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 ("Just do away with ALL the taxes, people will sort it out and enterprise will skyrocket") 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'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.<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'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 "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.<p>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. <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't intellectually dishonest?