Canadian Politics Today

Publicly formulated the first time in January 2013[12] by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer, the bullshit asymmetry principle (also known as Brandolini's law[13][14]) states that:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

It became especially popular after a picture of a presentation by Brandolini at XP2014 on May 30, 2014, was posted on Twitter.[15] Brandolini was inspired by reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow right before watching an Italian political talk show with journalist Marco Travaglio and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi attacking each other.[16][17] A similar concept, the "bullshit mountain theory", was formulated by the Italian blogger Uriel Fanelli in 2010, roughly stating the same sentence.[18]

Brandolini's law emphasizes the difficulty of debunking bullshit.[19] In contrast, the faster propagation of bullshit is an old proverb: "a lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on".[20]

The reasons many of us refuse to engage in these conversations is a bit more nuanced than just "it takes more time to refute." In many cases, the existence of a debate is itself more damaging than any possible amount of effort could reverse. People are prone to false dichotomies, where if there exist two sides to a conversation, people assume that both sides must be legitimate and/or the truth is somewhere in the middle. The truth, or at least the best and/or nearly incontrovertible estimate of it, is very frequently one sided. This is true for climate change, vaccines, etc.

An excellent example of where this goes wrong is things like Pruitt's Red vs. Blue debates. While it sounds "reasonable" to have such a debate, the only possible result is over-promotion of falsehoods about climate change, despite near certainty in the evidence that climate change is real and man-made.

The other forum has gotten better as most of the crazy people have left or been banned.

Irony alert. The reason we need the red-blue debate is because the scientific establishment has gotten so arrogant that they demean and ostracize scientists that raise scientifically reasonable objections to alarmist narrative. If there is a concern about scientifically unsound arguments getting aired as part of this exercise then the alarmists scientists only have themselves to blame because they should have respectively engaged their skeptical colleagues instead of driving them out of the field.

We see the same kind of 'lack of nuance' coming from the left all of the time. If someone raises questions about immigration they are a 'nazi'. If someone suggests that woman may have different preferences than men they are a 'misogynist'. It goes on and on.

The use of vicious personal attacks as a way to avoid actually engaging in an nuanced discussion is a common affliction across the political spectrum. Trying to pretend it is only the "other guys" makes you part of the problem.

The other forum has gotten better as most of the crazy people have left or been banned.

I'll take sane-ish!   

...it has had its ups and downs over centuries.

I don't think it's necessarily durable, per se.  I said it has had ups and downs, but it can't last forever in its present form any more than it can collapse into autocracy that we have seen in the past.