User:Sdestefano/Brandolini's law

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Another example dates back to 2016, when Iceland's football team had eliminated England's out of the EUFA European Championship. Nine months after the victory, Icelandic doctor, Ásgeir Pétur Þorvaldsson jokingly tweeted out that a baby boom in Iceland had occurred due to this victory. Despite wide media coverage suggesting the truth behind this statement, statistical analysis carried out by curious researchers debunked the notion proposed by Þorvaldsson's tweet.

This concept and the principles Brandolini’s Law is accentuated during larger scale and higher tension situations as well. Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom discuss in their analysis of using Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 prevention that, despite Hydroxychloroquine being frequently proven to not be effective in curing illnesses, including COVID-19, that it was extremely difficult to convince people that it would not prove effective against the highly contagious virus. Because of how afraid people were of COVID-19 during its conception, and how desperately people wanted a cure, widespread social media coverage and a desire for Hydroxychloroquine to work made it extremely difficult to disprove the bullshit being presented, furthering the concepts presented by Brandolini’s Law.

Within the context of scientific analysis, Brandolini’s Law can be put to use not just on the bullshit being presented, but can also bring the bullshitter under scrutiny as well. When the lying becomes apparent on multiple occasions throughout a stretch of scientific research, the bullshitter becomes more obvious than the bullshit itself, and because the bullshitter loses credibility, the ensuing bullshit is easier to identify.

In accordance with Kieron O’Hara’s research to further analyze how bullshitters operate as opposed to just analyzing the bullshit, while it still takes substantially more energy to disprove bullshit than to create it, the overall amount of energy exerted to discover a bullshitter is less than the amount of energy used to discover the bullshit itself.