Brandolini's law

Short description: Difficulty of refuting false or misleading information

Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage coined in 2013 that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The law states the following:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

The rise of easy popularization of ideas through the internet has greatly increased the relevant examples, but the asymmetry principle itself has long been recognized.

Origins

The adage was publicly formulated in January 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer. Brandolini stated that he was inspired by reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow right before watching an Italian political talk show with former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and journalist Marco Travaglio.

Examples

The persistent false claim that vaccines cause autism is a prime example of Brandolini's law. The false claims, despite extensive investigation showing no relationship, have had a disastrous effect on public health. Decades of research and attempts to educate the public have failed to eradicate the misinformation.

In another example, shortly after the Boston Marathon bombing, the claim that a student who had survived the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting had been killed by the bombing began to spread across social media. Despite many attempts to debunk the rumor, including an investigation by Snopes, the false story was shared by more than 92,000 people and was covered by major news agencies.

In an example of Brandolini's law during the COVID-19 pandemic, a journalist at Radio-Canada said, "It took this guy 15 minutes to make his video and it took me three days to fact-check."

The yoga scholar-practitioners Mark Singleton and Borayin Larios write that several of their colleagues have "privately" expressed their "aversion to public debate" with non-scholars because of Brandolini's law.

Environmental researcher Phil Williamson of University of East Anglia implored other scientists in 2016 to get online and refute falsehoods to their work whenever possible, despite the difficulty per Brandolini's law. He wrote, "the scientific process doesn't stop when results are published in a peer-reviewed journal. Wider communication is also involved, and that includes ensuring not only that information (including uncertainties) is understood, but also that misinformation and errors are corrected where necessary."

Similar concepts

In 1845, Frédéric Bastiat expressed an early notion of this law:

We must confess that our adversaries have a marked advantage over us in the discussion. In very few words they can announce a half-truth; and in order to demonstrate that it is incomplete, we are obliged to have recourse to long and dry dissertations.

See also

• Big Lie
• Burden of proof
• False balance
• Gish gallop
• Hitchens's razor
• List of eponymous laws
• Poe's law
• Sealioning