Brandolini's law

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

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. This famous case involved British doctor Andrew Wakefield who wrote an article about a study that claimed to find a relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism. The article's findings were later shown to be false; as a result, Dr. Wakefield lost his medical license and then disclaimed and recanted. The false claims, despite extensive investigation showing no relationship, have had a disastrous effect on public health due to vaccine avoidance. Decades of research and attempts to educate the public have failed to eradicate the misinformation, which is still widely believed.

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, Jeff Yates, a disinformation journalist at Radio-Canada said (of a very popular YouTube video), "He makes all kinds of different claims. I had to check every single one of them. I had to call relevant experts and talk to them. I had to transcribe those interviews. I had to write a text that is legible and interesting to read. It's madness. It took this guy 15 minutes to make his video and it took me three days to fact-check."

Due to the rapid dissemination of information on social media, the public is much more susceptible to becoming victims of pseudoscientific trends such as Dr. Mehmet Oz's weight loss supplements and Dr. Joseph Mercola's tanning beds that were meant to reduce one's risk of developing cancer. Although government agencies were able to prevent further sales of these products, millions of dollars had already been spent by consumers and fans.

Another example dates back to 2016, when Iceland's football team had eliminated England out of the UEFA European Championship. Nine months after the victory, Icelandic doctor Ásgeir Pétur Þorvaldsson jokingly tweeted out that a baby boom in Iceland had occurred due to this victory. Despite wide media coverage suggesting the truth behind this statement, statistical analysis carried out by curious researchers debunked the notion proposed by Þorvaldsson's tweet.

Brandolini's Law is accentuated during larger scale and higher tension situations as well. Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom discuss in their analysis of using Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 prevention that, despite Hydroxychloroquine being frequently proven to be ineffective in curing illnesses, including COVID-19, that it was extremely difficult to convince people that it would not prove effective against the highly contagious virus. Because of how afraid people were of COVID-19 during its inception, and how desperately people wanted a cure, widespread social media coverage and a desire for Hydroxychloroquine to work, made it extremely difficult to disprove the misinformation being presented.

Social media

According to the Media Education Journal, "Media portrayal of politics has always been subject to contested claims about accuracy and veracity but this has reached a new intensity."

With social media, ideas, thoughts, opinions, and beliefs can be shared at an extraordinary speed. Social media amplifies Brandolini's Law due to these capabilities. Although there are advantages to social media, there are also disadvantages especially when considering the role it has when spreading misinformation. News and research can be misinterpreted and false beliefs can be spread farther and wider than before. Fake news has a tendency to spread faster and wider through social media than true news, peer review is almost nonexistent in regards to social media, and the way some true research can be presented through social media can make it easier to misunderstand.

Combating the spreading of misinformation requires scientists to establish the validity and quality of research, stories, and claims with a rating system.

Further applications

In 2020, researchers did a study on sensitivity to bullshit and found that, "people are more receptive to bullshit, and less sensitive to detecting bullshit" which establishes Brandolini's law.

Within the context of scientific analysis, Brandolini's law can be put to use not just on the bullshit being presented, but can also bring the bullshitter under scrutiny as well. When the lying becomes apparent on multiple occasions throughout a stretch of scientific research, the bullshitter becomes more obvious than the bullshit itself, and because the bullshitter loses credibility, the ensuing bullshit is easier to identify. In addition, the challenge of refuting bullshit does not just come from its time-consuming nature, but also from the challenge of defying and confronting one's community.

In accordance with Kieron O'Hara's research to further analyze how bullshitters operate as opposed to just analyzing the bullshit, while it still takes substantially more energy to disprove bullshit than to create it, the overall amount of energy exerted to discover a bullshitter is less than the amount of energy used to discover the bullshit itself.

Bullshit and Brandolini's law has also has been involved in gender issues. The U.S. Department of State defines gendered disinformation as "a subset of misogynistic abuse and violence against women that uses false or misleading gender and sex-based narratives, often with some degree of coordination, to deter women from participating in the public sphere. Both foreign state and non-state actors strategically use gendered disinformation to silence women, discourage online political discourse, and shape perceptions toward gender and the role of women in democracies." This is a specific type of bullshit commonly found in politics where women are the victims of false claims. Misinformation is used frequently in fostering gender inequalities especially in social platforms and in political matters. As the refuting of bullshit takes a lot more energy than producing it, lives and jobs are affected especially by women.

Mitigating the effects 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."

Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin West, researchers on the topic of bullshit, study how to refute the bullshit that takes a large amount of energy to discover. This complicated process depends on the audience the bullshit is intended to influence, the time and energy a person is willing to invest in this process, and the medium used to do the refuting. In order to refute one needs the following:

1. Be correct by including all necessary information that was run by a friend and double checking facts.
2. Be charitable by acknowledging the possibility of your own confusion, not attributing malice, and not assigning stupidity.
3. Be clear and coherent about the argument you are making.
4. Admit mistakes and faults.

Other techniques for increasing the effectiveness of retracting misinformation include: preexposure warnings, repeated retractions, and providing an alternative narrative.

Similar concepts

The adage, "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on", has taken various forms since as early as 1710.

Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late, the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect: like a man who has thought of a good repartee, when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or, like a physician, who has found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.

— Jonathan Swift, The Examiner (November 9, 1710)

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.

— Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms, First Series (1845)

Prior to Brandolini's definition, Italian blogger Uriel Fanelli and Jonathan Koomey, creator of Koomey's law and researcher, also shared thoughts aligning with the bullshit asymmetry principle, Fanelli stated, "An idiot can create more bullshit than you could ever hope to refute", when generally translated in Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World.

Koomey states, "In fast-changing fields, like information technology, refutations lag nonsense production to a greater degree than in fields with less rapid change."

See also

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