Talk:One-way hash argument

Merge w/ Gish Gallop
...? Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 03:49, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I got no problem with that. It's something I ran across and decided to slap it up here. --Inquisitor (talk) 03:57, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Isn't this sort of the other side of the coin of the Gish Gallop? Rather then many small arguments to shoot down, this is one mammoth one that has to be attacked from many angles.--Revolverman (talk) 04:53, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
 * (Edit conflict) The impression I'm getting is that a one-way hash argument and a gish gallop are different.  A gish gallop is a collection of as many arguments as one side can think of.  Some can be difficult to rebut, and some can be easy.  What matters is the quantity, and that you cannot possibly address them all.
 * A one-way hash argument, on the other hand, takes a "quality" approach, in that it more carefully crafts a single superficially good argument (perhaps a paragraph in length) that requires an explosion of summaries of various scientific methods and theories to thoroughly explain why that one argument is wrong. The two methods share a motive and an end result (wasting the opponent's time), but they're structured differently.   04:54, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Agree that the two are different. The Gish Gallop aims to bury the opponent under a tsunami of bullshit, while the "one-way hash argument" (a misnomer if there ever was one) has facets of the argument by assertion, with the assertions often being of the not even wrong type. I encounter this kind of thing all the time in trying to assemble my perenially unpopular WIGO:Clogs entries. 05:33, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I think that the observation is much older than this Cato guy (and the name is... unintuitive). It's usually something like "one line of bullshit requires at least two lines to refute", though I'm not sure about the exact formulation.--ZooGuard (talk) 08:44, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree that the name is very unintuitive and also that it is different from the "Gish Gallop". Examples could be "We don't know how the tides work".  Obviously we do know this, but explaining this to somebody to somebody who thinks we do not know it takes much longer than making the assertion.  A more complicated assertion would be "I know homoeopathy works because it cured my grandmother".--Bob"I think you'll find it's more complicated than that." 09:19, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Apart from anything else, the title is plain wrong. A hash algorithm is always one-way. The multiplying two long prime numbers thing is from encryption, not hashing. Encryption is reversible, hashing is never reversible. rpeh •T•C•E• 09:52, 14 February 2013 (UTC)