| "Well, one strategy would be to preemptively rebut common misrepresentations and meaningless critiques..." The reply: "What's that got to do with anything I said? I'm saying <a rephrased version of one or more of the misrepresentations>." If they reply with a different misrepresentation, it becomes the Gish Gallop; they will eventually cycle back around to one of your rebutted misrepresentations, but by then everyone will have forgotten your rebuttal. "And if it's just misinformation with no merit, use Hitchen's Razor." The response: "See, they're not even responding to our evidence! They're silencing dissent!" "We should investigate evidence that casts doubt on consensus if there is some merit, even if it is painstaking." Which is one of the points of this article: while you are reconsidering the evidence for thermodynamics, you are not addressing the problem. They've won. This is why it took thirty years after the original Surgeon General's report to begin to address cigarette smoking. This is why humanity has done essentially nothing about climate change. Established science has been wrong before, but when facing an immediate problem the current consensus is probably where you want to put your money. |