Brandolini's Law

There is a famous quote assigned to Goethe in German, which roughly says »A fool can ask more questions then 7 wise men can answer«. The internet just increased the visibility of fools. Let's ensure wise men don't stop to share their wisedom, because that's what participative education is all about.

Nowhere has this been more true than social media: a constant stream of unverified BS shared from one group to another via a mutual friend.<p>And the most frustrating part is it&#x27;s a no-win situation: either you spend time refuting only for the story to change slightly (or more arguments back), or the poster assumes silence means agreement, enforcing their opinion and sharing similar later.

There is a spectrum of evidence from weakest (&quot;I can imagine something happening&quot;) to strongest (&quot;I have a formally verified mathematical proof that I understand and that leading mathematicians agree with&quot;). On that scale, someone confident, respectable and reasonable saying something earnestly is pretty good evidence. Especially good evidence considering the ease and difficulty of collecting and verifying more serious forms evidence.<p>But this is also why it is so important to have an almost cruel level of cynicism towards politics. The politician figured this out long ago, and will always make sure to look confident, respectable and reasonable when making stuff up and lying. But most people are not cynics and the ugly soup of politics continues to simmer.

See also, Gish Gallop: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rationalwiki.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gish_Gallop" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rationalwiki.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gish_Gallop</a><p>&gt; The Gish Gallop is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort.<p>&gt; The Gish Gallop is a conveyor belt-fed version of the on-the-spot fallacy, as it&#x27;s unreasonable for anyone to have a well-composed answer immediately available to every argument present in the Gallop.

Harry G. Frankfurt offered a full philosophical theory of BS[1].<p>Key takeaway: the BSer isn&#x27;t just sloppy or inaccurate with the hogwash. Rather, BS attacks the very concept of truth as such.<p>Looking at you, Postmodernists.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0691122946&#x2F;ref=mp_s_a_1_1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0691122...</a>

This seems to have parallels with the laws of thermodynamics.

That related technique, the Gish gallop (also mentioned in the article), is seen very frequently: your opponent makes numerous wild claims, often very different in truth and applicability, but hoping that some will stick and cast doubt on your position, or the listener thinks “it’s too complicated, I give up”.<p>The latter, that people give up and conclude that there is no truth or “all politicians lie”, is sometimes the main goal. It removes accountability.<p>Often seen with creationists, covidiots, Qanon, and political propaganda.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gish_gallop" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gish_gallop</a>

This is similar to why I am suspicious of many “fact checks”, the amount of effort it takes to produce them makes me think that it’s often more about damage control for a specific special interest group than it is about general facts and knowledge, and the quality of many “fact checks” seems to reflect this often as well. Perhaps this is a sub-law of sorts.<p>There’s a similar one where fact checks will start out with one premise in the title, provide a completely different fact or two that they’ve “corrected”, and think they got away with people thinking they have “debunked” the original premise when really it was just a deflection. And often they work since many people just read the title and think if a fact check exists, it must be a true debunking.

I disagree.<p>If the Russian School of Probability taught is anything is that we should always think in inequalities, as such it should read:<p>&quot;The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is AT LEAST an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.&quot;<p>:)

I think this law is BS... &#x2F;s

bs seems to bias very favorably towards the first mover.<p>how about we set up some sort of proactive ‘evidence based truths’ thing to potentially preempt future BS.

Reminds me of the quote “ A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes on”

Adtech is full of BS and perhaps the challenge of our times. Let’s look at what Facebook VP Carolyn Everson, said in 2018:<p>“So we believe very strongly that the business model that we have been operating under is not only good for people because it gives them more relevant advertising, but it also is good for businesses because obviously it drives their growth.”<p>If you agree it’s not going to be easy to overcome such BS, then here’s an important case of Brandolini’s law. But why is it so difficult? Zuboff makes the case for the AI genius of surveillance capitalists. Doctorow and others argue it’s about digital monopolists.<p>They would likely all agree that it’s difficult because the mainstream and laggards need to wake up. If people are asked “Do you prefer ads that are more relevant?” then the mainstream are going to say something like; yeah OK, that sounds better than ads that are irrelevant to me.<p>But how about if people are asked “Do you wants ads that are more relevant and are based on data that we collect about you and you’re lookalikes?”. They might then say “Well, no not really, but do I have a choice?”

Dealing with a Qanon family member is something that would&#x27;ve sounded funny to me a few years back, but things like those are on my mind every day and it&#x27;s not getting better. It&#x27;s a serious and very depressing thing.

Asymmetric Information Terror

Is the asymmetry of refuting bullshit abnormal?<p>Isn&#x27;t confirming the Truth also hard? Maybe even really hard?<p>What if the diffusion of all new ideas, for better or for worse, is just really hard?<p>Please bear with me...<p>How long did it take to confirm Einstein&#x27;s general theory of relatively? How many bumps and bruises were earned along the way?<p>I was just learning about the Eddington experiment [1919] to confirm Einstein&#x27;s prediction [1911] about how much the Sun&#x27;s gravity will bend light.<p>TLDR: It was really hard to do, the results were uncertain, there was drama.<p>--<p>All progress is hard. We have the replication crisis. There&#x27;s misinformation, disinformation, miscommunication, some outright fraud.<p>And yet we somehow forge order from chaos.<p>My optimistic hot take:<p>Truth has a slight edge. On longer time scales. Like years, decades, generations.<p>We are absolutely awash in bullshit. Refutation is resource intensive.<p>But we already know what to do. Run more experiments, share our findings, patiently and tenaciously cope with the inevitable uncertainty.<p>--<p>Thanks for reading this far. Am not a philosopher. So I don&#x27;t know how to talk about this stuff.<p>FWIW, this is the podcast episode that made me think &quot;huh, Truth is hard too&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jimruttshow.com&#x2F;michael-strevens&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jimruttshow.com&#x2F;michael-strevens&#x2F;</a><p><i>&quot;Michael Stevens talks to Jim about some of the ideas &amp; stories in his book, The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science: what the great method debate is &amp; how Popper &amp; Kuhn added to the topic, falsification &amp; scientific progress, the messy history of testing Einstein’s theories, understanding the theoretical cohort, Michael’s iron rule, science vs natural philosophy, Francis Bacon‘s view on science, scientific convergence, the Tychonic principal, theory vs experimentation, Newton’s trendsetting approach to science, the war against beauty in science, why science was born in western Europe, and much more.&quot;</i><p>And before anyone gets all epistemological on me, I&#x27;m a Popperian, so you all know what I mean by Truth.