"Snow Job" as a pseudological fallacy?
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Original Question
Dr Bennett writes about the Blow Snow Job on his Pseudo-Logical (or "B-List") fallacy page. But...wouldn't it be considered a real fallacy?
But isn't use 1) considered a form of Proof by Intimidation? Intentionally bombarding the audience or opponent with piles of evidence (relevant or not), which causes them to buckle and bow down to the authority of the proponent without fully considering whether the argument is reasonable? Here's another one of my famous examples:
Ken: She's obviously wrong if you consider the statistical consensus regarding this issue...[insert dozens of references to statistical papers and studies, and shows a bunch of sketchy graphs in PowerPoint].
Kate: ...what?
It looks as if Kate loses here, because she's completely blindsided by the avalanche of information presented by Ken. However, he's basically just drowned her in evidence without giving a fair chance to reply. This wouldn't be the Argument by Gibberish, since it's not necessarily a cascade of nonsense, but at the same time, it's still attempting to win by quantity rather than quality.
RationalWiki has a related concept called the Gish Gallop. This 'Snow Job' sounds closer to that.
Answers
2I would agree that this belongs in the b-list because blowing over your senses doesn't tell you anything about the arguments.
Logical fallacies are almost guaranteed to be wrong besides the occasional broken clock effect and coincidences/false-positives. If the logic is broken, the reasoning actually may then be used as a reason why the conclusion cannot be made (in that way.)
Another classic term for this is the "Gish Gallop" but you could do the same thing with affirming facts.. doing the rhetorical trick doesn't make everything you said wrong. It's not a true logical fallacy.
In the 2020 edition, I am doing a more systematic approach to defining the "B-list" based on Google results. This one actually might make it to an "A-list" fallacy based on usage. Fallacies can be an error in the form of an argument, but also an error in reasoning as well as a technique that commonly causes errors in reasoning. The Snow Job is a technique that commonly causes errors in reasoning.
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