It is enormously frustrating to know, as an evolutionary biologist with experience from the trenches of the creationist wars on science, that nobody on Biden’s team nor CNN’s seem to be aware of the Gish Gallop, 30y after Eugenie Scott described it and years of Trump deploying it!
As someone who was a student in an evangelical middle school 30 years ago I have seen many an evolutionary biologist have worse times on debate stages than President Biden did.
Yup. A number of biologists made mistake of accepting debate invitations from these charlatans. But we wised up and realized the futility of debates as a format for scicomm. As @joshrosenau.bsky.social said this week @ncse.bsky.social helped Bill Nye develop counter strategy when he debated Ken Ham
It was a Gish gallop, a term coined by my former boss Eugenie Scott for a creationist tactic in debates. And in prepping Bill Nye to debate creationist Ken Ham, we came up with a counterstrategy: do your own Gish gallop back. Force Trump into the same corner.
Bill Nye doing that debate was still a huge mistake, since in the end all it did was lend legitimacy and platform to creationists.
Unfortunately not giving Trump legitimacy or platform by not debating him isn't a realistic option. He's the Republican nominee. So having a good strat would be good.
I think the actual best thing is just more widely explaining how the Gallop works.
Just standing there in front of a lie every four seconds when you know it's gonna take you two minutes to unravel each one is *exhausting*
The calculus was that the debate shouldn’t have happened, but if he was committed to doing it, he should put on the best performance possible. Analogies to debating Trump are left as an exercise for the reader.
