Mary Cheney Quotes
Early numbers are always wrong.
Cheney, Mary. Now It's My Turn: A Daughter's Chronicle of Political Life. Threshold Editions, 2006.
There is a great tendency in politics and government operations to get extremely precise numbers because political opponents will always attack all numbers that do not support their positions. The result is that typically, so much time and money goes into trying to get precision, that by the time the numbers are good enough the opportunity to make the right policy decision will have passed. Much information that bears on an issue is never used because it is not precise enough while the precise information is not particularly relevant. See {619763} for a similar related quote.
He had standard barometers made and distributed widely, accumulating the data and predicting the weather. Although crude and inaccurate by modern standards, his system was a vast improvement over earlier efforts. Today, we use the term for economics and politics as well.
This quotation illustrates a scientific principle that is at the heart of several political issues. Specifically the debate over whether creationism should be taught in science classes along with evolution. The major reason that almost all serious scientists (religious and secular both) oppose teaching creationism is that it is not a “falsifiable” set of statements—that is there is no way to prove it or disprove it. There are scientific statements that can be proved or disproved but have not yet been so. To be a scientific statement, it must be falsifiable—logically provable or disprovable. And this is the logic which the Federal Courts have used in ruling that creationism may not be taught in science classes in public schools. This quotation, Pauli is saying that the paper is not falsifiable—it cannot be proved and cannot be refuted. As such it is not scientific and belongs in the realm of philosophy, literature, theology, or other disciplines, but not science. An example of non-falsifiable statements are: “Blue is the most attractive color.”; “Freedom is essential to capitalism”; “Monarchy is more efficient than theocracy”.
This is a reference to mathematical models.
He is absolutely right, but unfortunately made this statement several years after he served as the Fed Chairman. He never made a statement like this when he and his colleagues made their policies based on their economic forecasting. Central bankers have generally felt that one of their jobs was to give the people confidence in the nation’s banking system and economy and the admission that much policy making was based on “coin toss” forecasting.
Mary Claire Cheney is the younger daughter of Dick Cheney, the former vice president of the United States, and his wife, Lynne Cheney. She is politically conservative and is involved with a number of political action groups. She married her wife Heather Poe in 2012, and in 2013 was a signatory to an amicus curiae brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of same-sex marriage during the Hollingsworth v. Perry case.
