Brandolini’s law (or the bullshit asymmetry principle) is an Internet adage coined in 2013 by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini. It contrasts the considerable effort of debunking misinformation with 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.

via: https://blog.glyph.im/2026/06/adversarial-communication.html

Or, sufficiently advanced cynicism is indistinguishable from naïveté.

The default lens through which modern people look at the world is vulgar materialism: a stylized, populist version of historical materialism where everything is explained by money, states are weak, democracy is a fiction, corporations and the rich run the world, ideology and religion and nationalism and language have no explanatory power and are merely covers for secret, underlying material motives.

Sometimes, people really just wanna beat other people up.

On people who use AI to think.

So this view, that ideas spring fully-formed, and then it’s mere toil to turn them into prose, is false. There is no ideating before writing, because the writing is the thinking. Writing is the ne plus ultra of thinking. A “thinker” who doesn’t write, who skips the step of “merely” synthesizing their vague thoughts into prose, is not thinking.

So when a scientific journal rejects an AI-written submission, they’re not rejecting AI. I’m sure poor old ChatGPT with its weird syntactic obsessions is a more honest scientist than many. They’re rejecting a human whose actions prove they are dishonest and irresponsible and too easily impressed.

via: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/disagreeing-charitably-with-others/

I think a lot of attempts at steelmanning wind up failing to reckon with difference and deeply held disagreement. You wind up acting like other people’s belief systems are failed versions of your own, instead of something that makes sense from experiences and assumptions you happen not to share. But other people aren’t inferior versions of you. Their beliefs make sense from their own perspective, and if you want to understand them you have to try to inhabit that perspective.

see: https://aella.substack.com/p/the-other-porn-land

The reason that the most common viewpoint is absent from the discourse is that reasonable people don’t want to spend their free time arguing with unpleasant weirdos about genital preferences, when they can instead spend time with their families or binge webnovels or clean the bathroom grout with a toothbrush, all of which are far more rewarding and meaningful activities.

for most people, framing cryptocurrency as a choice between letting well-regulated, government-insured banks manage our money and letting the next Jeff Bezos do what he wants with it, should make the best choice obvious.

This is an excellent angle on why cryptocurrency doesn’t work in practice.

writing is a technology, frames are a frame. bespoke human content.

Progressives who advocate for illiberal policies aren’t Marxists or postmodernists. They turn liberalism’s tools against itself.

The author does a good job of describing popular logical fallacies in political debate, but I think is quite wrong about the nature of rights in some extents and also unnecessarily insults his audience. :/

Two options:

1. don’t be controversial, i.e. assimilate
2. don’t get famous

If it seems like someone would have to know the right answer to be this wrong, that’s because they do. And they posted it anyway, which means you are entering an interaction they engineered for a purpose. You are entering a shooting gallery from the wrong end.

via: https://nottoby.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-training-boys-and

People take what they need and change what they don’t; they read, interrogate, contextualize; in this way, history moves forward. The question is not what the books say. The question is always you, the reader; what you take, what you leave, and how you change the world.

This is a good introduction to hate speech as a legal phenomenon, with emphasis on social media and college campuses. Exposed me to a lot of useful viewpoints.

Very slick technique.

This is exactly why I refuted Paul Graham’s “Good Writing” post. Zombie facts poison discourse.

A nice linguistic principle, even absent of the post’s content:

we don’t have much conscious awareness of a lot of the patterns in our own speech, let alone much insight into the reasons for them

There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right. […] I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.

This thought feels dangerous and is arguably wrong. He later says that this isn’t quite right, but it still feels like a bad (and arguably bit dishonest) thing to lead your essay with.

So it’s not quite right to say that better sounding writing is more likely to be true. Better sounding writing is more likely to be internally consistent. If the writer is honest, internal consistency and truth converge.

This is significantly better, but still reads as naïve. If anything, I feel like well-written stuff can make it really hard to challenge the assumptions of an argument, which in a way is its own hell. I think Graham is right to point out that clumsy writing reflects wrong ideas, and that getting rid of those errors can help you fix the ideas, but I feel like in some way, because of how the argument is framed, that this essay is self-refuting.

In this speech, I tell the story of Captain Richard de Crespigny and Qantas Flight 32, and draw from it a lesson about the power of reasons. I hope you enjoy the speech and find it stimulating.

This is a video lecture on chapter 17, titled “Values in a Scientific World”, of Russ Shafer-Landau’s book, ‘Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?’ The argument that this chapter considers is one that claims that if one follow’s Occam’s Razor, then one ought to reject the reality of objective moral facts or laws. This is an argument for moral skepticism, and Shafer-Landau offers several responses to it and in defense of moral objectivism. In the end, he claims that this use of occam’s razor defeats itself. This lecture is part of an introductory level philosophy course, Introduction to Ethics.

Occam’s razor applies only to descriptive facts, not normative ones.

This is a lecture about chapter 14 of Russ Shafer-Landau’s book ‘Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?’ This chapter is about the popular argument that starts from the claim that there is persistent disagreement about moral matters to the conclusion that there are no objective moral facts or laws. Shafer-Landau is able to turn this argument against moral skepticism itself. This is a pretty long video lecture, but I spend a lot of time modifying the argument, which should be helpful in learning how to deal with arguments themselves. This is part of an introductory level philosophy course, Introduction to Ethics.