Brandolini’s Law or DiCapriolini’s Law?
Have you heard of Brandolini’s Law? Let me quote Wikipedia:
Brandolini’s law (or the bullshit asymmetry principle) is an internet adage coined in 2013 by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini. It compares the considerable effort of debunking misinformation to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The adage states:
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
The challenge of refuting bullshit does not come just from its time-consuming nature, but also from the challenge of defying and confronting one’s community.
Clever, eh? But I am disgusted. Wikipedia cites COVID-19 as evidence for Brandolini’s Law. Well. I think we need another law: a law with a further specification.
If we are replacing Brandolini’s Law with something equally charismatic we should surely allude to an equally significant American actor with an Italian name. And a more modern one. One more politically correct. Instead of Brando, let’s have DiCaprio. Hence DiCapriolini’s Law. I fear if I called it Alexander’s Law you’d never take it seriously enough.
DiCapriolini’s Law is not actually an independent law. It is a further specification and intensification of Brandolini’s Law. Brandolini’s Law is a general one, but, as cited, seems to specifically blame the usual suspects (the marginalised, the deniers, the sceptics, the ordinary people) for this bullshit, whereas, of course, I think we should remember at all times that the greatest propounder of bullshit is His Majesty’s Government.
Here it is. An adage invented in 2026 for the Daily Sceptic, in order to refine and perfect Brandolini’s Law:
DiCapriolini’s Law
The amount of energy needed to refute government propaganda, especially when confected by so-called scientists, is two orders of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
Two orders of magnitude? Yes, consider the difficulty we had getting anything sensible, proportionate or wise listened to during Covid. It was an easy matter for the Guardian or the BBC to ‘fact-check’ a small bit of bullshit and head back to the safe government-sanctioned bilge. A flick of someone’s hair and the enemy was tarnished, tarred with the brush of ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘misinformation’. 5G, Horse De-Wormer, Anti-Vax. But then they saw-no-evil, heard-no-evil and spoke-no-evil when it came to their own the-the-the-science: it streamed out like bullshit squared. Orders of magnitude no difficulty for the science.
Do you remember those predictions in the Daily Sceptic years ago that said: 1) we will be right, the government will be wrong; 2) but the government will never admit that we were right, that it was wrong. Brandolini’s Law doesn’t begin to touch this: it is a law that could have been smirked over by all manner of Hancocks, Fergusons and Michies in 2020 without so much as a wink.
I do believe that DiCapriolini’s Law, though it no more gets rid of Brandolini’s law than The Departed or Blood Diamond got rid of The Godfather or The Wild One, establishes a sense of scale: it puts Brandolini’s Law in its place. It says that it is a very small law, an insignificant law, and an ideological law, designed to use complaining-about-small-bullshit as a way of distracting us from the iron-clad dreadnought-sized bullshit-rivetted sheet-metal monsters manufactured in the intellectual dry harbours of the grifting and grinding scientific mind.
Now put together a Wikipedia page for this law.
James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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As soon as you create a Wikipedia page for DiCapriolini’s Law, it will become owned by Jimmy Wales’ little army of government approved experts, and – bang – DiCapriolini’s Law will be used to denounce the marginalised, the deniers, the sceptics, the ordinary people.
Before you wish for a new law, imagine your enemy using it against you.
Read most of the MSM to verify this.
Few journos have sufficient knowledge or relevant ability to critically appraise the spin they receive from lobbyists. They are innumerate and their range of acquaintances is limited to metropolitan elites with PPEs and media “degrees”.
Very true.
Too few people, still, appreciate this obvious fact.
That’s an observation I already made over 30 years ago: Bullshit can be produced in large quantities very quickly, it can be tailored to the prejudices of a certain audience so that they’ll like it and simple enough to remember it.
Refuting bullshit usually takes a lot of research and effort to write. The resulting text won’t particularly appeal to anyone and will often be rather complicated. By the time it’s complete, two new mountains of bullshit nobody refuted so far will have appeared.
Ergo: Arguing against bullshitters is an endless campaign of uphill battles each of which can be won individually. But those victories won’t ever accompish anything.
Example from today: A biologist stated that “We are the first generation to really feel the effects of global boiling and the last which can do anything about it!” Every generation of the last 30 years was made to believe that at some time or another and none knew about any of its predecessors.
“Refuting bullshit usually takes a lot of research and effort to write. The resulting text won’t particularly appeal to anyone and will often be rather complicated. By the time it’s complete, two new mountains of bullshit nobody refuted so far will have appeared.” Very true. Try Trust the Evidence – Heneghan and Jefferson’s Substack. It’s all careful, evidenced, scientific thinking. It takes effort to follow the reasoning. I love it. But however true and well-reasoned it is, it doesn’t stand a chance against the Bullshit. Why is this? Something must have changed. I think it’s less that the Bullshitters have got better, but that people’s appetite for Bullshit has expanded. It was an eventual, hard-won meta-thought about all those endless, daily triumvirate Bullshit-fests during lockdown: why did no-one Ask Questions? A question – the right one – would have brought the whole stinking edifice down. What had happened to… something, which I can’t identify, which doesn’t need to think things through, hard and thoroughly, after the event, and rightly claim reason through that effort, but can instantly go “Bullshit!”, and ask the right question? It was extraordinary, the silence. Of course, those triumvirate Daily Frighteners were stage-managed, so that no-one… Read more »
“1) we will be right, the government will be wrong; 2) but the government will never admit that we were right, that it was wrong.” Larry Frankfurt (“On Bullshit”) has this covered. Yes, we were right. But the government wasn’t wrong. Because the government wasn’t wasn’t actually lieing: it was bullshitting. (Frankfurt, paraphrased: “The liar cares deeply about the truth: he cares enough about it to devote enormous effort to misdirecting you away from it. The bullshitter doesn’t care in the slightest about the truth – all he cares about is his bullshit, which may even occasionally – by accident – be true”.) This is why that revolting neologism “messaging” came to such prominence during the COVID-bullshit. It doesn’t matter in the slightest to government whether they’re telling the truth: the new measure is whether their “messaging is effective”. Truth and falsity are outmoded measures. That – not questions of truth or falsity – is the root of government hypersensitivity about “misinformation”. It looks rather like a projection: but in fact it’s more complex than that. It’s an impulse to censor and destroy those old-fashioned people who still believe that whether something is true or false actually matters, who spoil… Read more »
It’s that old “There is a teapot on Mars” argument. ——It isn’t for me to prove their isn’t one or refute that claim
An example was the “fact check” about voting figures in 2024. Apparently, according to the “fact checkers” there was a claim that 80% of those who could vote had voted against the government. If there was such a claim, the “fact checkers” would be right in refuting it. What the “fact checkers” did not challenge was that only 20% of those who could vote voted *for* the government. But the “fact checkers” had done their job, smearing those who drew attention to the gross disproportion between votes and parliamentary seats.