Science Quote by John Tukey

Tukey’s line is a quiet rebuke to a certain kind of scientific vanity: the belief that precision, by itself, is proof of seriousness. He’s drawing a hard distinction between accuracy and relevance, and suggesting that modern research culture too often optimizes the wrong variable. An “exact answer” can be mathematically immaculate yet strategically useless if it’s attached to a question that’s only a loose proxy for what we actually care about. In other words: you can measure the wrong thing flawlessly and still be wrong in any way that matters.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “Approximate” shows up twice, but only one version is rewarded. Tukey isn’t romanticizing hand-waving; he’s elevating disciplined approximation aimed at the real target. The subtext is deeply pragmatic: science and policy operate under constraints, noise, messy human systems, and incomplete data. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make your work purer, it makes it brittle.

Context matters here. Tukey helped invent modern statistical practice and exploratory data analysis, pushing against the mid-century temptation to treat statistics as a ritual of hypothesis tests and p-values. His quote anticipates today’s replication crises and metric-driven decision-making: entire pipelines built to extract “exact” significance from convenient datasets while the underlying question (What causes this? What helps people?) stays vaguely defined.

It’s also a cultural critique of academia’s reward structures. Journals love clean answers; careers are made on technical virtuosity. Tukey is arguing for intellectual courage instead: the willingness to wrestle with the right problem even when it refuses to yield a tidy, publishable number.