Brandolini's Law | Hacker News Reader

Brandolini's Law

en.wikipedia.org

132 pointsivanmaeder59 comments

There is a famous quote assigned to Goethe in German, which roughly says »A fool can ask more questions then 7 wise men can answer«. The internet just increased the visibility of fools. Let's ensure wise men don't stop to share their wisedom, because that's what participative education is all about.

For those interested in / learning German: https://www.dict.cc/german-english/Ein+Narr+kann+mehr+Fragen...

Not sure about the original source though. A quick Google comes up with either German, Italian or even Lenin, with varying numbers of wise men.

This compendium of idioms from 1925 mentions it dates to the middle ages[1] – but without any details.

As an aside, I came across Proverbs 18:2, which I rather like: "A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion" (or, somewhat more poetic in KJV: "A fool hath no delight in understanding, but that his heart may discover itself").

[1]: In Dutch: https://dbnl.org/tekst/stoe002nede01_01/stoe002nede01_01_062...

For those who are German or otherwise and learning English, the following two phrases are not the same (they have opposite meanings):

1. Let's ensure wise men don't stop to share their wisdom

2. Let's ensure wise men don't stop sharing their wisdom

If you say, "don't stop to do X," that means (roughly), "don't do X." In other words, #1 means the same thing as, "Let's ensure wise men don't share their wisdom." #2 is the one you want. If the amount of multiple negatives is confusing, omit them completely and say, "Let's ensure wise men keep sharing their wisdom."

Your explanation is a bit confusing, although correct. I believe this person here [1] explains it better, with more examples. The key is to “stop thinking” of these two structures as similar to each other: They're not.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-stop-do...

So Goethe was off by 3? :-)

(Disclaimer: I own the complete edition, so not meant as an offense.)

A form of denial of service (DoS) against spreading knowledge: flood the system with 'requests'.

There's also a saying in Romanian which roughly translated (by me) goes something like this: "A fool throws a stone in the lake which then ten wise men people struggle to get out".

According to his son, Willam F Buckley use to say: “Never fence with an amateur, he’ll kill you.”

That’s cool to know, we have almost the exact saying in Turkish, but ours include a “well” instead of a “lake”.

Coincidentally Hindu mythology also has 7 wise sages.

Torriano's A common place of Italian proverbs and proverbial phrases from 1666 has "One fool may ask more than seven wise men can answer". So it's probably very old.

Nowhere has this been more true than social media: a constant stream of unverified BS shared from one group to another via a mutual friend.

And the most frustrating part is it's a no-win situation: either you spend time refuting only for the story to change slightly (or more arguments back), or the poster assumes silence means agreement, enforcing their opinion and sharing similar later.

It can be powerful just to say something like: "I don't agree with that"

Direct refutation of what they have said suggests that you are open to discussion in light of further evidence, and invites people to find new arguments; whereas, saying that you fundamentally disagree makes your position much clearer.

Related: if you don't want to do something, providing the genuine reason you don't want to can avoid some pretty frustrating fights over whether you should do it. At the very least, arguments tend to be relevant.

Providing the reason might, of course, provoke other fights, or be embarrassing.

I agree with this.

I have simply stopped engaging entirely with people who post nonsense on social media.

I believe it is actually unethical to post things you haven’t verified. By doing it you are actually making the world demonstrably worse.

Block, unfollow, defriend etc ... I can be friends with someone in real life and nit have their every nonsense thought gumming up my Facebook feed.

There is a spectrum of evidence from weakest ("I can imagine something happening") to strongest ("I have a formally verified mathematical proof that I understand and that leading mathematicians agree with"). On that scale, someone confident, respectable and reasonable saying something earnestly is pretty good evidence. Especially good evidence considering the ease and difficulty of collecting and verifying more serious forms evidence.

But this is also why it is so important to have an almost cruel level of cynicism towards politics. The politician figured this out long ago, and will always make sure to look confident, respectable and reasonable when making stuff up and lying. But most people are not cynics and the ugly soup of politics continues to simmer.

See also, Gish Gallop: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

> The Gish Gallop is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort.

> The Gish Gallop is a conveyor belt-fed version of the on-the-spot fallacy, as it's unreasonable for anyone to have a well-composed answer immediately available to every argument present in the Gallop.

Harry G. Frankfurt offered a full philosophical theory of BS[1].

Key takeaway: the BSer isn't just sloppy or inaccurate with the hogwash. Rather, BS attacks the very concept of truth as such.

Looking at you, Postmodernists.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122...

Having attempted to understand postmodernism (it's been what, a good part of a century by now?), facile characterisation of postmodernism as anti-truth is itself BS.

It might not be anti-truth but it’s not anti-anti-truth, so to speak?

Post-modernism isn't so much, there isn't any truth: more that there isn't any singular truth, as in, it's relative to perspective. This doesn't preclude outright lying, though - expounding false facts seems to be a move towards totalitarianism. I'm looking forward to a 21st review of the last 4 years by one of our bright philosopher/theorists and how it compares to the totalitarianism of the early 20th century.

OK, how about intellectual nihilism?

This seems to have parallels with the laws of thermodynamics.

Easier to get the toothpaste out of the tube than to get it back in...

Most toothpaste is found in tubes though?

I suspect actually most toothpaste is found dissolved in the water supply.

Of which most lies in large sewage tubes

That is unless toothpaste is also a pile.

If toothpaste is inside one tube then it is necessarily outside of all other tubes.

Unless the tube is also in a tube.

Getting it into the tubes involves a factory, so it’s still easier to get it out.

https://youtu.be/g9aD3BpxEAY

Part of the scientific march against entropy

The amount of BS in the world must always increase.

BS can go down locally so long as it goes up globally?

That related technique, the Gish gallop (also mentioned in the article), is seen very frequently: your opponent makes numerous wild claims, often very different in truth and applicability, but hoping that some will stick and cast doubt on your position, or the listener thinks “it’s too complicated, I give up”.

The latter, that people give up and conclude that there is no truth or “all politicians lie”, is sometimes the main goal. It removes accountability.

Often seen with creationists, covidiots, Qanon, and political propaganda.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

This was also an important part of Soviet Maskirovka in WW2. Soon after being attacked by the Germans, the Soviets realized that their military codes had been thoroughly broken. However, due to material, time, and skilled manpower constraints, they did not have the ability replace the codes with ones that actually worked while also fending off the largest coordinated invasion the world had ever seen.

So, what to do when the enemy can read all the orders you give your troops pretty much immediately after you give them? Do you let them have this amazing intelligence advantage, or do you stop using radio altogether and thus give yourself a massive communication handicap?

The Soviets took the third option. They kept giving their troops orders using the compromised codes, and eventually also in the clear, but also started giving a lot of conflicting orders to formations that did not exist, or were in fact elsewhere. Or fake orders to real formations that were specifically told beforehand to ignore any orders starting with a certain phrase. And by a lot, I really mean massive quantities. Once they really got the hang of it, the ratio of bullshit to real orders on the air was often well above 1000:1. The idea being that it was so much easier to manufacture bullshit that survived superficial scrutiny, but would collapse under any real investigation, than conducting those investigations, that you could bury the enemy intelligence officers under the workload. By the time of Stalingrad, the Germans had mostly given up on sigint.

As an activist, I finally figured out that advocating an affirmative agenda is easier than trying to stop someone else's agenda. tldr: offense beats defense.

I try to share this hard earned wisdom with other noob activists. "Ya, ya, ya. I agree. Now tell me what you're FOR. What changes, reforms do you advocate?"

It's not an easy sell. People are strongly inclined to punch back, join the food fight, get dirty.

This is similar to why I am suspicious of many “fact checks”, the amount of effort it takes to produce them makes me think that it’s often more about damage control for a specific special interest group than it is about general facts and knowledge, and the quality of many “fact checks” seems to reflect this often as well. Perhaps this is a sub-law of sorts.

There’s a similar one where fact checks will start out with one premise in the title, provide a completely different fact or two that they’ve “corrected”, and think they got away with people thinking they have “debunked” the original premise when really it was just a deflection. And often they work since many people just read the title and think if a fact check exists, it must be a true debunking.

I disagree.

If the Russian School of Probability taught is anything is that we should always think in inequalities, as such it should read:

"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is AT LEAST an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."

I think this law is BS... /s

Well I think it’s not! Buuuut the margins of hn are too narrow to provide a proof.

"I think this law is about BS"

Fixed that for you

bs seems to bias very favorably towards the first mover.

how about we set up some sort of proactive ‘evidence based truths’ thing to potentially preempt future BS.

One reason could be that we as humans are naturaly biased towards the first version of a story.

It's a well known bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)

There’s also quantity and complexity: For every fact, you can come up with a multitude of BS counter-claims (so it’s more likely that at least one of them is already out in the wild), and truths are usually more complex than BS claims, which also biases against them.

That only works on people who value evidence. Sartre figured this out:

>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.

> how about we set up some sort of proactive ‘evidence based truths’ thing to potentially preempt future BS.

It's basically how you'd run a project, right? If there was some point of contention, you would document that point, attaching the various conflicting opinions, perhaps with pros and cons of each, whatever else was important, and then that argument is done. If a genuinely new future disagreement arises, amend it. Over time, more distinct points would arise, and you'd do the same thing, gradually building out a model of The System: what it is composed of, how it works, where things are decided, where things are not, where do we still have unknowns and more work to do, etc. A reasonably decent model of what our reality is composed of.

In the world of democracy and public affairs though, we seem to have instead chosen to take an approach with no organization or persistence of decisions. So, an event occurs, a couple hundred internet arguments break out, composed in part of thousands of mini-arguments involving past unresolved disagreements, and plenty of insults and ill will. And then tomorrow when the next event occurs (or a new wrinkle in yesterday's), we start from scratch doing the same thing all over again.

Round and round we go, like we're on a treadmill to nowhere.

That’s assuming that both sides respect the process and are acting in good faith to come to a conclusion.

If there is a disagreement, it is noted. I don't see a problem.

Reminds me of the quote “ A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes on”

Adtech is full of BS and perhaps the challenge of our times. Let’s look at what Facebook VP Carolyn Everson, said in 2018:

“So we believe very strongly that the business model that we have been operating under is not only good for people because it gives them more relevant advertising, but it also is good for businesses because obviously it drives their growth.”

If you agree it’s not going to be easy to overcome such BS, then here’s an important case of Brandolini’s law. But why is it so difficult? Zuboff makes the case for the AI genius of surveillance capitalists. Doctorow and others argue it’s about digital monopolists.

They would likely all agree that it’s difficult because the mainstream and laggards need to wake up. If people are asked “Do you prefer ads that are more relevant?” then the mainstream are going to say something like; yeah OK, that sounds better than ads that are irrelevant to me.

But how about if people are asked “Do you wants ads that are more relevant and are based on data that we collect about you and you’re lookalikes?”. They might then say “Well, no not really, but do I have a choice?”

Dealing with a Qanon family member is something that would've sounded funny to me a few years back, but things like those are on my mind every day and it's not getting better. It's a serious and very depressing thing.

No kidding! I will never complain about helping fix a printer or computer again.

Asymmetric Information Terror

Is the asymmetry of refuting bullshit abnormal?

Isn't confirming the Truth also hard? Maybe even really hard?

What if the diffusion of all new ideas, for better or for worse, is just really hard?

Please bear with me...

How long did it take to confirm Einstein's general theory of relatively? How many bumps and bruises were earned along the way?

I was just learning about the Eddington experiment [1919] to confirm Einstein's prediction [1911] about how much the Sun's gravity will bend light.

TLDR: It was really hard to do, the results were uncertain, there was drama.

All progress is hard. We have the replication crisis. There's misinformation, disinformation, miscommunication, some outright fraud.

And yet we somehow forge order from chaos.

My optimistic hot take:

Truth has a slight edge. On longer time scales. Like years, decades, generations.

We are absolutely awash in bullshit. Refutation is resource intensive.

But we already know what to do. Run more experiments, share our findings, patiently and tenaciously cope with the inevitable uncertainty.

Thanks for reading this far. Am not a philosopher. So I don't know how to talk about this stuff.

FWIW, this is the podcast episode that made me think "huh, Truth is hard too".

https://www.jimruttshow.com/michael-strevens/

"Michael Stevens talks to Jim about some of the ideas & stories in his book, The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science: what the great method debate is & how Popper & Kuhn added to the topic, falsification & scientific progress, the messy history of testing Einstein’s theories, understanding the theoretical cohort, Michael’s iron rule, science vs natural philosophy, Francis Bacon‘s view on science, scientific convergence, the Tychonic principal, theory vs experimentation, Newton’s trendsetting approach to science, the war against beauty in science, why science was born in western Europe, and much more."

And before anyone gets all epistemological on me, I'm a Popperian, so you all know what I mean by Truth.

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