That Mercury is closer than Venus on average is very intuitive: it just never gets very far away from us due to its orbit being so close to the sun. Makes perfe

That Mercury is closer than Venus on average is very intuitive: it just never gets very far away from us due to its orbit being so close to the sun. Makes perfect intuitive sense to me. But this is not a math or intuition problem, it's about ambiguity on what exactly is meant with "closer" – you can have multiple definitions of that: "closest at this particular point in time", "closest at any point in time", "closest on average". None of these are more correct than any other.