For those who don't know, "Brandolini's Law" is a tongue-in-cheek so-called law, akin to Godwin's Law and Murphy's Law, frequently applied to fringe conspiracy theories. It reads like this, according to Wikipedia: The energy required to debunk a stupid idea is orders of magnitude greater than the energy it takes to produce a stupid idea, also known, according to Wikipedia, the bullshit asymmetry principle, coined by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer, after listening to an interview with the former Prime Minister Sylvio Berlusconi.
Here are four corollaries that seem to me consequent to his "Law":
1. The asymmetry is in inverse relation to the quantity or availability of evidence. The less evidence available for or against the stupid idea, the harder to debunk.
If you can't practically go to the moon, you can't easily demonstrate that stars don't appear on camera there. Instead you have to rely on an elaborate explanation of optics on lunar-like surface locations. A conclusive and thoroughly persuasive explanation might require a comprehensive understanding of physics, a comprehensive understanding that might take years of effort and math. And even if the debating parties were willing to pursue that study, considering the resources of intelligence immediately available to the discussants, it's probably impossible. People will believe what they want to believe regardless of any facts. Why should they bother to learn all that background? "Learning? F*** no!"
To extrapolate this corollary (corollary 1.a): where there is no evidence, the orders of magnitude of difficulty reach to infinity, iow, impossibility. This leads to another corollary:
2. is the flip side of (1): wherever there is no easily available evidence, therever will be a playground for stupid ideas and hoaxes to fill the vacuum of information.
Consider the difficulty of proving that China doesn't really exist, it's just a gov't conspiracy. You'd have to persuade people that all the local Chinese immigrants and tourists, along with everyone who claim to have visited China and returned, are in the conspiracy, that all the books on China are fabricated, news casts from "China" etc., etc. And the risk would be high. Anyone can just buy a ticket and go visit to prove your conspiracy hoax is false. So where there's evidence, hoaxes will be few and stupid ideas only at the very extremist end of stupidity.
However, it does not follow from (2) that wherever there's lots of evidence, therever will be no conspiracies. Corollary 2 does not lead to an infinite conclusion as (1.a) does. A stupid idea can always either twist evidence in favor of a theory, or find some coincidence that supports a theory. This is one reason why confirmation bias is so intransigent -- it's so easy to find supportive evidence for almost any theory. Fringe conspiracy theories, like the poor, will always be with us.
A flat earther tells me that maps have always been flat. Proof! If I point out that all the portraits for George Washington are also flat, but he certainly couldn't have led the armies if he were flat, the response I get is, there are statues of Washington. And if I argue that there are no statues of Hitler :-), the response I get is, yes, Hitler was flat and black and white too. He's a gov't fake.
3. is a corollary of (2). Wherever there is little evidence available, therever will be a playground for real conspiracies, that is, propaganda. What's an opportunity for the goose is just as rich an opportunity for the gander.
4. There's yet another corollary to (1). Where there's no evidence, or no practical evidence (like the moon), there the debunking of a stupid idea with evidence is waste of time reaching towards an infinite waste of time, and anyone engaging in debunking the evidence of such a theory is infinitely foolish.
That's not to say that debunkers should give up on stupid hoaxes. Disproofs don't depend only on empirical evidence or even on best theories of physics. Many hoaxes rely on internal contradictions. It's just a matter of identifying them. They are not always obvious, often because the absurdities of the conspiracy focuses attention on the details set out by the conspiracy. Conspiracy theorists too easily set the terms of discourse. Accepting the assumptions of the theory is an easy trap to fall into.
The moon landing is a case in point. The temptation is to debunk the empirical evidence about stars and flags waving in "the breeze". It's easy to miss the contradictory assumption in the conspiracy itself, that gov'ts produce fakes for the purpose of propaganda. Take that seriously and you've got to ask, why didn't the Soviets (or as we used to say, the Russians -- a telling and interesting expression that has been overlooked since the collapse; it implies that we intuited that the CCCP was really an extractive Russian empire more than an ideological alternative, or maybe that was our gov't's propaganda) produce their own fake in response? Really. It was recognized across the globe that the Russians were ahead of the US in the space race. They'd sent a satellite in orbit first, the first dog and animal, the first extra-orbital object, and the first human in orbit. Anyone would have believed a Russian photo of Russian cosmonauts carousing on the moon. And their photo could have been even more persuasive, correcting and improving the US photo!
This question -- why the Soviets didn't produce their own fake landing -- takes the conspiracy assumption seriously and renders it, if not contradictory and inconsistent, then certainly stupid.
I once asked a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist why didn't the Soviets produce their own fake. His emailed answer (I don't know how long it took him to figure out the answer) was, if they had produced a fake, they'd be risking exposure!
Do I need to point out that his answer is a reason to believe the US landing was real? That if he truly and fully credits that answer, then he can't also believe the US faked its landing? More accurately, he can't be a consistent thinker and hold onto the fake landing belief without some ad hoc extenuating belief like the US gov't doesn't care about being exposed even though the Soviet gov't is.
An even more interesting question is why anyone believes the conspiracy when the premise of the theory leads to an obvious inconsistency. One could salvage the theory by insisting that only the US practices propaganda, but you'd need an additional explanation for why that would be so. IOW, salvaging the theory only complexifies it, making it less probable. I've got a post upcoming on probability and truth ("entropy and truth) and another on why the lack of any Soviet fake moon landing is a really interesting puzzle regardless whether the US landing was real or fake ("where are all the missing fake moon landings?)
Also notice that his answer is a thinking answer. Yet he doesn't think to apply it to the US fake -- he doesn't apply to his own view. That's the character of human thinking -- we use it when we want it and only then. And that's why conspiracy thinking is so important for us to understand. It shows us the general character of our thinking in bold relief.