'It is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong' - is a useful piece of advice. Of late, I have been postulating in my mind a similar-sounding approximately-precisely principle, which goes:
'It is better to know the answer to a meaningful question approximately than to know the answer to a useless question precisely.'
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3 comments:
Hm hm.. that's very interessting but honestly i have a hard time understanding it... wonder what others have to say..
It takes a lot of intelligence to deal with uncertainty. Limited people would prefer to be precise about nonessentials. I mean the kind that would say a broken clock is better than one running late because it shows perfect time twice a day! I just love the comment made by Scott Fitzgerald in "The Crack-Up. "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
I like Scott Fitzgerald's comment, although I would refer to the quality as tolerance.
The path to knowledge is riddled with contradictions, and the journey is a humbling one. No wonder, Bertrand Russell would say: Those with knowledge lack confidence and vice versa.
Life is full of difficult questions. In my reckoning, the ability to accept that we don't have all the answers is more admirable than knowing a few answers.
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