It is enormously frustrating to know, as an evolutionary biologist with experience from the trenches of the creationist wars on science, that nobody on Bidenâs team nor CNNâs seem to be aware of the Gish Gallop, 30y after Eugenie Scott described it and years of Trump deploying it!
Even more frustrating when I know for a fact that the White House science office has scientists with scicomm expertise and good understanding of such tactics. But it doesnât look like the campaign talks to them much. Biden really needs a better comms team!
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 shouldnât 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.
And it's an enormously effective tactic against someone with a stutter - which is an issue with language processing in the brain. Biden dealt with Trump successfully last time because he told Trump to shut up on a hot mic and everyone was surprised and thought it was funny.
You can win, but it takes a great deal of preparation. You have to know what they're going to lie about ahead of time, anticipate it, rank their lies from least to most important, and craft *concise* rebuttals to their most important lies. Key word is concise, you don't have time for everything
Yes. It's extremely rare to win, and the wins have meaningful effects only in very specific situations (which can of course be exceptionally important from legal and policy perspectives).
I still canât believe that after the 2000 debates anyone still thinks trying to get out as many facts and stats as you can in 2 minutes is the way to go.
i don't know where you'd find it, but this strategy predates gish by quite sometime, and there are canonical strategies to beat it. the wiki article on "spreading" is terrible, but there are literally how to guides on how to beat this that are for sale.
oh, yeah, the strategy trump is employing is best described as "a dumb debate team that spreads and talks pretty." tale as old as time, it can be beaten every time, that biden wasn't prepped for it... i, i can't finish the rhyme. i'm too disappointed.
CNN practiced a refusal to work during the TV duel between Biden and Trump by stopping any serious journalistic work and only keeping the camera on it, thus slipping into the simplest form of tabloid reporting.
