Brandolini’s Law — Mickey Mellen

This is something we’ve all seen before, but I never knew what it was called. When someone posts false or misleading information online, the effort to refute it is generally an order of magnitude larger than to produce it. Coined in 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, it’s known as Brandolini’s Law, sometimes known as the “bullshit asymmetry principle”.

I discovered the name for it when I saw this old post resurface on Reddit again recently:

It follows a similar pattern to most items that fall under Brandolini’s Law:

1. Someone states something untrue.
2. They are told that it’s not true.
3. They respond with “do your research!”, without providing any research.
4. The final response is a bunch of research to debunk their claims.
5. They don’t respond (but likely restate their original claims again elsewhere).

In this case it worked well, and was handled nicely, but I think calling that final response “an order of magnitude larger” is understating it quite a bit!

It’s a tricky thing, because most of us want to uncover the truth in any situation. However, due to the effort needed to present an adequate amount of detail, the original author will likely have posted a half dozen other untruths in other places in…