John von Neumann Quotes
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.
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 been asked how to solve the housing problem of the Great Recession. Rarely do major public figures admit ignorance on a major issue. Even if they have no specific solutions, they provide general platitudes and further describe the solution. If they are politicians, they then tend to blame the opposition for the existence of the problem.
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. Von Neumann was generally regarded as the foremost mathematician of his time and said to be "the last representative of the great mathematicians". He integrated pure and applied sciences.
