Context
One thing that many vocal supporters of Trump and MAGA politics have in common is an “allergy” to actual facts and sound reasoning. When presented with inconvenient information and sources, most of them reject the supporting information and reasoning out of hand. Some, with no stated reasons I’m aware of, absolutely refuse to even look at the source information. Apparently, they know their position is based mostly on falsehoods and crackpot arguments, i.e., logically flawed. Asserting falsehoods and crackpot reasoning is almost always fast, easy and fun. But, as some people here understand, explaining and debunking MAGA falsehoods and crackpottery takes a lot of time and effort. It’s not fast or easy, but it can still be fun!
A recent example of me wrestling with a crackpot argument is at these three links, link 1 (the crackpottery), link 2 (debunk, part 1), link 3 (debunk, part 2).
The Brandolini asymmetry principle
In January 2013, Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini watched former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi sparring with a journalist on an Italian political talk show. He just finished reading Daniel Kahneman’s masterpiece of cognitive biology, Thinking, Fast and Slow. From that collision of cognitive science with political theater, he distilled an observation into a single tweet that became known as Brandolini’s Law, or the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle. The Asymmetry Principle is simple: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it”. Yeah, but if it’s obvious in hindsight, why was no one saying it long before Brandolini? (link 4, link 5, link 6)
Anyway, the principle gave a name to was something people had long felt intuitively, namely that fabricating a false claim takes seconds, but dismantling it demands research, evidence, and careful argumentation. As Jonathan Swift observed centuries earlier, “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it”. Brandolini simply quantified the asymmetry for the digital age. Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West of the University of Washington later built an entire university course and a book, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World, around this insight. They argued that unmanaged bullshit now saturates every corner of society and spreads across networks much the way diseases do. (link 7)
The asymmetry phenomenon is not just anecdotal. It is rooted in well-documented cognitive vulnerabilities. The illusory truth effect, first identified by psychologist Lynn Hasher and colleagues, demonstrates that simply repeating a false statement increases people’s perception that it is true, even when they previously knew it was incorrect. Each repetition exploits the brain’s tendency to mistake familiarity for accuracy. Research by Gordon Pennycook and David Rand at MIT found that susceptibility to fake news is driven more by lazy or crackpot thinking and partisan bias than sound reasoning. That kind of mindset usually fails to engage slow, hard analytic reasoning. Social science research indicates that people who are susceptible to pseudo-profound bullshit are significantly worse at distinguishing fake news from real news. Meanwhile, confirmation bias causes people to selectively seek and accept information that aligns with their preexisting beliefs, further insulating false claims from scrutiny. These cognitive shortcuts, e.g., familiarity heuristics, motivated reasoning, and unconscious open-mindedness to weak claims, constitute fertile ground for misinformation to take root with minimal effort from its creators. (link 8, link 9, link 10, link 11)
Research indicates that humans tend to spread false news more readily because it is usually to be more novel and emotionally arousing. That triggers reactions of surprise and emotions such as disgust or anger that drive spreading of falsehoods and crackpottery. By contrast on the debunking side, researchers have identified the continued influence effect of falsehoods/crackpottery even after a correction is issued and accepted. For better or worse, the original misinformation continues to shape people’s reasoning and memory. Researchers synthesized the findings in The Debunking Handbook 2020. That is a consensus document by 22 scholars detailing why effective debunking requires not just a retraction but a factual alternative explanation to fill the causal gap the myth once occupied. That task is far more time- and labor-intensive than the making up an original lie. (link 12, link 13, link 14)
The real-world stakes of asymmetry are enormous. The American Psychological Association asserts that people are more likely to believe misinformation when it comes from in-group sources. Nowadays, appeals to emotions like fear and outrage are easily manufactured on a large scale on social media. Vaccine misinformation alone cost an estimated $2 billion in preventable hospitalization costs and contributed to 45,000 avertable deaths in the United States in 2021. A 2019 University of Baltimore study estimated the global economic toll of fake news at roughly $78 billion per year in stock market losses, revenue declines, and reputational damage. Brandolini’s Law describes not just a rhetorical inconvenience but a structural vulnerability of democratic discourse and democracy itself. Bad-faith actors and ignorant people, can flood the information ecosystem with cheap shot lies and falsehoods. The liars know the truth but they also seem to know that truth will always be playing catch-up, which is a losing game. (link 15, link 16, link 17)
Conclusion
It takes some courage to confront people honestly, knowing that truth and sound reasoning are weaker than dishonest speech. It is much harder to debunk lies, slanders, crackpottery and all the rest of the rhetorical tools and tricks that demagogues have at their disposal. It just ain’t a fair fight. The human mind is rigged by evolution to give the advantage to the deceivers and their cynical, dishonest speech. But, people on the side of truth, sound reason and honest speech have no principled, honest choice but to play the hand nature and evolution gave us. If we loose, nearly all of us will be royally screwed by MAGA tyranny, ghastly corruption and arrogant cruelty.
