Wisdom Quote by John Tuley

The line is a quiet demolition of a modern status fetish: precision as a proxy for intelligence. Tuley’s point isn’t anti-expertise; it’s anti-misdirection. An “approximate” answer implies humility, error bars, and a willingness to revise. A “right question” implies that the thinker has done the harder work first: framing the problem so that any answer actually connects to reality. The quote flatters curiosity over certainty, and it does so with a neat asymmetry: “far more than” signals that being wrong in a sophisticated way isn’t just a little bad; it’s categorically worse than being roughly right.

The subtext is a critique of institutions that reward the appearance of rigor. It’s a jab at meetings where metrics are immaculate but irrelevant, at research that optimizes what’s measurable rather than what matters, at punditry that produces confident numbers on top of shaky premises. “Precise answer” evokes spreadsheets, models, and technocratic polish; “wrong one” punctures that authority in four words.

Contextually, the sentiment sits comfortably in scientific method culture, engineering pragmatism, and good journalism: define the question, test the frame, then refine. It also reads like a warning against algorithmic thinking, where the system delivers exact outputs while the inputs quietly bake in the bias. The quote works because it shifts prestige from the final decimal place to the first principle, reminding us that the most dangerous mistake is not being uncertain - it’s being certain about something that doesn’t matter.