"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about"
About this Quote
Precision is a kind of intellectual theater: it looks like rigor, it feels like control, and it can fool everyone in the room. Von Neumann’s jab punctures that illusion. He’s not dismissing careful thinking; he’s warning that exactness without understanding is just a higher-resolution way to be wrong.
The line works because it reverses a familiar academic instinct. In math, physics, and economics, precision is usually treated as virtue on its own, a moral upgrade from the messy language of ordinary life. Von Neumann, one of the architects of modern computation and formal modeling, knew better than most how easily formal systems can produce crisp nonsense when the underlying concepts are shaky. You can specify ten decimal places and still be describing a phantom.
Subtext: he’s calling out a particular failure mode of smart people. When you don’t actually grasp the phenomenon, you compensate by tightening the screws on the parts you can control: definitions, notation, assumptions, margins of error. It’s the seduction of the spreadsheet and the proof sketch: if the output looks clean, maybe the thinking was, too. Von Neumann’s line is a prophylactic against that self-deception.
Contextually, it reads like postwar technocratic skepticism in miniature. The mid-century boom in operations research, game theory, and early computing promised to turn uncertainty into solvable problems. Von Neumann helped build that promise, but he also understood its limits: models are only as meaningful as the questions they’re actually answering. The quote is less anti-precision than anti-fake certainty, a reminder that the hardest part isn’t calculating - it’s knowing what you’re calculating about.
The line works because it reverses a familiar academic instinct. In math, physics, and economics, precision is usually treated as virtue on its own, a moral upgrade from the messy language of ordinary life. Von Neumann, one of the architects of modern computation and formal modeling, knew better than most how easily formal systems can produce crisp nonsense when the underlying concepts are shaky. You can specify ten decimal places and still be describing a phantom.
Subtext: he’s calling out a particular failure mode of smart people. When you don’t actually grasp the phenomenon, you compensate by tightening the screws on the parts you can control: definitions, notation, assumptions, margins of error. It’s the seduction of the spreadsheet and the proof sketch: if the output looks clean, maybe the thinking was, too. Von Neumann’s line is a prophylactic against that self-deception.
Contextually, it reads like postwar technocratic skepticism in miniature. The mid-century boom in operations research, game theory, and early computing promised to turn uncertainty into solvable problems. Von Neumann helped build that promise, but he also understood its limits: models are only as meaningful as the questions they’re actually answering. The quote is less anti-precision than anti-fake certainty, a reminder that the hardest part isn’t calculating - it’s knowing what you’re calculating about.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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