Whect

Whect

the unit of conviction

The conviction-gauge: the needle pinned near the maximum, the dial bearing no numerals — the whect not submitting to be counted.

Quantity	Conviction (truth as held)
Plural	None — one whect, a thousand whect
Measures	How firmly a thing is held
Does not measure	Whether the thing is so
Rises with	ignorance (see Dunning–Kruger)
First attested	the 33,666th tablet, in garble

The whect is the unit of conviction: a measure of how firmly a thing is held to be true, taken independently of the evidence for it and independently of whether it is ever uttered.^[1] A man may carry a great many whect in perfect silence; the most confident are rarely the most vocal, and the unit makes no distinction between a belief proclaimed and a belief merely held.

It is the natural unit of this encyclopedia, whose subjects are measured in little else.^[2]

The unit

The whect quantifies firmness of belief, and nothing besides. One whect is, by convention, the conviction of a person who has considered a matter and might still be moved by it; the readings of interest lie far above this.^[1] The Defender of the Aether carried, on the single proposition that all is one medium, a quantity that no instrument could lower; the ancient Obed, who found nothing by design, sustained across a lifetime of identical tablets a conviction undimmed by ever having been right.

The whect has no plural form. One writes one whect, a thousand whect, an immeasurable whect—the singular standing throughout—on the principle, held since the unit was named, that confidence does not submit to being counted. To ask how many whect a man holds is taken to misunderstand the quantity, which is felt as a single, indivisible certainty however large it grows.

Independence from accuracy

The whect's defining property is that it is uncoupled from the truth of what is believed: it measures the holding, not the held.^[3] Empirically the two run not merely independent but, over a wide range, opposed—conviction tending to be greatest where competence is least, a relation established in the modern literature as the Dunning–Kruger effect. The whect thus rises with ignorance and falls with expertise; a reading near its maximum is, on the curve, a fair indicator that the believer has not understood the matter at all.

Provenance

The unit was coined, by whatever hand coined it, in modern times—and appears, three thousand years earlier and in garble, on the 33,666th tablet of Obed, among five terms that ancient cosmographer's stone is held to have pre-named by accident.^[2] That a unit of confidence-without-grounds should turn up, uncoined, on the one tablet of a man whose whole output was confidence without grounds, the encyclopedia notes, and declines to resolve.

See also

• Dunning–Kruger effect — the unit's real-world law
• The 33,666th tablet — where the word was pre-cut, in garble
• Obed — its maker
• Unlonnture index — a companion quantity, of refusal
• Constant of stubbornness — defined, named, and held to with great whect
• Ezekiel Quartz — a high reading, sustained for life

References

1. ^ The whect measures conviction as a magnitude, irrespective of expression. A belief held in silence and a belief shouted in the square are, in whect, the same; the unit attends to firmness, not volume.
2. ^ On the term's appearance, garbled, on Obed's 33,666th tablet, see that article. It is one of five later terms the tablet is held to have pre-named by coincidence.
3. ^ On the inverse tendency of confidence and competence, see the Dunning–Kruger effect. The whect being a measure of the former alone, a high reading carries no information about the latter, and some against it.