There’s a line that circulates online: “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
Like most good aphorisms, it’s true in more ways than you first expect.
If you’ve ever argued with a crank, you’ve felt it. They can toss out a dozen wrong ideas in a minute, and to reply honestly you’d have to spend hours citing studies, reconstructing history, or running experiments. Most people eventually give up, not because the crank was right, but because the exchange was structurally rigged.
This is why bad ideas spread so easily. They’re cheap. Cheap to make, cheap to repeat, cheap to share. Good ideas are expensive. They require effort to think through, effort to test, effort to communicate. It’s like comparing graffiti to architecture. Anyone with a spray can can scrawl something on a wall; designing and building the wall in the first place took years.
The asymmetry shows up everywhere:
In politics, where one false slogan can undo pages of careful policy.
In startups, where competitors make wild claims while you’re still debugging your code.
In personal life, where one rumor can ruin a reputation it took decades to earn.
Why is the asymmetry so strong? Because truth has constraints and lies don’t. To be true, a statement has to fit with everything else that’s true. To be false, it just has to be catchy.
That doesn’t mean you should give up on fighting nonsense. But it does mean you have to fight differently. You can’t win by matching volume for volume. You win by creating structures that make bullshit harder to spread and truth easier to see. That’s why scientists insist on peer review, why good legal systems demand evidence, and why the best founders eventually win despite noisy competitors: reality has the final say.
In the long run, truth compounds. But in the short run, expect the math to be unfair. Ten minutes of garbage can cost you ten days of work.
It’s tempting to get angry about this, but it’s better to get strategic. The asymmetry is real. Don’t waste your life refuting every bad take. Spend your time building the kind of things that don’t need to shout to be real.