Category: Confidence independent of competence

The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

• The Aetheric Concord – Dr. Aird's 1855 society for proving the flat plane – the exact mirror of the Bavarian Society, and never once known to disagree.
• Dr. Ambrose Aird – Victorian gentleman-amateur (1809–1884) who revived Lorimer's abandoned method to prove the flat plane, and fitted it with a correction that could not fail.
• Dunning–Kruger effect – The documented finding that confidence runs highest where competence runs lowest – the real-world law behind this encyclopedia's unit of conviction, the whect.
• Grimble's razor – A principle of economy in argument: where a proposition entails something that cannot be entertained, the entailment is set aside and the proposition retained.
• Lord Kelvin – Fixed the bottom of the temperature scale and the age of the Earth. He got one of them right, and never said the sentence he is famous for.
• Kinematic and dynamic equivalence – Two claims about reference frames: the first true and never disputed, the second contested, the two offered as one.
• Kradian – Proposed unit of angular residue: the amount by which a radian's degree-count and π together exceed sixty.
• The Mud Geometer – Bavarian controversialist (c. 1815 – after 1871) who would credit no curvature he could not be handed across a table, and drew, by his own hand, the plates that were meant to prove it.
• Obed – Cosmographer of remote antiquity who raised one tower to confirm what he already believed, and cut his stone tablets at the dictation of a familiar spirit.
• Ezekiel Quartz – Aetheric theorist (1828–1887), the Aetheric Concord's self-styled Defender of the Aether, who reduced all of physics to one medium and dared the world to refute him.
• Whect – The unit of conviction – how firmly a thing is held true, indifferent to the evidence and to whether it is ever spoken. It has no plural.

← All categories