattern after just posting one or maybe even two incidents the responses are likely to be "these are isolated incidents". If you try to get everyone to notice the pattern just by posting one of these stories every week or so for months on end then you risk people get annoyed with you "get off your hobby horse" and it defeats the purpose of this place being able to speak plainly.
@EverythingIsFine Having specific incidents to discuss is fine. But being able to have meta discussions is also useful. This post you are discussing allowed for both types of conversation.
@stolen_brawnze I'd generally suggest people not worry too much about the meta-health of themotte discussion forum. It especially should not be a reason to complain to someone who is improving the discussion.
Thank you for the charity, but I’m being selfish. I want more comments to read while I’m bored at my desk!
I stand behind this:
Maybe the interaction is more draining than the initial effort. If I write a controversial post I usually spill three - five times more words defending it.
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I think you should put each topic in its own top post.
Because bruh. Why are you trying to corral all discussion led by you into one thread? We have an issue where we can go 24+ hours without another top-level thread, and you were withholding three of them to save for one post? I don't understand why you do it like that. It's what I imagine you would do if for some reason you wanted to minimize the amount of interaction you get for all that effort.
I enjoyed reading it. I'm not as convinced by the "through-line" justification.
That's more fair. The more serious justification's that we've had a number of topics, both political and non-political, where a common rejoinder was that an individual small case was not meaningful in some way, the large case not representative, and the attempt to connect them after being 'called out' on it mere retrofitting. Where my examples clearly stand on their own, I'll write them individually, cfe 3d Printers or Legos or furry cancelation. I'm not sure that the fair booth example would be worth a standalone post even in the Bare Link Repository era.
I also specifically don't want to be the type of person that optimizes for interactions. I'm probably overcompensating on 'don't get braincored', but the failure mode is dire enough I'd rather risk that.
But fair. And there's a good example coming out of Louisiana that might serve as a test case, if I have time to write it up later this week.
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While the post the parent links to is not a Gish Gallop, I will give an example of a Gish Gallop a leftist publication posted last year and how I rebutted it.
Context: Charlie Kirk was a conservative activist who was assassinated by a leftist last year for his conservative beliefs. After he died, many leftists smeared his name and attacked him. I responded to one particular attack against Kirk which, yes, was a Gish Gallop: Making a bunch of weak arguments, and implying the other person needs to refute each and every weak argument.
In my response, I only addressed one weak argument:
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A Gish Gallop is not a long post meandering in several different directions. A Gish Gallop is making an argument and then backing it up with a barrage of weak arguments and dubious facts, none of which really hold up if examined closely, but which are hard to address en masse because the arguer can keep switching from one point to the other ("Okay, you say Not A, but I notice you didn't even address B, C, and D, why is that? Hah!")
You are mostly just expressing your personal preference as to what type of posts you'd like to see. I don't entirely disagree with you, but we aren't going to require people to "only post about one thing at a time."
As for upvotes and downvotes, that's unfortunately an inevitable result of evaporative cooling. I would say the Motte is still more ideologically diverse than the average forum or social media site, but the number of people willing to post long posts about their hobby horses is becoming narrower, and upvotes mostly reflect the general attitude towards those hobbyhorses (generally, "right good, left bad").
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I don't know if the post you cite is really the best example of this site's Length Problem, but I'm glad you brought up the Length Problem more generally.
When I started reading /r/slatestarcodex's culture war thread, posts were long for a reason. Posts were frequently written to cover current events. Authors generally understood that their audience might not have the full history and context of the event at their fingertips, so the better posts would frequently provide information to the reader about what was happening, what events lead to the current situation, who the players were, and why the topic was important enough to bring up. That framework helped expose me to a lot of world events, history, and concepts that I otherwise would not have seen at the time. It created a lot of long posts, but the length was a byproduct of an attempt to maximize understanding.
More and more, post length here feels performative. There's not a lot of context; most posters seem to assume that every reader is exactly as plugged in as they are. The broader history is gone. Sure, we know from the post that Jaan van der Grindl went and Said a Thing On Twitter Again, but who the hell is Jaan van der Grindl? Is he somebody in a position of power? Does he have some unique influence over the broader population? Hell if I know. If I click on the link, I'll find out that he's railing about immigrants or birth rate. Awesome. Now I have to figure out if this is something van der Grindl says regularly or if it's out of character for him. Did something happen recently to make this relevant? Hell if I know. Now I get to read bad machine translations of Dutch news articles to try and find out. Maybe I'll get lucky and learn that there are protests in Europe again. What makes these different? Protesting is constant over there. The sense that the modal poster is trying to maximize understanding is gone.
Beyond that, the discussion space has largely collapsed. You'll see topics about Catholicism, declining birth rates, AI, immigration, and... that's broadly it. Somebody is going to reflexively say to "be the change that you want to see in the world", but believe me, I've tried. There's not much engagement outside of a handful of well worn paths.
As a result, I've broadly retreated into the other threads on the board, where people actually talk about things that might be new and interesting. For example, did you know there's a highly coveted waiting list for luxury beans? I sure as hell didn't. It's a window into a culture that's completely alien to mine. There's probably all kinds of room for a culture war post about that. Right now I'm trying to write a post about how Fender is in the middle of a lawsuit that's threatening to upend the entire midlife crisis industry, but I don't know if I'll bother to finish it. If I provide all the necessary context, I fear nobody will particularly care, because they're all busy talking about how AI will fix the European fertility crisis by making all the immigrants Catholic, or something.
Hell if I know what to do about it, though. It seems like it's what the regulars want.
I do find this post a bit ironic.
My problem with length is I don't want to read it all.
I'm largely in the same boat, at least depending on how much detail and depth is necessary in a topic. My philosophy is that simpler and shorter is better. If a post is long but each sentence is packed with detail, that's better than being a long post that could have been rewritten to be shorter. I've gotten used to skimming long posts that fall in the latter.
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One thing I noticed browsing the mega AAQC round-up is how many old AAQCs were an exercise in synthesizing comments above. The big effort posts and link filled explainers are there, but many are a few paragraphs to frame a picture. As if they were a cherry on top award for providing wisdom not yet stated within the context of a comment chain.
I do not think that is an overly helpful observation, but it could be evidence of a community that valued understanding more. One idea is
bussingto move the weekly threads into the CW thread as a pinned top-level comment for the day of the week. Bean culture war posts might sprout with more exposure.I humbly request @fribble chooses one type of weekly thread for the Rancho Gordo saga so that I can more effectively monitor the bean situation.
May I suggest the Wednesday Wellness thread?
Beans, beans they're good for the heart
the more you eat, the more you fart
the more you fart the better you feel
so eat your beans with every meal
That’s a variant I’ve never heard. I grew up with
Beans, beans, the magic fruit
The more you eat, the more you toot
The more you toot, the better you feel
So let’s eat beans with every meal.
Looking back on the rhyme as an adult, I suspect foul influence from the UK.
That's the more common variant, for sure (EDIT: but I know it as "...the musical fruit"). But it doesn't lay out the cardiovascular benefits, so it doesn't point to any weekly thread in particular.
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Doooo eeeet
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Why are you surprised that people want to talk about the hottest culture war topics in the culture war thread? (Ok Catholicism isn’t quite as topical as the others perhaps, but I like the Catholicism posts all the same.)
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Coffee beans or baked beans or what?
Unusual cultivars of beans that you cook with, shipped to your door.
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Please do. The most recent guitar I bought was a Fender.
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Agreed 100%. Someone complained not long ago about referring to court cases by one word names, and the mods said that this was fine because it's a typical way of citing them, which I can understand if it's Brown v. Board or some other landmark decision that every educated person is familiar with, at least in the United States. The problem is when people assume that cases that were big news in their hobby horse communities are similarly well known everywhere else, and they're referenced without any context. So someone says "The argument that you're making doesn't square with what the court said in Vinoverski, and the reader is wondering what they hell the poster is talking about. Meanwhile Google gives a dozen cases with that name, and even giving the full case name is just shorthand for saying "you can look this up yourself". I'd prefer that people would instead say something more like "The argument you're making doesn't square with what the court said in Vinoverski v. Sullivan, in which the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that municipalities could regulate short term rentals under the zoning code (I made that case up so don't go looking for it).
Link to a non-made-up Pennsylvania decision on the topic for people who want it
I didn't know I wanted it, but I did
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This is exactly the sort of reason I love this place.
I will post a full summary of this case in the next Friday Fun Thread.
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The mods don't really know what to do about it either. We don't have a lot of levers to use that won't just disincentivize posting in general.
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I agree it’s a bad post for the reason you think it’s a bad post, but it’s not a gish gallop. Beyond that, even though the Gish Gallop proper is pointing at a real bad argument tactic , I hate it for the reasons demonstrated here. Incorrect accusations of Gish gallops are too common, and becomes its own bad argument itself.
Anyway, the problem with the bad post is that it is, as you point out a long post with multiple topics but no thesis or theme. Personally, post length is much less interesting as a heuristic of quality than having a strong thesis with some supporting material.
A pithy post with a strong thesis delivered in a few sentences or less is much better than some of the meandering mess of stream of consciousness. Unfortunately too many folks fancy themselves lil’ Scott Alexanders (who himself, while a great writer is overly long to his own detriment).
So you get people (1-2 who really over do it) writing cute little anecdotes and tedious stories with many words and little point beyond a vibe, and that’s treated wrongly as the gold standard.
Hot take but he's actually a mediocre writer [1], and this is what you get for organizing the forum around such a writer.
[1] Why is he so popular if he's mediocre? He's above average on one metric which is entertainment quality, but mediocre on logic, evidence, concision, and substance. I weight entertainment very low so he comes out as middling on my scale, but unsurprisingly most readers weight entertainment very highly. He also built his brand on a lot of volume and had a first mover advantage in that what he did was pretty fresh back in the early 2010s. Now there are copycats, many which are just as good, but they're less novel because he already did it, and usually have less volume.
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There's a clear througline; all three stories deal with Blue Team messaging that's playing fast and loose with the truth. A moderate governor of a Blue state nakedly lies in a way that denies the legitimacy of the Trump Admin. Blue MSM aggressively downplays the evidence/possibility that vandalism is at least partially to blame for exacerbating the Reflecting Pool debacle. Blue academia gives a (probably) grossly inflated casualty figures for the effect of Red policy.
I think it's useful/interesting as a little snapshot of some of the current media going-ons. The first two are unlikely to be remembered a few months down the line, the third will be one small piece of all the ink spilled about Red Team attempts to alter America's international status quo, but all three are examples of the kind of deception that's contributing to the break-down of consensus reality.
That’s hardly a very intriguing or incisive throughline, though. Take a snapshot of any day in the past century and you’ll find a bunch of political organs massaging the truth. If you want to prove the present is particularly egregious, you’ll need to step into the world of statistics.
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I always collapse all the multipage philosophical meanderings (especially the ones concerning AI) and navel-gazings,
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No. We can't simultaneously have a rule that say we should "proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be" and then cry about Gish Gallops.
Not to mention, this isn't even a Gish Gallop. The tactic Duane Gish perfected was citing many studies out of context, in a way that make it seem they agree with his point to people who haven't read them, and it turning out that they don't once you look into them. The reason the Gish Gallop was effective in stage debates was that it takes more effort to research and refute the claims, then it is to make them. It was also trivially countered - because Gish's repertoire was actually quite limited, one of his opponents prepared for a debate, and was actually pre-bunking all his claims in real time, making him look like an idiot. Things like this don't tend to happen on this forum, and definitely not from Gattsuru.
Be honest about what this is: you being upset that your side does actually look bad, and being unable to provide counter arguments.
Yes, I'm sure you will be less upset when you have 3 top level Gattsuru comments instead of one.
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