you can reasonably argue that you have strong enough evidence that this person is so bad at evaluating arguments that it’s not worth your time to investigate the rest.
Unfortunately, this is sub-optimal from a game theory perspective. It results in information hiding, and can result in arbitrarily-incorrect views as a result.
Suppose that everyone knows that you stop reading after the first two wrong arguments you see.
Now suppose that there are two common and reasonably well-regarded arguments that every knowledgeable person on the subject knows, and as well each person knows two novel arguments of their own devising that they know are likely incorrect.
The optimal for each person trying to convince someone of the premise, knowing only that the person stops reading after two wrong arguments, is to give them the two common arguments and nothing else.
So you see the same two common arguments repeated a thousand times, instead of the thousand novel arguments. And you miss that ten of the novel arguments are actually correct.
(This is very akin to strategic voting in some ways.)
(This still “works” even if, say, 50% of the population has heard the common arguments before...)
An agent wanting to search for truth with bounded resources is better off looking somewhere that isn’t a known cesspit of bad evidence presented as if it were good.
That aside, I still don’t think your hypothetical world captures the essence of the proposal. The Gish Gallop is primarily an asymmetric resource exhaustion strategy. Evaluating the first(*) couple of arguments to judge the quality of the evidence is a defense against that strategy. If they’re only presenting their own two arguments then this isn’t a Gish Gallop, and the defense is inapplicable.
It seems to me that a better strategy would be to first quickly check that they do in fact already know the standard not-obviously-wrong arguments or other evidence, and then proceed with your own information. If they don’t already know it, then presenting the well known information first is a good thing. If they do know it, then you now both know that you’re working from a common base before starting on the new information of unknown value. In both cases your situation is stronger.
(*) They need not be the first strictly, but shouldn’t be cherry-picked. Reliably choosing the first few makes it obvious that they’re not cherry-picked, and establishes a useful norm of communicating strongest information first.
Unfortunately, this is sub-optimal from a game theory perspective. It results in information hiding, and can result in arbitrarily-incorrect views as a result.
Suppose that everyone knows that you stop reading after the first two wrong arguments you see.
Now suppose that there are two common and reasonably well-regarded arguments that every knowledgeable person on the subject knows, and as well each person knows two novel arguments of their own devising that they know are likely incorrect.
The optimal for each person trying to convince someone of the premise, knowing only that the person stops reading after two wrong arguments, is to give them the two common arguments and nothing else.
So you see the same two common arguments repeated a thousand times, instead of the thousand novel arguments. And you miss that ten of the novel arguments are actually correct.
(This is very akin to strategic voting in some ways.)
(This still “works” even if, say, 50% of the population has heard the common arguments before...)
An agent wanting to search for truth with bounded resources is better off looking somewhere that isn’t a known cesspit of bad evidence presented as if it were good.
That aside, I still don’t think your hypothetical world captures the essence of the proposal. The Gish Gallop is primarily an asymmetric resource exhaustion strategy. Evaluating the first(*) couple of arguments to judge the quality of the evidence is a defense against that strategy. If they’re only presenting their own two arguments then this isn’t a Gish Gallop, and the defense is inapplicable.
It seems to me that a better strategy would be to first quickly check that they do in fact already know the standard not-obviously-wrong arguments or other evidence, and then proceed with your own information. If they don’t already know it, then presenting the well known information first is a good thing. If they do know it, then you now both know that you’re working from a common base before starting on the new information of unknown value. In both cases your situation is stronger.
(*) They need not be the first strictly, but shouldn’t be cherry-picked. Reliably choosing the first few makes it obvious that they’re not cherry-picked, and establishes a useful norm of communicating strongest information first.