David Mamet Quotes
The poker player learns that sometimes both science and common sense are wrong; that the bumblebee can fly; that, perhaps, one should never trust an expert; that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of by those with an academic bent.
Mamet, David. Writing in Restaurants. Viking Penguin, 1986.
This quotation was from a mathematician who was in the midst of the expansion of mathematics in the late 19th century to include the then rapid and rich development of Probability. This required mathematicians, scientists and others who would use the new mathematics to think in a very different way. For the existing mathematicians his quote clearly states the dilemma for them. Today, scientists and mathematicians have little trouble with “laws of probability” and realize that Probability is governed and controlled in the same way as other fields of mathematics; they are comfortable with different results occurring under the exact same experimental conditions, and those different results are unpredictable in any particular instance, but exactly predictable in terms of frequency of each possible occurrence. This makes Quantum Mechanics rational. However, few non scientists have had their thinking expanded and are comfortable with this thinking. Law and public policy makers are particularly vexed by not being able to think and work in this paradigm where consequences of something can be described for a population precisely, and yet be impossible to describe for any particular individual. This will improve over time, as politicians and other community leaders become better educated mathematically and scientifically.
This principle, so important to the philosophy of science, was a major component of the philosophy of Spinoza—the part that had him excommunicated by the 3 major religions of the era.
David Alan Mamet is an American playwright, film director, screenwriter and author. He won a Pulitzer Prize and received Tony nominations for his plays Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988). He first gained critical acclaim for a trio of off-Broadway 1970s plays: The Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and American Buffalo. His plays Race and The Penitent, respectively, opened on Broadway in 2009 and previewed off-Broadway in 2017.
