Forty years of opening things people said couldn't open

There's this argument going around that if we knew all the inputs, we'd know the output, so nobody's really choosing anything. I spent forty years with my fingers inside a lock mechanism, feeling where the pins bind and where they don't. Nobody on that bench ever convinced me they knew how it was going to turn out — least of all me. Maybe that's just old-salt stubbornness, but it's the kind I trust.