Brandolini's Law

Brandolini’s Law (the “bullshit asymmetry principle”) says it takes far more energy to refute nonsense than to produce it, so the world fills up with unrefuted bullshit. CF rejects this. The asymmetry runs the other way: criticism is broadly easier than creation, because one decisive error is all you need.

CF traces the mistaken intuition to the point-system model of argument. If you imagine an idea accumulating “+10” for each supporting point, a critic seems to need matching “-10” criticisms plus extra to push the score negative — making refutation more work. CF denies this accounting. Ideas don’t start with a positive default that critics must overcome; an unargued or unsupported claim sits at the level of random noise, indistinguishable from arbitrarily chosen claims, and needs no laborious rebuttal. To an unsupported assertion the complete reply is “Source?” or “Reasons?” — cheaper than the lie.

The deeper point is decisive criticism within a binary frame. A rational proposal has three parts — goal, solution, and reasoning connecting them — and a critic can break any one part, even a sub-detail, to refute the whole. You don’t owe negative arguments proportional to the positive ones; that weighing picture is exactly what CF refutes. Success-vs-failure is binary, so a single relevant error suffices.

CF concedes real exceptions: clear counter-examples aren’t always available, and malicious lying about fabricated sources can impose genuine research costs. But ordinary low-effort bullshit is cheap to deflect. CF also notes Brandolini’s Law contradicts Hitchens’ Razor from the same source — what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.