Nature Cannot Be Fooled
"Hitler was plainly not delighted with the possibility that the earth under his rule might be transformed into a glowing star."
"They don't do scientific...they follow the forms...you gather data, you do so and so and so forth but they don't get any laws, they haven't found anything, they haven't got anywhere yet, maybe someday they will but it's not very well developed, but what happens is...even on a more mundane level we get experts on everything."They sound like a sort of scientific experts. They are not scientists. They sit at the typewriter and make up something.. Maybe true but it hasn't been demonstrated one way or the other but they sit there on the typewriter and make up all that stuff as if it's science and then become experts on food, organic foods and so on. There is all kind of myths and pseudoscience all over the place."Now I might be quite wrong, maybe they do know all these things but I don't think I'm wrong. You see, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something and therefore I can't...I see how they get their information and I can't believe that they know it. They haven't done the work necessary, haven't done the checks necessary, haven't done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don't know that this stuff is...and they are intimidating people by it."
"Suppose two politicians are running for president, and one goes through the farm section and is asked, 'What are you going to do about the farm question ?' And he knows right away – bang, bang, bang. Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through. 'What are you going to do about the farm problem ?' 'Well, I don't know. I used to be a general, and I don't know anything about farming."But it seems to me it must be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say that they know how to solve the farm problem. And it must be a hard problem. So the way that I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it, and then to come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it. Now, I can't tell you ahead of time what conclusion, but I can give you some of the principles I'll try to use – not to make things difficult for individual farmers, if there are any special problems we will have to have some way to take care of them,' etc. etc."Now such a man would never get anywhere in this country, I think. It's never been tried, anyway. This is in the attitude of mind of the populace, that they have to have an answer and that a man who gives an answer is better than a man who gives no answer, when the real fact of the matter is, in most cases, it is the other way around.And the result of this of course is that the politician must give an answer. And the result of this is that political promises can never be kept. It is a mechanical fact; it is impossible. The result of that is that nobody believes campaign promises. And the result of that is a general disparaging of politics, a general lack of respect for the people who are trying to solve problems, and so forth.. It's all generated, maybe, by the fact that the attitude of the populace is to try to find the answer instead of trying to find a man who has a way of getting at the answer."
"The current market is one of the most difficult that I've seen in my career as the range of outcomes are so wide. Big picture, you have a global depression with hundreds of millions out of work, offset by 'Project Zimbabwe' and while I think the big guns at the Central Banks ultimately emerge victorious, there are likely to be many scary moments along the way. I want to buy those scary moments, not the afterglow of one of the strongest rallies in market history."As I sit on the beach and mull this over, these are just some of my many concerns; as quarantines end and infection rates go parabolic, will governments lock everyone down again? Will people lock themselves down on their own initiative? How has the pandemic changed how we consume goods? How will new regulations impact businesses? How will the virus impact global trade and movement of people? What happens to a business if the revenue level plateaus at some lower level while many of its expenses are fixed at the old higher level? Sometimes, I look at a set of outcomes and say, 'You know what; I just don't know.'"
"Decision making smothered by bureaucracy became a kind of Russian roulette. . [The shuttle] flies [with O-ring erosion] and nothing happens. Then it is suggested, therefore, that the risk is no longer so high for the next flights. We can lower our standards a little bit because we got away with it last time. You got away with it, but it shouldn't be done over and over again like that."
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."