Wronger than wrong
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“”It’s a little wrong to say a tomato is a vegetable, it’s very wrong to say it’s a suspension bridge.
|—Stuart Bloom, The Big Bang Theory, episode The Hofstadter Isotope|
The phrase "wronger than wrong" was coined by Isaac Asimov in The Relativity of Wrong, (expanded and popularised by Michael Shermer, who called it "Asimov's Axiom".) Wronger than wrong describes any idea that equates errors that clearly aren't equal. The example originally given is that a belief in a flat earth is wrong, but a belief in a spherical earth is also wrong (as it's actually a distorted spheroid) — however, saying that a spherical and flat earth are equally wrong, is more wrong than both those errors combined. Blurring concepts into the same category of "wrong" or "improbable", despite their obvious difference in the magnitude of how "wrong" and "improbable" they are, is an example of the continuum fallacy (the "fallacy of gray").
This phrase has important implications regarding the nature of scientific theories and aptly describes how the scientific method builds up knowledge and understanding — theories may change and adapt, but calling them outright wrong is not necessarily the right way to go about it. One reviewer of Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong asserted that such thinking was a great tool for "arming oneself against the inevitable anti-science attack that one often hears — [that] theories are always preliminary and science really doesn't 'know' anything".
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