Re: Is one wrong answer more wrong?
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sure one is more wrong.
if a cashier overcharges you a dollar, and your buddy 2 dollars,
did one of you get overcharged more?
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He gets overcharged more, but that doesn't mean the cashier was "more wrong" in his case. In fact, he may have been "less wrong" by some standards. What if your true total is $.75, while your buddy's total is $214.99?
Another example. Imagine that I'm measuring the distance to a certain star, and so is my friend. I like the number 50, so I guess "50 parsecs." My friend works out some calculations, and they're almost perfect - but he makes a careless mistake and comes up with 70 parsecs as his answer. The actual distance of the star is 45 parsecs. Am I more right?
And what if my answer to 2+2 is 8? Or 40? Maybe -4? At least these are all divisible by 2, and have a meaningful relationship to the correct answer of 4. Can we say that 5 is "more correct" because it happens to be in closer proximity to the correct answer? What if having an even number, or a number with the digit "4" in it, is important to our application?
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