Fractal wrongness

Anyone who has had their share of long online discourses should be familiar with people who are plainly beyond the definition of wrong. Now there is an unattributed attributed term begging to enter mainstream vocabulary!

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.

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 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 website forums — your best bet is to say your piece once and ignore any replies, thus saving yourself time.