The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit
It can be hard to detect, at first, with an untrained eye—you have to know your specific area of research extremely well to begin to see it—but once you do catch on, it becomes impossible to un-see.
.. The problem is that Lord Voldemort doesn’t play fair. In fact, he is so intent on defending this hypothetical intervention that he will stop at nothing to flood the literature with arguments and data that appear to weigh decisively in its favor.
.. Since journals tend to print the letters they receive unless they are clearly incoherent or in some way obviously out of line (and since Lord Voldemort has mastered the art of using “objective” sounding scientific rhetoric to mask objectively weak arguments and data), they end up becoming a part of the published record with every appearance of being legitimate critiques.
.. The result of this artful exercise is a heavily skewed benefit-to-risk ratio in favor of X, which can now be cited by unsuspecting third-parties. Unless you know what Lord Voldemort is up to, that is, you won’t notice that the math has been rigged.
.. So why doesn’t somebody put a stop to all this? As a matter of fact, many have tried. More than once, the Lord Voldemorts of the world have been called out for their underhanded tactics, typically in the “author reply” pieces rebutting their initial attacks. But rarely are these ripostes — constrained as they are by conventionally miniscule word limits, and buried as they are in some corner of the Internet — noticed, much less cited in the wider literature.
.. The term “Gish Gallop” is a useful one to know. It was coined by the science educator Eugenie Scott in the 1990s to describe the debating strategy of one Duane Gish. Gish was an American biochemist turned Young Earth creationist, who often invited mainstream evolutionary scientists to spar with him in public venues. In its original context, it meant to “spew forth torrents of error that the evolutionist hasn’t a prayer of refuting in the format of a debate.”
.. As the programmer Alberto Brandolini is reputed to have said: “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”