Style‑Based Dismissal Heuristic

A growing norm in media and academia treats prose style (opacity, jargon, rhetorical flourish) as a reliable short‑cut for judging intellectual legitimacy, allowing critics to refuse sustained engagement with entire schools of thought without parsing arguments. This heuristic spreads via social media and columnists, shaping which theories receive serious rebuttal and which are consigned to ridicule. — If widely adopted, this shortcut will skew public intellectual life by privileging clarity as a gatekeeping tool, amplifying polarization and narrowing the range of debated ideas.