This quote confuses me. At first I read it as a restatement of the famous Lord Kelvin quote on the topic -- if you don't have numbers, your understanding "is meager and unsatisfactory." Hooray for that as far as it goes. But the second half seems to suggest, reversing another famous quote, that it is better to be precisely wrong than vaguely correct.
I favour D'Arcy Thompson's view. If you are precisely wrong, it will be easy for evidence to refute you and make you less wrong. But if you are already vaguely right, how will you attain to being precisely right? How will you discover that you are actually vaguely wrong, if your wiggle room lets you explain away contrary evidence? As Francis Bacon wrote, "Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion."
Being vaguely right is only better when you need to decide an action now and have no opportunity to improve your knowledge. But being pr...
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.