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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.
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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