The first one has to do with whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. And my trick that I use is very easy. If you ask him intelligent questionsthat is, penetrating, interested, honest, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questionsthen he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naive questions. If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesnt know the answer, if he is an honest man. It is important to appreciate that. And I think that I can illustrate one unscientific aspect of the world which would be probably very much better if it were more scientific. It has to do with politics. 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 awaybang, bang, bang. Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through. What are you going to do about the farm problem? Well, I dont know. I used to be a general, and I dont 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 cant tell you ahead of time what conclusion, but
I can give you some of the principles Ill try to usenot 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., etc.
Now such a man would never get anywhere in this country, I think. Its 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. Its all generated from the very beginning (maybethis is a simple analysis). Its 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.
Now we try another item that comes in the sciencesI give only one or two illustrations of each of the general ideasand that is how to deal with uncertainty. There have been a lot of jokes made about ideas of uncertainty. I would like to remind you that you can be pretty sure of things even though you are uncertain, that you dont have to be so in-the-middle, in fact not at all in-the-middle. People say to me, Well, how can you teach your children what is right and wrong if you dont know? Because Im pretty sure of whats right and wrong. Im not absolutely sure; some experiences may change my mind. But I know what I would expect to teach them. But, of course, a child wont learn what you teach him.
I would like to mention a somewhat technical idea, but its the way, you see, we have to understand how to handle uncertainty. How does something move from being almost certainly false to being almost certainly true? How does experience change? How do you handle the changes of your certainty with experience? And its rather complicated, technically, but Ill give a rather simple, idealized example.
You have, we suppose, two theories about the way something is going to happen, which I will call Theory A and Theory B. Now it gets complicated. Theory A and Theory B. Before you make any observations, for some reason or other, that is, your past experiences and other observations and intuition and so on, suppose that you are very much more certain of Theory A than of Theory Bmuch more sure. But suppose that the thing that you are going to observe is a test. According to Theory A, nothing should happen. According to Theory B, it should turn blue. Well, you make the observation, and it turns sort of a greenish. Then you look at Theory A, and you say, Its very unlikely, and you turn to Theory B, and you say, Well, it should have turned sort of blue, but it wasnt impossible that it should turn sort of greenish color. So the result of this observation, then, is that Theory A is getting weaker, and Theory B is getting stronger. And if you continue to make more tests, then the odds on Theory B increase. Incidentally, it is not right to simply repeat the same test over and over and over and over, no matter how many times you look and it still looks greenish, you havent made up your mind yet. But if you find a whole lot of other things that distinguish Theory A from Theory B that are different, then by accumulating a large number of these, the odds on Theory B increase.