[philh]

I find it vaguely amusing and ironic that he cites rationalwiki on the gish gallop, given that my impression is they do this themselves a bunch.

(Note that running a gish gallop doesn't mean you're wrong, it just means you're intellectually dishonest.)

(I try not to pay too much attention to them, and I'm not super interested in refuting their bullshit, so this comment is going to be pretty unsatisfying. Sorry.)

[jenius]

You can't make a comment like this with absolutely zero explanation other than that it was 'your impression'. I understand the whole refuting bullshit is a lot of work thing, but it's equally as irresponsible, if not more, to make a comment like this with no evidence for a claim. At least give us something!

[philh]

See my other reply, also for why (apart from time commitment) I was reluctant to give evidence.

[xixi77]

Never heard of rationalwiki until now, but particularly in context of this discussion, it would be nice to see actual examples of what you are talking about (it seems that you are talking about them selectively withholding specific and important evidence -- I think it should be quite easy to give examples of that, no?) :)

[knowaveragejoe]

I haven't read much on rationalwiki, but nothing I did struck me as gish gallop. They might have a lot of angles on attack on some bunk concept, but they expand upon all of them.

[rudolf0]

I haven't found them guilty of gish gallop, but some of their articles are very biased and one-sided. They seem to be a reliable source on most issues of philosophy, science, and "woo", but anything political, societal, or remotely controversial usually isn't given a balanced view.

[philh]

It's worth asking how much you already know about the subject? It's easy to make an article that looks convincing and devastating to someone with no prior knowledge, but laughably incomplete to to someone in the field.

For example, a cited claim could be contradicted by the citation, or missing valuable context provided by the citation, and you'd need to look up the citation to discover this. Or the citation could be bogus, and you'd need to do further research. Or the claim could be a really trivial objection and its reply omitted, and again you'd need to do further research.

I'll accept that not all of these things necessarily make for a Gish gallop as such. But they do all seem to be in the broad category of "intellectual dishonesty through weak argumentation which is easier to perpetuate than refute". I'm not going to quibble about how to subcategorise that.

I'm reluctant to give specific examples, because that risks starting an argument about those examples. Hopefully this thread is now old enough to avoid that.

---

So for example, we can look at http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cryonics (permalink in case of edits: http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Cryonics&oldid=159...). Just skimming it, the "engineering problems" section keeps referring to "freezing". Trivial objection: "freezing damages the cells!" Omitted reply: "yes, so we moved on from freezing". It does also talk about vitrification, but it makes no particular effort to distinguish between the two or to tell the reader that freezing is no longer current practice.

Elsewhere, "Alcor Corporation calls cryonics "a scientific approach to extending human life" and compares it to heart surgery.[8] This is a gross misrepresentation of the state of both the science and technology and verges on both pseudoscience and quackery."

What the citation actually says is: "Cryonics, like heart surgery, is a scientific approach to extending human life that does not violate any religious beliefs or their principles." They aren't making the comparison that RW wants to paint them as. They're sort of hinting in that direction, but they're not making any actual scientific claims here. (They do make scientific claims elsewhere. If they ever say that cryonics has the same chance of success as heart surgery, RW should feel free to call them on it. I'm pretty sure they never say that.)

Their citation for "Some advocates literally propose a magic-equivalent future artificial superintelligence that will make everything better" is not someone proposing that (later in the thread, he says nanobots would be sufficient but not necessary). You might want to read the citation for more replies to RW-level objections to cryonics.

I can tell you that "Belief in cryonics is pretty much required on LessWrong to be accepted as "rational."" is simply false, and probably wasn't true when it was written. The citation leads not to a survey of LWers opinions on cryonics, but to the opinion of the founder of LW.

Note that these objections are true, and reflect badly on RW, even if cryonics is complete bunk.

And also note that I didn't follow a single citation on that article and then decide "no, this seems fair". I picked things to follow according to what I expected to see, but I was never pleasantly surprised.

(In the interests of fairness, I'll say that I am pleasantly surprised they don't call cryonics a scam. RationalWiki: not quite as bad as it could be.)

And I've spent over an hour on this now, when I should have gone to bed. So I'm done.