Unscrambling eggs, and the worst part of the cow

A truism fully supported by the laws of thermodynamics is that you can’t just unscramble an egg as easily as you can scramble it. Well, you also can’t just un-tell a lie.

TIL that one version of this is Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it”. For obvious reasons, it’s also called the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.

On the surface, it seems related to an older maxim: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on”. However, while both deal with the difficulty that truth has when dealing with falsehood, one is about speed of propagation, the other is about total effort to refute.

A closer match can be found in the Gish gallop, a Creationist propaganda technique which amounts to a DoS attack on the truth. The trick is to put out as many arguments as possible, no matter how weak or even absurd, knowing that it’ll take much longer to refute than to throw out there in the first place. If anything, bad arguments work better because it takes longer to make some sense out of them before showing the errors.

On a related but distinct basis, Richard Dawkins argues that there’s no point in someone like him debating Creationists because he’s just giving them credibility by pretending there’s something to debate. They have more to gain and he has more to lose because there is no genuine controversy, only denialism.

Taken to its natural end, you get the propaganda technique found in Russia, as explained thoroughly in a book called “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible”, which attacks the very notion of truth. For example, when there is something to cover up, the state-controlled media doesn’t just put out a single story to lead people astray. Instead, it puts out multiple, intentionally-conflicting lies until everyone is too confused to even bother searching for the truth of the matter. It’s the Gish gallop escalated to a DDoS attack of national proportions, and it works.

If it sounds familiar, that may well be due to Putin’s favorite American pawn using a variant of it, in which a single sentence may contradict itself, and then immediately contradict that contradiction, leading to confusion. There’s so little self-consistency, much less connection with reality, that you wouldn’t even know where to begin; there is no detectable logic to refute.

There’s a taxonomy of deception:

• Lies. These are statements intended to pass for truth, but falling short in one way or another. The key is that the claim must be willfully false while being designed so that the listener is likely to believe it. Lying is a staple of deception, but only amateurs stop there.
• Bullshit. This goes deeper than lying, as it often involves using the truth (but not the whole truth, and with something but the truth) to distort reality. The key is that it’s not limited to getting a specific fact wrong but instead works by building up a narrative that’s deceptive. It doesn’t deviate from reality on a single point; it creates an alternative to reality.
• Gaslighting. The next level is to directly attack the target’s confidence in their ability to tell truth from lie, much as HIV attacks the immune system. It piles on the lies and BS, often engaging in the most bald-faced versions of each, until they doubt their own grasp of reality. It seeks to induce a sort of learned helplessness, so that they no longer even bother to make the effort to defend themselves.

Forewarned is, according to the cliché, forearmed. Nonetheless, even when you know it’s coming, these methods can be highly effective. Hopefully, every bit of defense and awareness helps. When it doesn’t, all you have left is the humility to admit that you were misled, so that you can begin to recover. Good luck with that.