The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle — why a false claim takes seconds to make and far longer to undo.
Information Literacy · Decision ScienceMaking something up is cheap. Proving it wrong is expensive. That gap is Brandolini's Law, and it explains a huge amount of what feels broken about arguments online, in meetings, and in the news.
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
Alberto Brandolini, Italian software engineer, posted this on Twitter on January 11, 2013. It is informally nicknamed the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle. It is not a scientific law with a measured constant — it is a sharp, widely used observation about the economics of argument, and professionals treat it as a practical heuristic rather than a proven ratio.
Use this compass to orient yourself before you reach for the model. It tells you what field it comes from, what it travels with, and where the real tension sits.
Information literacy and rhetoric. It describes an asymmetry in effort, not a law of physics — closer to a rule of thumb than a formula.
The Illusory Truth Effect and the Gish Gallop. Those explain why false claims spread and overwhelm; this one explains why correcting them costs so much more.
A claim only has to sound right. A refutation has to actually be right, sourced, and clear enough to survive scrutiny. That asymmetry is the whole model.
Deciding where to spend scarce fact-checking, moderation, or correction effort — and setting expectations before you engage, not after you're already exhausted.
Work through these four steps in order. Each one builds on the last.
0 of 4 steps opened
A false claim can be invented on the spot, with no constraints. It just has to sound plausible for a few seconds. A correction has to be accurate, has to cite something real, and has to anticipate the follow-up questions. One side is improvising; the other is doing homework.
Reality has to match itself. A true statement is pinned down by evidence, so building one takes research, citation, and care. A false statement answers to nothing but how convincing it sounds, so it can be produced instantly and shaped purely for impact.
This is not a new complaint. In 1710, Jonathan Swift wrote that "falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it." In 1845, the economist Frédéric Bastiat noted that a bad argument can be made in a sentence while the full rebuttal needs a treatise. Brandolini's 2013 tweet gave the modern, internet-era version of the same observation a catchy name.
Because refutation is structurally more expensive than fabrication, you cannot win by matching volume with volume. The model's real use is strategic: decide in advance which claims are worth the expensive work of refuting, build corrections that are reusable, and stop treating every piece of nonsense as equally urgent.
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A single misleading statistic goes viral in a ten-word post. The newsroom that wants to correct it needs to track the original study, interview a methodologist, and write 800 careful words — and even then, the correction reaches a fraction of the audience the original claim did.
One angry customer posts a screenshot with a damaging (and inaccurate) accusation. The company's comms team needs legal review, an internal timeline, and a carefully worded statement before they can respond — hours of work to answer something posted in thirty seconds.
A hallway comment — "I heard the project's getting cancelled" — spreads in minutes. The manager who actually knows the real status has to call a meeting, explain the context, and answer follow-up questions just to undo one offhand sentence.
A complaint alleges wrongdoing in one paragraph. Responding properly means pulling records, building a documented timeline, and drafting a formal reply reviewed by counsel — a multi-day effort to answer a claim that took five minutes to write.
An AI assistant produces a confident, wrong answer instantly, because generating fluent text costs it almost nothing. Verifying that answer against primary sources, and writing a correction that explains exactly where it went wrong, takes a careful person real time.
A wellness post claims a supplement "cures" a condition, with no caveats needed. The accurate answer — what the evidence actually shows, including its limits and exceptions — takes a clinician several honest paragraphs to explain well.
Picture a false claim that takes 20 seconds to post. Watch what it actually costs to answer it properly.
Why the gap is this large: the claim only needs to be typed. The refutation needs someone to identify what's actually being claimed, find or re-derive the real numbers, check whether the source is being misread, and then write the explanation so it's clear to someone who wasn't already convinced. Each of those steps is optional for the person making things up and mandatory for the person setting the record straight.
Pick the situation you're facing, and build a starting prompt you can take to any AI assistant to help you spend your correction effort wisely.
Keep this model on hand as a reusable skill for yourself or an AI assistant.