[bryanrasmussen]

prove that? There are many more ways to be wrong if the question is something uninteresting like how many pennies are there in this jar, sure, but if the question is something interesting maybe there are the same amount of ways to be wrong or right, however there is, in my experience, a statistical likelihood that wrong answers converge on a few common idiotic ideas.

Relatively clever people will also converge on a number of statistically likely right answers, but I think the really bright people will find right answers nobody else ever suspected and which the moderately intelligent will say "that can't be right, can it?!?", and the really stupid people will still be inside the list of common stupid answers but probably focused on the ones that even moderately intelligent people will think, "huh that has to be wrong".

on edit: I probably should amend that to may find right answers that nobody else ever suspected, sometimes there may be a right answer that is the best right answer among the set of acceptable right answers, although that makes it a less interesting question I suspect.

[slowmovintarget]

For any question, there are nearly an infinite number of statements that either do not apply or make some error in fact, judgement, or conclusion. There are many more ways to be wrong. There will always be more answers that are beyond the context of any given question that we can lump into wrong.

Wrongness even has more categories:

- Fails to address premise

- Contradicts premise

- Fails to match goals

- Cannot be understood

- Makes claims not in evidence

- Based on claims not in evidence

- Is deliberately false

- Assumes impossible outcomes

- Assumes impossible preconditions

- Is untimely

- ...

"What should we do to pass the time?"

"We could go hang ourselves..."

You list three categories of being "right" for an answer, but each one has narrower possibilities than the next: Pragmatic (immediate), strategic, and innovative (novel solution). Each of these categories has fewer possible formulations than the categories for being wrong.

[bryanrasmussen]

>For any question, there are nearly an infinite number of statements that either do not apply or make some error in fact, judgement, or conclusion.

Q: should one vote for Trump A: No, because it will distract from his duties to distribute toys to good children once a year.

Is that a wrong answer or a right answer, assuming that one agrees on should not vote for Trump.

At any rate let us put it in the set of wrong answers, is it a wrong answer that will ever actually be given in seriousness to the question? Sure it is a potentially wrong answer to the question, as is "2 + 2 equals 5" but while potentially wrong is it ever going to be wrong in actuality.

The set of potential wrong answers to any question is infinite, the set of actual answers probably are not infinite, and as I noted from my experience seems to actually converge on a normative set of wrong / stupid answers.

> each one has narrower possibilities than the next: Pragmatic (immediate), strategic, and innovative (novel solution).

given your use of potential answers that are wrong to show how that set is much bigger I would think you would see that the innovative is probably bigger than immediate (depending on constraints of problem) and also unknowable.

>"What should we do to pass the time?" shows a question

>"We could go hang ourselves..." shows not a serious attempt to answer the question, in my experience, but a refusal to consider the question important enough to answer.

[slowmovintarget]

Estragon was fully serious in his answer to Vladimir, wrong as it was nonetheless. Vladimir was not at first convinced of the wrongness of the answer, and they spent a fair bit of time debating about how to hang themselves and who should go first until they decided it was a wrong answer.

But the original statement was simple: "There are more ways to be wrong than there are to be right." You took issue with this, but if you're willing to grant that the set of wrongness is infinite, we're one step away from a debating proof (pumps fist: internet points!). If you'll concede that the ways to be right in answer to the question are finite, which I'd assert even in the innovative space, they are, then the statement holds.

At any rate, thank you for the discussion.