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There are at least two ways to refute Brandolini's Law, both work. The first refutation is in response to a steelman version of the argument. It's simply that
by nvm0n2 3y ago
There are at least two ways to refute Brandolini's Law, both work.
The first refutation is in response to a steelman version of the argument. It's simply that that you often can't know whether a claim is or isn't bullshit until someone manages to refute it, or tries to and fails. Thus even if this claim is correct, it doesn't matter. People will just have to spend the energy in order to discover what's true.
The second refutation is to observe that Brandolini's Law is itself bullshit. Therefore anyone presenting it as relevant to a debate on free speech is in fact arguing in bad faith, as you put it, whether they know it or not.
Where does this "law" come from? Calling it a law makes it sound like it's got some empirical basis in fact, and it's phrased in a mathematical way, but in reality it's literally a snarky tweet made in 2013 by some rando programmer [1]. Not only was it presented with no evidence but when asked "How do you know that" his reply was "Just read #ThinkingFastAndSlow ... then everything will fall in place". But very ironically Thinking Fast and Slow is a book famous for being built on bullshit. Many of the studies within it don't replicate, and the author later admitted that he relied too heavily on underpowered studies for his claims.
Even if this book wasn't full of bullshit, nothing in it is about the claim Brandolini made! So we have something that pretends to be some sort of scientific law but isn't, and which is justified via a bullshit irrelevant reference to a book that doesn't make that claim and which is itself full of bullshit studies. It's a fractal of bullshit.
Brandolini's Law is a good example of why we need an open and uncensored internet. Far too many people are willing to take claims at face value because they are phrased in ways that sound superficially scientific or authoritative. Our only defense against this is when people are free to refute such claims in public, extensively and robustly, without being moderated into oblivion. Only then will we be able to inch slowly closer to a truth-based and shared reality.
[1] https://twitter.com/ziobrando/status/289635060758507521 https://twitter.com/ziobrando/status/289635060758507521
- nobodyandproud 3y agoYes, but I think it’s fair to assume it’s true because any investigative work takes effort. Real investigative journalism is costly, for example, and fewer outlets are able to do this today. Our society is the poorer for it but there seems to be too many interests and market forces against this.
- nvm0n2 3y agoI agree it sounds like it should be true. But the reason BS is effective is that it often sounds true without actually being so. I can think of many examples within 10 seconds where high effort bullshit was trivially refutable, so I don't think it's safe to assume that this non-"law" actually holds in reality regardless of how cozy it may feel.
- nobodyandproud 3y agoSure, but the best BS is mostly true and requires fact-finding. We see this in science where it’s the lack of replication that uncovers the BS. We’ll agree to disagree, but I’m willing to assume this as a given to progress an argument.
- nvm0n2 3y agoBut I'm not willing, because your willingness to make unfounded assumptions leads you to demand things like censorship and the removal of all anonymity, which would only be possible at great cost and would certainly make it much harder to refute official, government sanctioned BS which is the most important kind. Hacker News is an especially good example of why it's important. This forum is full of people who both generate and accept vast quantities of "right sounding" BS all the time, just look at any discussion of COVID, climate, etc. All you'd do with your proposals is enable large-scale harassment and punishment of anyone pointing out that yes Virginia, it's actually quite likely that a novel coronavirus came from the lab right next to the first cases, the that was experimenting on novel coronaviruses. Instead of leading us towards insight and truth you'd have it that all such people are immediately silenced on the grounds of producing producing clever "BS" that's too hard to refute. As for science, I'm afraid that replication is usually not necessary to uncover a paper as BS. It's actually one of the things I was thinking of when I said high effort BS can often be trivially refuted. Scientists like to do a full replication anyway because within their culture that's considered respectable and lawsuit-proof, whereas pointing out that a paper is illogical, makes absurd assumptions and none of the numbers add up can land you in hot water. But in reality lots of high-effort scientific papers that took a team of authors months to produce can be refuted in five minutes by just pointing out things in the text. "How did this get through peer review?" is a very common response to studying bad scientific papers - you don't need a full blown replication to detect these problems.