[dajohnson89]

I just thought it was to give positive and negative error values the same treatment. Moreover I think that it's debatable that one big error is more important than many small errors. That is conceivably a bad strategy, in some cases -- if most points have low error, do you really want to penalize your candidate function for having a very few bad outliers? To me that is no better than giving extra favor to a few points that happen to have low error.