Brandolini's Law Is Flipping
AI makes checking claims cheaper than making them. A penny-rounding simulation proves the point.
Brandolini’s Law: it takes 10x more energy to refute bullshit than to produce it. I think that ratio might be shifting.
I read about Arizona passing legislation to let shops round totals to the nearest 5 cents since they’re retiring the penny. Two lawmakers voted against it, basically saying people could lose their hard-earned money.
Which seemed stupid to me, so I asked Claude to research median income and expenditures from BLS and then construct a simulation for the net effect of a year of rounding pennies.
Turns out it is dumb. The average net effect across 10,000 simulated years is a tenth of a penny. You probably don’t even need a simulation to know this. Rounding up and rounding down cancel out unless every shop owner is adversarially pricing to always round up, which, come on.
It took 10x longer to type this out than to farm out the work and get the answer. Two lawmakers said something that felt wrong, and it took less effort to prove it than it took them to say it.
Checking claims used to be expensive. Now it’s basically free. The tools exist for anyone to be a little more right about things.