Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks

I realised a while ago that I was spending way too much time and energy getting into pointless online arguments about social justice issues. I now have a pretty low threshold of disagreement above which I'll immediately (and politely) disengage, and if it escalates at all from there, just block the person. I no longer care if someone is wrong on the internet, it's not my job to re-educate them, and the less energy I waste on them the better.

> A variant of this technique is now standard in competitive debating

Not outside the US it isn’t. Policy debating is a special US abomination, with unfortunate extensions into the cultural colony to the north. Everywhere else does parliamentary debating.

Thank you! Will add the source.

I think the worst kind of intellectual DOS attacks are those with high compression rate. Those that sound vaguely plausible at first ("Just do away with ALL the taxes, people will sort it out and enterprise will skyrocket") but require many more words to refute. When the politician in question is also a fast talker, and has a master's degree in Philosophy, he can appear to be smarter because no one can keep up with him and it's by definition impossible to refute all compressed arguments in the same amount of time. A Polish politician I have in mind goes by initials JKM.

My point: an intelligent, educated person can cross over to the dark side and it makes it all the way worse. Some people praise Dan Brown for his intelligence. So what, he doesn't write books for intelligent people.

In the past, centralized media kinda kept those guys in check because it had higher respect for formal education. The "compressed argument" still worked very well for populists in space-constrained media like TV debates (time) and print (word limit). Now, the Pandora's box is open.

To succeed in social media, you don't need to construct good arguments. Some charisma and a way with words will go a looong way. Ordinary people no longer seem to respect education, logic and wisdom. This is a problem because no one can be an expert at everything. In the end, we trust some people. What if a lot of people put trust not into expertise and experience, but into charismatic, cheeky figures? What if they prefer appeals to nationality, bloodline (son of a heroic activist)?

Is there a strategy that works against populism and isn't intellectually dishonest?

There’s a very similar saying in my native language (Romanian) that roughly translates into English like this:

> One fool person throws a rock into a lake and ten smart persons then try their best to get it out