Home › Examples › Brandolini's law examplesBrandolini's law examples
The energy needed to refute nonsense is an order of magnitude greater than to produce it. A lie travels while the correction is still putting its shoes on.
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5 examples of brandolini's law
The viral false claim One sentence of misinformation takes seconds to post and hours of careful sourcing to debunk.
The conspiracy thread A wild theory spawns ten more; each takes a paragraph to make and an essay to dismantle.
The bad statistic A made-up number spreads everywhere; the nuanced real figure never catches up.
Online arguments Answering every absurd point exhausts you, which is often the point of making them.
The rumour at work A casual false aside ripples through the office while the truth needs a formal correction nobody reads.
How to spot it in yourself
Don't try to refute every false claim — pick the consequential ones where you can actually change minds; let trivial nonsense die from neglect.
Be scrupulous about what you share — a careless forward costs others far more to undo than it cost you to send.
Invest upstream (credible sources, good defaults) rather than exhausting yourself debunking downstream.
Go deeper — get the full book
Loved these examples? Listen to the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle by Alberto Brandolini free with an Audible trial — or read it in full.
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