The bullshit asymmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it¶
Alberto, B. (2013). The bullshit asymmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
Cited by¶
3 citations across 3 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Asymmetric Attack Defense Cost
- In misinformation, producing a viral false claim costs minutes while the fact-checking response costs trained labor and reaches a fraction of the original audience — the famously bad ratio that Brandolini's law captures as one instance.
This sourceNames the production-cost asymmetry between misinformation and its correction.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
The page states Brandolini's law and gives a minutes-versus-days debunking example, but says nothing about fact-checks reaching only a fraction of the audience.
“It took this guy 15 minutes to make his video and it took me three days to fact-check.”
- In misinformation, producing a viral false claim costs minutes while the fact-checking response costs trained labor and reaches a fraction of the original audience — the famously bad ratio that Brandolini's law captures as one instance.
- Brandolini's Law
- The colloquial framing ("the bullshit asymmetry") and Brandolini's original 2013 statement were about online debate, but stripped of that vocabulary the pattern is asymmetric cost between corruption and correction on a shared, propagating channel.
This sourceOriginal articulation of Brandolini's law (the bullshit asymmetry principle) — the asymmetric cost of producing versus correcting a claim.
- The colloquial framing ("the bullshit asymmetry") and Brandolini's original 2013 statement were about online debate, but stripped of that vocabulary the pattern is asymmetric cost between corruption and correction on a shared, propagating channel.
- Verifier-Prover Asymmetry
- A particularly useful move the pattern supports is recognising the inverse case, where for certain claim classes — misinformation, for instance — refutation cost exceeds production cost; Brandolini's law sits at the opposite end of the asymmetry direction, and identifying which direction a given activity runs in is itself a sharp diagnostic.
This sourceThe energy needed to refute nonsense is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it — the inverse direction of the find/verify asymmetry.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
Confirms Brandolini's law: debunking misinformation costs far more than producing it; it does not frame this as the inverse of a verifier-prover asymmetry or as a diagnostic.
“It contrasts the considerable effort of debunking misinformation with the relative ease of creating it in the first place.”
- A particularly useful move the pattern supports is recognising the inverse case, where for certain claim classes — misinformation, for instance — refutation cost exceeds production cost; Brandolini's law sits at the opposite end of the asymmetry direction, and identifying which direction a given activity runs in is itself a sharp diagnostic.
Verification¶
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