Brandolini's law

Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage which emphasizes the difficulty of debunking bullshit:[1] "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."[2][3]

Origins

It was publicly formulated the first time in January 2013[4] 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 journalist Marco Travaglio and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi attacking each other.[5][6]

Similar concepts

In 2005, Russian physicist Sergey Lopatnikov anonymously published an essay[7][8] where he introduced the following definition:

If the text of each phrase requires a paragraph (to disprove), each paragraph - a section, each section - a chapter, and each chapter - a book, the whole text becomes effectively irrefutable and, therefore, acquires features of truthfulness. I define such truthfulness as transcendental.

Another similar concept was formulated by economist Roy Radner in 1993, who considered the performance of an organization that processes information in terms of both the number of processors required to review data items, and the time delays associated with processing data items.[9]

In debating, the Gish gallop is a technique that focuses on overwhelming an opponent with as many arguments as possible, without regard for accuracy or strength thereof.

Carl Bergstrom is a professor at the University of Washington.[10] Bergstrom is an outspoken critic of low-quality or misleading scientific research.[11] He is the co-author of a book on misinformation called Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World and teaches a class by the same name at University of Washington.[12]

See also

References
  1. Williamson, Phil (2016). "Take the time and effort to correct misinformation". Nature. 540 (7632): 171. doi:10.1038/540171a.
  2. Leonardo Ambasciano (27 December 2018). "Ghosts, Post-truth Despair, and Brandolini's Law". An Unnatural History of Religions: Academia, Post-truth and the Quest for Scientific Knowledge. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 11–. ISBN 978-1-350-06239-9.
  3. Jim Thatcher; Andrew Shears; Josef Eckert (April 2018). "Rethinking the Geoweb and Big Data: Mixed Methods and Brandolini's Law". Thinking Big Data in Geography: New Regimes, New Research. U of Nebraska Press. pp. 232–. ISBN 978-1-4962-0537-7.
  4. Brandolini, Alberto. "Bullshit Asymmetry Principle – Twitter". Twitter.com. Retrieved 1 March 2015.
  5. Brandolini, Alberto. "Twitter reply". Twitter. Retrieved 1 December 2016.
  6. Brandolini, Alberto. "Twitter reply". Twitter. Retrieved 1 December 2016.
  7. Lopatnikov, Sergey. "Исследование геополитики". polit.ru. Retrieved 22 Jun 2020.
  8. Lopatnikov, Sergey. "/". livejournal.com. Retrieved 22 Jun 2020.
  9. Radner, Roy (1993). "The Organization of Decentralized Information Processing". Econometrica. 61 (5): 1109–1146. doi:10.2307/2951495. JSTOR 2951495.
  10. Brandolini's law publications indexed by Google Scholar
  11. Simonite, Tom (24 March 2020). "The Professors Who Call 'Bullshit' on Covid-19 Misinformation". Wired. Retrieved 5 May 2020.
  12. "Calling Bullshit". Penguin Random House. Retrieved 5 May 2020.
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