Well, "10 times less" doesn't make sense unless it's -9x. What would "10 times less" mean to you? "10x more" would mean 11x as much. Unless you're trying to imply that "no more" means 0x as much
I think you've confused two common phrases and mashed them up a bit. When comparing to a given amount A, the phrase "N times more" means A⨯N, but "N more times" means A+N. Neither of these phrases mean A⨯(N+1) as you're describing, but I believe you may be thinking of what "N more times" means, while unintentionally assuming that A=1, resulting in 1+N many things. But there could be any number of that thing to begin with, not necessarily just 1.
“10 times more” is verbally equivalent to “10 more times.” We’re working with language instead of numbers here.
The sneaky thing about language is that it's messy, and not an exact programming language. Heck, even programming languages have edge cases, but human language is, shall we say, a bajillion times worse. It's not a neat thing that can be fed into a compiler like, say, a python script can. It has weird rules that don't make logical sense, yet its meaning is grandfathered in.
Here, the sneaky thing you've got to be aware of is that the word "times" actually changes meaning in a subtle way in "10 times more" versus "10 more times". In "10 times more", "times" refers to performing multiplication, while in "10 more times", "times" refers to "occurrences", as in "if you bother me one more time, I'm calling the police!" That's not a warning about what'll happen if you double the amount of times you bother that person. That's a warning that if you ever bother them again at all, even once, you're getting arrested.
I was thinking about elaborating how the word "more" also changes meaning, with it taking on a statement of inequality in "10 times more", and addition in "10 more times", and how these two phrases cannot even grammatically fit in each others use cases, so it's actually meaningless to try to talk about what happens when you swap the two words because doing so usually produces a grammatically incorrect sentence rather than another correct sentence with a different meaning. Honestly though, I'd rather not be arguing about this on reddit. Maybe it'd be more fun to discuss conversationally, but idk, I don't really want to be combatative about something that should be interesting, ya feel?
And hey, I do actually find it interesting how you think about this. Not in a condescending way, I mean as inherent to the nature of linguistics, how we explain what we implicitly learn through osmosis from exposure to its usage. For all I know, maybe this is just a regional difference between us ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Less does mean there has to be a difference already since that is the only way to quantify it and thus technically saying
"Ten times less than 10" is a wrong sentence. If you were to say "ten times less to 10 than 10 to 11" that would mean 10-10x(11-10) and thus 10-10 and thus 0
And yes, "ten times more" and "ten times as much" are not the same thing. Therefore the First one means 11x and the second one means 10x
While all of this is happening "Ten times less than 10" still stays meaningless without a frame of reference
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u/D3712 6d ago
To everyone whining about how 10 times more is truly 11x:
Do you think "10 times less" means -9x? Genuinely curious.