Flat-earther archetype

In 1999 two psychologists at Cornell, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, gave students tests of grammar, logical reasoning and humour. Then they asked each student how well they thought they had done.

The worst performers ranked themselves above average. The paper's explanation is the part worth keeping. The skill you need to answer a grammar question is the same skill you need to notice you answered it wrong. Someone without it makes the mistake, then cannot see the mistake. Dunning and Kruger called this a double burden.

Their fourth study tested the idea. They gave some of the low scorers a short lesson in logic, then asked them to look back at the test they had already taken. They marked themselves down. Still too high, but closer to the truth than before the lesson. A little knowledge of the subject is what showed them how little they had.

The low point is the most useful place on the chart. It is where a person becomes aware of their own illiteracy. Nobody reaches it by talking. You reach it by studying until the subject pushes back.

The flat-earther archetype never gets there. Reaching the low point costs study, and they spend that time talking instead. So they stay on the peak for years, and the peak is where their audience finds them.

In July 2015 a New Zealander named Nigel Richards won the French-language world Scrabble championship in Belgium. He does not speak French. He spent about nine weeks memorising the French Scrabble word list, then beat every French speaker in the field. A friend of his said he learnt the words and would not know what they mean.

In 2024 he did it again in Spanish, winning 23 of his 24 games at the Spanish world championship without speaking Spanish.

Richards is honest about what he has. He knows the letters of every word and makes no claim past the board. Nobody hands him a microphone and asks him to explain French.

A spelling bee child is the same case at a smaller size. They can spell epistemology and photosynthesis letter by letter and never slip. Ask what either word means and you may get a shrug. Nobody in the hall mistakes the child for a philosopher or a biologist.

The flat-earther archetype is that child grown up, and they do what Richards never does. They lecture. They have the vocabulary: quantum, dopamine, frequencies, first principles, do your own research. They say the words in the right order, and an audience that does not know the subject hears a scientist. Anyone who does know it hears a spelling bee.

Years inside a subject change how a person sounds. They get slower to answer and quicker to say "it depends". They say "I don't know" without flinching. None of those habits come from memorising words, so the archetype has none of them.

Everyone is ignorant of almost everything. A heart surgeon may know nothing of the fiqh of inheritance, and a mufti nothing of valve repair. Neither of them is illiterate.

The illiterate is the one who cannot measure their own ignorance.

They do not know, and they do not know that they do not know. Muslim scholars had a name for this, jahl murakkab, compound ignorance. Simple ignorance knows it is missing something and goes looking for a teacher. Compound ignorance thinks it is the teacher.

On the chart, the low point is where the measuring starts. Before it, the person has no ruler.

A ten-year-old has no way to tell a scholar from a spelling bee. Certainty sounds like knowledge, and a speaker who never says "I don't know" sounds like the cleverest person alive.

A wrong fact is one correction away. The bigger loss is the method, which the child copies: answer everything, never pause, treat doubt as weakness. With this switch on, channels built around that method stop arriving.

Malik ibn Anas was the imam of Madinah, and died there in 179 AH, 795 CE. People travelled from across the Muslim world to ask him questions. His student Abd al-Rahman ibn Mahdi reports what happened when one of them arrived.

A man came to Malik and said, "Abu Abdullah, I have come to you from six months' journey away. The people of my land sent me with a question to ask you."

"Ask," said Malik.

The man asked. Malik said, "I do not know it well."

The man had crossed six months of road for this answer. He said, "Then what do I tell the people of my land when I go back to them?"

Malik said, "Tell them: Malik ibn Anas says he does not know it well."

تقول لهم: قال مالك بن أنس: لا أحسن

Ibn Abi Hatim, al-Jarh wa al-Ta'dil 1/18. Ibn Abd al-Barr, Jami' Bayan al-'Ilm wa Fadlih 2/838.

It was not a one-off. Al-Haytham ibn Jamil watched Malik being asked forty-eight questions. To thirty-two of them he answered, "I do not know."

Malik learned it from his own teacher, Ibn Hurmuz, who said a scholar should leave their students "I do not know" as an inheritance, so it becomes a principle in the students' hands. When one of them is asked about something they do not know, they say it.

Ibn Abd al-Barr, al-Intiqa, and Jami' Bayan al-'Ilm wa Fadlih.

Set Malik beside the chart. He was the most knowledgeable man in Madinah, and the one quickest to say he did not know. That is the plateau. The traveller came expecting the peak, an answer to everything, and Malik would not give it.

His reply had six months of road to travel back, and it carried more than an answer would have. The people who sent the question learned what a scholar sounds like.

Listen for "I don't know". The flat-earther archetype never says it.