A field guide to the ways reasoning breaks
Distraction and distortion
Also called Proof by verbosity, spreading
Burying the other side under many weak claims at once so none can be answered properly.
Here are thirty objections, refute all of them or I win.
Pick the strongest two, answer them fully, and say why volume is not strength.
Coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who named it after the creationist debater Duane Gish and his habit of sprinting through dozens of weak claims faster than anyone could answer one. The metaphor is the sprint, not the strength, that wins.
On a live panel, a guest fires off twelve statistics about crime, the border, schools and taxes in ninety seconds; the moderator has time to fact-check none of them.
A colleague replies to a code review with a 40-bullet comment dump, half of them misreading the diff, and declares the change 'clearly unready'.
A viral video lists fifty 'questions they don't want you to ask' in five minutes — each one a full research project on its own.
In a family argument, one person rattles off every grievance since 2019 — the borrowed car, the forgotten birthday, the group-chat snub — before anyone can address the first.