Degrees of Incredulity

Carl Stitz, LCC

Recall that given a (nonempty) conversation, C, comprised of (nonempty) sentences, S, we define two
mappings:

W : S → N,
the ‘word count’ of the sentence, and:

N W : S → N ∪ {0},
the ‘nonsense word count’ of the sentence. For example, let:

C = {S1 , S2 }.
where:

S1 = ‘It is to be hoped that some of our Learning Outcomes may be assessed by traditional methods.’

and

S2 = ‘I agree, AQIP may well help us identify low hanging fruit.’

Then we get:

W (S1 ) = 17, N W (S1 ) = 4,

while

W (S2 ) = 11, N W (S2 ) = 4,

Even though N W (S1 ) = N W (S2 ), S2 has a higher proportion of nonsense words than S1 . We quantify
this as follows:

Definition: For a fixed (nonempty) sentence S, the bullshit coefficient, β(S) is defined as:

N W (S)
β(S) = .
W (S)
Clearly, for any fixed S ∈ C, we get:

0 ≤ N W (S) ≤ W (S).
and so we get:

0 ≤ β(S) ≤ 1.
We extend this definition to a (nonempty) conversation by averaging over all (nonempty) sentences:
1 X
β := β(S)
|C|
S∈C
For our example above, we have:
4 4
β (S1 ) = , β (S2 ) = ,
17 11
so that, for C = {S1 , S2 }, we get:
 
1 4 4 56
β= + = ≈ 0.299
2 17 11 187

We may use β to describe ideas by computing the β of conversations concerning those ideas. With this
notion, we formulate the Incredulity Index, I. We have the following:

β
I := .
1−β
For example, mathematical theorems have, by their nature, a bullshit coefficient: β = 0. Hence, the
incredulity index: I = 0. In other words, mathematical truths are completely believable. Note that:

lim I = ∞.
β→1−

which means that as the conversation nears absolute bullshit, the topic becomes absolutely unbelievable. In
the table below, we have summarized the Incredulity Index, I, with some known phenomena. Remember,
the higher the index, the more unbelievable the idea.

Idea I

Newton’s Laws of Motion 6 × 10−81

Existence of Bigfoot 42

Effective Online Education 1.17 × 1051

Productive AQIP meeting ∞

Further research aims to use a modified model for I to explain the ‘Technobabble’ phenomenon.