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Imagine you are having a test in high school, the teacher says "you have two minutes until I take your test". You are doing the last question and you are clearly wrong, you have no time to redo the question. what should you do? my theory says that you should try to make one of your calculations wrong, because if you are one hundred percent sure you are wrong and you are making a mistake at being wrong, than you increase your chances of being right. So to make it short it is better to be wrong twice then being wrong once if you are trying to get the right answer. If someone want to help me prove this it would be great i am just a high school kid Thanks for reading, comment your thoughts.

Yanko
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yuvi1
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  • If the last answer is the only thing that matters (it usually is not) then your claim is correct and your reasoning is good (there's no much to prove, since if you are 100% wrong you can't get any worse than that). – Yanko Mar 15 '19 at 16:52
  • Prove its wrong than – yuvi1 Mar 15 '19 at 17:01
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    The thing is in real life this will never happen. You will never know that you are completely wrong. And likewise you can not assume that your reasoning (with a false premise) will be utterly accurate and lead to false conclusion. Also a faulty premise with correct reasoning does not always lead to a false conclusion. I think as a logic puzzle, your idea is intriguing and worth talking about and analyzing. But as practical advice... not so much. – fleablood Mar 15 '19 at 17:01
  • It really depends an the question, what you are attempting to solve, what logic you are using and what your mistake is. I.E. it's completely situational. But yes, it is easy to set up examples where you are correct. But one can come up with scenarios where you are not as well. – fleablood Mar 15 '19 at 17:04
  • So if you are taking a test and your final answer is "george washington invented pasta carbonara" and a voice of God whispers in your ear "That is certainly wrong. You will get zero" and you wonder if you should change it to "Babe Ruth was a purple elephant" then... yes, you should change it. No point in being certainly wrong. But.... how could you ever know that you are 100% wrong? – fleablood Mar 15 '19 at 17:09
  • If its an equation and the result is in a certain range of a known wrong answer, than you know its wrong but that isn't the meat of my question the meat is if you are wrong once its better being wrong twice – yuvi1 Mar 15 '19 at 17:16
  • You are hoping that when you try to be wrong, there is a chance that you will fail and get it right? This seems to be a desperate and, in most cases, hopeless strategy. Rather like the theory that flying is easy: just jump from the top of a building and miss the ground. – badjohn Mar 15 '19 at 17:37
  • Im saying that if you are at the rooftop already its better to miss the ground – yuvi1 Mar 15 '19 at 17:41

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I agree with the comments, this seems desperate. 0 is close to a known wrong answer to $x^2-1=0$, but it's also only 1 away from 2 correct answers, -1 on one side, and 1 on the other. If it were conditional on other information , it would be like the monty hall problem. It really depends on what that alteration is, you may lose points, simply for your path between steps being unclear.

  • Note: I once got marked wrong and had to argue with a teacher for points in pharmacy, simply because she could not tell black specs from blue ink. –  Mar 16 '19 at 00:23