"A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage"
About this Quote
McNamara’s line lands like a cool splash of bureaucratic realism: tools don’t absolve you of thinking, and they rarely make you smarter on their own. By pairing the computer with the pencil, he strips the machine of its mystique. The analogy is blunt on purpose. A pencil can extend your capacity to write, revise, and organize thought, but it can’t supply literacy. A computer can accelerate calculation, modeling, and record-keeping, but it can’t manufacture judgment. The point isn’t anti-technology; it’s anti-credulity.
The kicker is the second sentence, which punctures a fashionable fantasy: that doing things “without the pencil” (without intermediating tools, without process, without what looks like friction) is inherently superior. McNamara is defending the unglamorous infrastructure of decision-making: drafts, checks, constraints, and feedback loops. In a culture that loves immediacy, he’s arguing that mediation is often the advantage.
Context matters. McNamara was a systems-minded administrator who lived through the seductions and limits of quantification, most notoriously in Vietnam-era metrics-driven strategy. Read with that history, the quote becomes a quiet warning from someone who watched data and models gain moral authority they didn’t deserve. Computers can optimize what you ask them to optimize; they cannot tell you whether the goal is sane, humane, or even coherent. The subtext is accountability: when judgment fails, you can’t point to the machine like it made the call.
The kicker is the second sentence, which punctures a fashionable fantasy: that doing things “without the pencil” (without intermediating tools, without process, without what looks like friction) is inherently superior. McNamara is defending the unglamorous infrastructure of decision-making: drafts, checks, constraints, and feedback loops. In a culture that loves immediacy, he’s arguing that mediation is often the advantage.
Context matters. McNamara was a systems-minded administrator who lived through the seductions and limits of quantification, most notoriously in Vietnam-era metrics-driven strategy. Read with that history, the quote becomes a quiet warning from someone who watched data and models gain moral authority they didn’t deserve. Computers can optimize what you ask them to optimize; they cannot tell you whether the goal is sane, humane, or even coherent. The subtext is accountability: when judgment fails, you can’t point to the machine like it made the call.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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