Carveth Reed, a British logician and philosopher is attributed with the quote, “It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong” (sometimes attributed to the economist John Maynard Keynes). This is a useful idiom for a number of problems where information is limited or lacking precision.
For example, in growth investing much of the value of a tech company is in future potential rather than something concrete like historical performance of revenue. It’s not possible to accurately predict the future and so valuations are imprecise. But in this case it’s better to be vaguely right than to try to precisely analyze and be wrong.
See also:
- This sentiment is like a Kalman filter where you still need to do something with imprecise information
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When two people have competing ideas (let’s call them idea A and idea B), it’s common to compromise somewhere between idea A and idea B (let’s call that idea C). The problem is neither person thought idea C would work to begin with otherwise they would have argued for it. Worse, both sides will harbor some resentment that idea C doesn’t work. Compromise leads to the worst outcome—a third idea that doesn’t work and resentment from both people.