You’ve been there. Scrolling through social media, minding your own business, when you see it. A comment so spectacularly, breathtakingly wrong it feels like a personal attack on the very concept of reality.
Maybe it’s your uncle posting about how wind turbines cause cancer. Or a stranger in a Facebook group insisting the Earth is flat. A little voice in your head whispers, “Don’t do it. It’s not worth it.”
But you can’t help yourself. You dive in, armed with facts, links, and a condescendingly patient tone. You lay out a flawless, evidence-based argument. You dismantle their nonsense piece by piece. You feel the righteous glow of a truth-teller.
An hour later, you’re exhausted, your faith in humanity is in tatters, and your uncle has just replied with a blurry meme of a Minion that says, “LOL OKAY SHEEPLE.”
You’ve just been steamrolled by one of the most powerful and frustrating laws of the digital age. A principle that explains why the world feels like it’s drowning in nonsense and why fighting it feels like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.
It’s called Brandolini’s Law. And it’s about to make you feel very, very seen.
The Origin Story: A Programmer’s Frustration
The law was born not in a philosophy lecture hall, but in the trenches of the internet. In 2013, an Italian software developer named Alberto Brandolini was watching a televised political debate. He saw one politician spew a firehose of misleading claims, while the other struggled, red-faced and flustered, to correct even a fraction of them.
Inspired by this spectacle and Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Brandolini tweeted out a thought that would soon become immortalized as a law:
“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
He later nicknamed it the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle. That’s it. That’s the law. It’s a simple, brutal diagnosis of our modern information crisis. Creating bullshit is easy, cheap, and fast. Correcting it is hard, expensive, and slow.
The Basic Explanation
Think of it like a glitter bomb.
It takes one second to pull the pin and unleash a shimmering cloud of chaos. The person who did it can walk away, laughing, having expended almost no energy.
But you? You’re the one left to clean it up. You’ll need a vacuum, tape, a wet cloth, and a whole lot of patience. You’ll be finding glitter in your hair for weeks. The effort required to restore order is massively, absurdly, asymmetrically larger than the effort it took to create the mess.
Brandolini’s Law says that information works the same way. A lie is a glitter bomb for the mind.
Making up a conspiracy theory takes seconds. “The moon landing was faked!” Done. Bullshit produced.
Refuting it? Oh, boy. Now you have to explain rocket science, orbital mechanics, the properties of light in a vacuum, the political context of the Cold War, and the thousands of people who would have had to keep the secret. You have to present photos, videos, and scientific papers. By the time you’ve gathered your evidence, the original bullshitter has already moved on to claiming that birds aren’t real.
The asymmetry is the weapon. The goal isn’t to win the argument; it’s to exhaust the opposition.
Brandolini’s Law in the Wild
Once you have a name for it, you see this dynamic playing out everywhere, from boardrooms to family dinners.
The Social Media Cesspool: This is Brandolini’s Law on steroids. A single viral tweet with a fake statistic can reach millions in an hour. The painstaking debunking by fact-checkers, posted a day later, reaches a tiny fraction of the original audience. The bullshit has already done its job.
The Political Debate: A politician can drop a misleading soundbite in 15 seconds. “My opponent wants to raise your taxes by 50%!” The opponent now has to spend their entire two-minute rebuttal explaining the nuances of their tax plan, by which time everyone has already tuned out. The lie is simple and memorable; the truth is complicated and boring.
The Workplace Meeting: A skeptical manager can torpedo an idea with a quick, unfounded objection. “This will never work with our current system.” Now, the person who proposed the idea has to spend the next week creating a detailed report, pulling data, and running simulations to prove it can work. The effort to create doubt is tiny compared to the effort required to build confidence.
How to Survive in a World of Bullshit
So, if refuting bullshit is a losing game, what are you supposed to do? Just let the glitter settle and accept a sparkly, nonsensical life? Not exactly. Brandolini’s Law isn’t a call for surrender; it’s a call for strategy.
Step 1: Don’t Play Chess with a Pigeon.
The first rule of Brandolini’s Law is to recognize when you’re in an asymmetric battle. If someone is arguing in bad faith, they’re not interested in the truth. They’re the pigeon that will just knock over the pieces, crap on the board, and strut around like it won. Don’t engage. Your energy is a precious resource; don’t waste it on them.
Step 2: Inoculate, Don’t Just Disinfect.
Instead of refuting every piece of bullshit, focus on teaching people how to spot it. Give them the tools of critical thinking. A person who knows how to spot a logical fallacy or a suspicious source is “vaccinated” against a whole category of nonsense. It’s more effective than trying to debunk every single lie.
Step 3: Pick Your Battles.
You can’t clean up all the glitter. It’s impossible. Focus your energy on the bullshit that causes the most harm. Is a conspiracy theory actively hurting people? Is a piece of misinformation in your company derailing a critical project? That’s where you spend your energy. Your cousin thinking the Earth is shaped like a donut? Maybe let that one go.
Step 4: Build a Better Bullshit Detector.
The best defense is a good offense. Be skeptical. Ask for sources. If a claim sounds too simple, too outrageous, or too perfectly aligned with what you already believe, pause. The easiest person to fool is yourself.
The Bottom Line
Brandolini’s Law is a depressing but liberating truth. It gives us permission to stop feeling like we have to correct every wrong thing on the internet. It reminds us that our energy is finite and that the world is overflowing with people who are happy to waste it for us.
The battle against bullshit isn’t won by having the most facts. It’s won by being the most strategic about where you deploy them.
So the next time you feel the urge to dive into that comment section, take a deep breath, remember the glitter bomb, and ask yourself: Is this really the mess I want to be cleaning up today?
Named Law: Brandolini’s Law (The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle)
Simple Definition: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that required to produce it.
Origin: Coined by Italian software developer Alberto Brandolini in 2013.
Wikipedia: Brandolini’s Law
Category: Human Behavior & Psychology
Subcategory: Communication & Rhetoric