> Epistemics > Confidence and Calibration > arghXiv:2602.09117
Domain Breadth of Confident Assertion Across Accounts
Abstract: For each of 2,140 accounts we recorded the number of distinct subject domains in which the account advanced a claim marked as certain, using a fourteen-domain scheme fixed before coding. The median is two. The distribution has a long tail: 61 accounts made certain claims in nine or more domains, and 7 in all fourteen. Breadth is uncorrelated with the provision of sources (r = 0.04) and weakly negatively correlated with the provision of a source that can be located (r = -0.21). The 61 accounts in the tail account for 38 per cent of all certainty-marked claims in the corpus and for 3 per cent of the accounts making them. We note that the scheme cannot distinguish an account with unusual breadth of knowledge from an account with unusual breadth of confidence, and that no instrument we are aware of can.