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.”
Trump: I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo
Still Mr. Trump did not hesitate to get highly personal with Ms. Kelly again on Wednesday, saying on Twitter, “I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct. Instead I will only call her a lightweight reporter!”
Prosopopoeia in Romans
In literary rhetoric, this is called prosopopoeia. It includes the creation of a character in the work to whom you, if you were writing the letter, could dialogue with. To clue the reader into this, rhetoricians established certain literary. Euripides used gar, a Greek word often translated as “for” in our English. The translators of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek (the Septuagint, or LXX) used gar to signify change of speaker as find twice in Job and over forty times in Isaiah. Would we expect Paul, a highly educated man who knew both Greco-Roman rhetoric and the Septuagint, to not have used rhetoric? If he did, we’d also expect him to use the established cues so that his readers could detect it.
I Watched Ted Cruz Debate in College. Don’t Count Him Out.
Ted Cruz was a king in Parliamentary Debate Land.
.. Indeed, emotion — not just intelligence — was very much in Cruz’s skill set.
.. The other team, Vinnakota recalls, had “crushed Ted’s argument.” By the time Cruz arrived onstage to speak a final time, the case was “dead on arrival.” “But Ted gave one of the most impassioned, flourished speeches. His focused anger and the power of his rhetoric just won over the crowd. If you were flowing the argument” — charting the debate — “he didn’t say anything. You have to be impressed by it. He is a gifted, gifted speaker.”
.. THE CHALLENGE FOR Cruz — which The New York Times highlighted several months ago in a piece about his debating career — was that he wasn’t necessarily likable. “I remember him as a scary, driven machine who fought a protracted, bloody land war for total victory,” says Ted Niblock, a Johns Hopkins University debater in Cruz’s year who is now general counsel for a clean-energy startup.
.. “I was not as smart, committed, or skilled as Ted was,” says Niblock. “I was completely random and unpredictable. You can’t outsmart a truly crazy person.”
.. This might be my biggest problem with him: He took all the fun out of it. He prepared and prepared, came to the tournament on the weekend, executed his plan, and then went back to Princeton to take the fun out of something else.”