This article was originally written June 8, 2022.
Taken from Wikipedia, with edits for clarity and length.
Impediments to creating a good Gateway Plan for Arcata
When necessary information is not presented; when important considerations are ignored; when statistical input is manipulated; when “facts” are made up; when personal bias prevails over reality; when bluffing and a distortion of knowledge appears with regularity; and when impossible-to-comprehend statements are promoted as truth — all of which we have regularly seen over this past year and a half — then the results are an impediment to the creation of a plan that is good for Arcata.
What is the “Gish Gallop” ?
During a Gish Gallop, a debater confronts an opponent with a rapid series of many specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them.
The Gish Gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments.
During a Gish Gallop, a debater confronts an opponent with a rapid series of many specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them.
In essence, it is prioritizing quantity of one’s arguments at expense of quality of the arguments.
The term was coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who named it after American creationist Duane Gish and argued that Gish used the technique frequently when challenging the scientific fact of evolution.
Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place, which is known online as Brandolini’s law.
The technique wastes an opponent’s time and may cast doubt on the opponent’s debating ability, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.
And what is Brandolini’s Law ?
We must confess that our adversaries have a marked advantage over us in the discussion.
In very few words they can announce a half-truth; and in order to demonstrate that it is incomplete, we are obliged to have recourse to long and dry dissertations.
Brandolini’s law, also known as the B.S. Asymmetry Principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place.
It states:
The amount of energy needed to refute b.s. is an order of magnitude larger (that is, ten times larger) than is needed to produce it.
In Economic Sophisms (1845), Claude-Frédéric Bastiat expressed an early notion of this law:
We must confess that our adversaries have a marked advantage over us in the discussion. In very few words they can announce a half-truth; and in order to demonstrate that it is incomplete, we are obliged to have recourse to long and dry dissertations.
In 1786, George Horne wrote:
Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer.
When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject.
And as people in general, for one reason or another, like short objections better than long answers, in this mode of disputation (if it can be styled such) the odds must ever be against us; and we must be content with those for our friends who have honesty and erudition, candor and patience, to study both sides of the question.
Want to see examples?
All the examples below are direct quotes from David Loya, Arcata’s Director of Community Development. From my observations, since January 2022, of what David Loya has said and written shows that when he does not know something, he simply makes it up. When he is unclear on a topic, he bluffs. And even when he likely knows something (or, that is, we think he knows it) he will say things that are simply false.
“The Gateway Area Plan has three primary means for increasing ownership opportunities. First, as the unit count in the area increases to meet the housing needs of the rental sector, new units with comparable rents to bedrooms in single-family homes that are older will attract the current market sector renting single-family homes. The single-family housing stock currently in the student housing market will become less attractive as an investment asset, and those homes will open to the for-sale market. While this is not a guaranteed outcome, it is a reasonable market prediction.”
“The term ‘affordable housing’ is perhaps one of the most enigmatic of the terms of art that we use. It is important to note that all of these definitions and programmatic applications lose sight of the way we experience affordable housing at the household level.
“Furthermore, the policy decision balances that fear the future investment will displace current residents against the reality of the extant and very real housing crisis. Staff suggests the risk of future gentrification pales compared to the dire current housing need. In particular because there are policies and programs to prevent wholesale gentrification in the draft plans.”
“So how does that relate to housing affordability? Well, it’s a supply and demand equation…. How we tie that to housing affordability is by producing enough supply so that we can disrupt that market factor…. So the way that we add equity into our community — and building equity in your community is a good thing, it’s a positive thing for those who choose to go that route — is by increasing the demand.”
Question: “What about review the 2010 L Street trail study?”
Response: “I’m not sure what’s being referenced there…. It’s, it’s actually — there’s not a — it’s not — I think it’s being taken a little out of context here. The document is the Rail With Trail Operations Plan. It is not the L Street Linear Park Plan or not the L Street, you know. It’s been — It’s been taken a little out of context. The L Street operations plan was one of the documents that was developed during — the operations plan, it was developed during the feasibility work that was being done on the Annie & Mary Trail and the Bay Trail work that we were doing. And so the document is — all of those documents are on our website. Certainly a great resource. If you Google “Rail With Trail Arcata” you should land on that page. It’s not in fact, a master plan to create a linear park. I don’t think linear park was a word until we started doing the Gateway Plan.”
[Note: No one suggested that it is a master plan. The term ‘linear park’ was used the U.S. in the 1980s and the phrase was in wide use by the early 2000s. Googling “Rail With Trail Arcata” gets to a different “rail with trail” Arcata project. Searching on the City’s website does not locate it. It is close to impossible to locate on the City’s website. “It’s been taken a little out of context” — false statement; a familiarity with the plan shows how exactly appropriate the document is.]
