Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks
I think the worst kind of intellectual DOS attacks are those with high compression rate. Those that sound vaguely plausible at first (&quot;Just do away with ALL the taxes, people will sort it out and enterprise will skyrocket&quot;) but <i></i>require many more words to refute<i></i>. When the politician in question is also a fast talker, and has a master&#x27;s degree in Philosophy, he can appear to be smarter because no one can keep up with him and it&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t write books for intelligent people.<p>In the past, centralized media kinda kept those guys in check because it had higher respect for formal education. The &quot;compressed argument&quot; still worked very well for populists in space-constrained media like TV debates (time) and print (word limit). Now, the Pandora&#x27;s box is open.<p>To succeed in social media, you don&#x27;t need to construct good arguments. Some charisma and a way with words will go a looong way. <i></i>Ordinary people no longer seem to respect education, logic and wisdom<i></i>. This is a problem because no one can be an expert at everything. In the end, we <i></i>trust<i></i> 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)?<p>Is there a strategy that works against populism and isn&#x27;t intellectually dishonest?