Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks, Part 2

I just noticed there are actually full performances on Youtube of Erik Satie's Vexations-- a piece written in the 1890s in which the player is asked to repeat a dissonant chorale theme 860 times.

That is a common, effective, and ethical rhetorical tactic people use every day in conversation.

It's common because people aren't automatons who must respond to every potential point of debate.

It's effective because it forces the would-be debater to reveal information. Either they roll with the subject change and reveal their utterance as light novelty and disarm, or they attempt to switch the conversation back to their novelty, revealing themselves as a zealot (in this case).

It's ethical because if anyone in the group wants to participate in that zealotry they can continue on the original topic. But everyone else has an easy out through the non-sequitur. And it works just as well if the initial utterance was a truth told to an ignorant crowd. Those who want to know more can break off without the entire group being forced to become students.

Finally, if the interlocutor misjudged the situation, the non-sequitur is ignored and the conversation continues unabated.

In all cases DOS is avoided.

If a medium doesn't support this tactic you might want to question the efficacy of the medium.

I know people that believe that, most of the time, the best way to respond to unreasonable or irrational petitions is to do it by means of answering the actual points made, even if completely unwarranted and time consuming.

For instance, claims of some random paranormal effect should be put to the test with proper scientific investigation, like that would satisfy the claimant and not take us in a never-ending endeavour...

Sometimes, the best way to answer the problem is to make use of well tested heuristics that, instead of going into the specific details, just make the elephant in room more evident: some problems are simply not well put, or some answers miss the point (e.g. the paranormal claim is pseudo-scientific therefore will never accept a negative result, whichever it may be; to feed the troll will not satiate the troll, etc).

The trouble with the "the revolt of the masses" theme is that institutions are failing us, experts are frequently wrong, and if you want to see fake experts turn on cable news and there you are... Cokie Roberts is always warning democrats to turn the right or otherwise we'll have to have somebody like Pinochet purge the left (she won't tell you her husband was a foreign agent for the Pinochet regime.)

All b.s. All the time was not invented by Facebook, look at how the rush Limbaugh show was reality free before the web was invented.

The media doesn’t care about anything, they want a face who can act as an expert of the matter at hand, they don’t care if the expert has real expertise — they care if the expert can say something experty that simple minds understand.

Everbody who has seen known experts in a field on TV knows that they will tell you afterwards that of that long interview session they just had to take the two sentences were you made the mistake of speculation. A mistake that stops many real experts from speculating on TV or stops them totally from ever doing TV stuff at all.

Of course you will always find real experts who enjoy it to have their voice heard and their face seen, and they will abandon all ideals to get their egos massaged — these will be kept on fast-dial by TV producers.