Fractal wrongness

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[[File:Fractal-wrongness.jpg|thumb|You're wrong there, and there, oh, and there too, there, now let's step back a little, yep, still wrong.]]
 
[[File:Fractal-wrongness.jpg|thumb|You're wrong there, and there, oh, and there too, there, now let's step back a little, yep, still wrong.]]
 
{{cquote|''You are not just wrong. You are wrong at every conceivable level of resolution. Zooming in on any part of your worldview finds beliefs exactly as wrong as your entire worldview.''|||There's a "de-motivator" poster for everything.}}
 
{{cquote|''You are not just wrong. You are wrong at every conceivable level of resolution. Zooming in on any part of your worldview finds beliefs exactly as wrong as your entire worldview.''|||There's a "de-motivator" poster for everything.}}

Revision as of 02:44, 15 August 2013

Part of the series on

Logic and rhetoric

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You're wrong there, and there, oh, and there too, there, now let's step back a little, yep, still wrong.
You are not just wrong. You are wrong at every conceivable level of resolution. Zooming in on any part of your worldview finds beliefs exactly as wrong as your entire worldview.
—There's a "de-motivator" poster for everything.

Fractal wrongness is the state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person's worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person's worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.

Contents

Etymology

The expression appears to date from around October 2001 where it was used by then computer science student Keunwoo Lee in a lexicon of computing [1]. The phrase is a metaphor deriving from the colloquial meaning of a fractal, which refers to an image which is substantially the same at any level of scale - in other words, it is impossible to determine how much the image is zoomed in simply by looking at it.

Debating with a person who is fractally wrong leads to infinite regress, as every refutation you make of that person's opinions will lead to a rejoinder, full of half-truths, leaps of poor logic, and outright lies, that requires just as much refutation to debunk as the first one. It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time.

If you ever get embroiled in a discussion with a fractally wrong person on the Internet — in mailing lists, newsgroups, or forums — your best bet is to say your piece once and ignore any replies, thus saving yourself time. But sometimes you have to work with Tim Britain.

See also

Footnotes

  1. Keunwoo Lee's lexicon of computing

External links

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