Wired video with some interviews: https://youtu.be/0FPsEwWT6K0
And a transcribed video from a highly-prepped debate: https://youtu.be/JhzwSlK4uEc
If you make a bunch of points that the other team doesn't refute directly, you get to nail them on it later.
Short of you speaking so quickly that even the judge didn't understand you, it was heavily encouraged to speak extremely quickly even back then.
The current pandemic is a good example. The “Plandemic” movie is making its rounds in the neighborhood but all I can say is that I can’t imagine that thousands of researchers around the world are part of a conspiracy. It just doesn’t make sense.
Person A writes their comment. Person B1 offers a rebuttal. Personal A offers their response. Person B2 offers a second rebuttal that abandons the premise behind B1's rebuttal, and may actually be at odds with it. Person A ends up either deflated or looking defeated.
It's like the cross product of a Gish gallop and a DDoS.
In fact, the whole "a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on" idea might be considered a variant of this. Making fine-sounding claims is easy; proving that they are false is harder. If you make claims faster than they can be refuted, you can get at least some people to believe you, even if much of what you say is false.
I like the DDoS analogy...
By not debating with people who use it.
The hard question is how you prevent people who use this strategy from having influence over the opinions of others. We haven't solved that problem.
That’s what I usually do. But it’s sad to see well intentioned people seduced by nonsense.
The common rejoinder to your reply will be hammering the fact that they provided sources that you didn't even examine by way of appealing to meta-argument, and they'd be right. This tactic ranks roughly at the same level as "responding to tone" on PG's hierarchy of disagreement.
Better would be picking one or two of the more pertinent sources and demonstrating their faults. This has the benefit of casting doubt on the rest of the list. If you can find a citation loop, even better.
https://smbx.org/bsg-guide-for-sending-email/
Proposed Symbolics guidelines for mail messages
BSG 4/11/84
[...]
It is customary to attack the someone by including his or her message, indented (unless you are using MM), and replying point by point, as someone debating someone they are watching on TV, or hearing on the radio.
It is considered artful to append many messages on a subject, leaving only the most inflammatory lines from each, and reply to all in one swift blow. The choice of lines to support your argument can make or break your case.
Replying to one's own message is a rarely-exposed technique for switching positions once you have thought about something only after sending mail.
[...]
You get 3 opportunities to advertise your Rock band, no more.
Idiosyncratic indentations, double-spacing, capitalization, etc., while stamps of individuality, leave one an easy target for parody.
[...]
Good HN submissions from Wikipedia are about topics that have not been widely discussed before, and about which there isn't a good article available elsewhere. (If there is, it's best to submit the latter instead.) Since Wikipedia is the most generic of sources, short of maybe a dictionary, it should be the domain of last resort for a topic.
I appreciate that not everyone has seen the same things. You can always use search as a proxy for how well known something is: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
This has been coming up repeatedly recently:
But yeah, I considered doing debate as I thought it was about logic and truthfulness. After watching a spectacle like this locally, I noped out of it.
The intractable problem is their sources are junk, and you're not going to refute them to their satisfaction.
You want to figure out where you are, and where you can realistically get to.
Much of what's achievable revolves around defeating the caricature. To them, you are a caricature of a person (and you've caricatured them, this cuts both ways) and your goal is to establish that you are a real person who has some relevant experience and views grounded in reality.
And your ideas are often grossly oversimplified, and often by your own side; everyone implicitly engages in the motte and bailey because we all need to develop an elevator pitch for our belief systems. E.g. "feminism is just about equality," "conservatism is simply common sense."
So when they pitch the soundbite version of your beliefs at you, you can expand on it, and explain your point of view.
The third thing you can do is some troubleshooting. For example, people don't go to antivaxx sites because they suddenly have a deep interest in immunology. You can probably find areas of common ground, very few people find large corporations and the government above reproach. And then you just lay out that while you don't implicitly trust large bureaucracies, you've nevertheless had positive experiences, etc.
So, you're not "winning" these arguments, but rather pushing the needle a bit and establishing a few facts in that person's mind. And, understand, they're going to change your mind a bit, too.
It's also affected by what motivates people to share something:
"Natural products produce fewer side-effects." Interesting.
"Pharmaceutical company disparages a study about negative impacts of their products." Also interesting.
"Big Pharma conspired to shut down revolutionary natural cures and push poisons!" The us vs them aspect is an implicit call to action, as marketing guys put it.