Skip to main content

"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."

Over the past few years I have heard a reasonably famous quote from a controversial character being bandied around by people as an example of political nonsense. Without wanting to get drawn into the relative merit (or otherwise) of one Donald Rumsfeld, I cannot help but feel that he gets a raw deal on this score.

You see, I have never really understood why people think it is nonsense. I am not sure whether my brain is hardwired to think in a convoluted and ambiguous way (it could be true, I have been accused of this, and I have also spent time locked in rooms with French post-modern feminist thinkers), but from the moment that I heard it, I couldn't see the fuss made about the quote. it seemed to make perfect sense to me right off the bat.

Let's go over the quote again before I move on:

...there are known "knowns". There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.

There it is. Simple really. Straightforward when you think about it. Perhaps not as succinct as we could crunch it down to, but probably concise enough given the universality of the idea. To break it down, I am going to try and use the example of alcohol and public policy.

  1. Known 'knowns'. This is the easiest part. For example, we know that a lot of people drink alcohol, and that some demographics drink more than others. We have collated plenty of hard data on this.
  2. Known unknowns. Now, we know about quite a few of the factors that influence why certain people drink, and why people drink the way that they do or why people drink the quantity that they do. But we also know that there are other factors that appear to influence behaviour in one way or another that we do not really understand (for example, why do some girls binge more than others if, demographically, they are the same?). However, in a public policy sense, we at least know that we do not know. Thus, we can try and find out.
  3. Unknown unknowns. Who knows? If we knew them, we'd know them. For example, in the last few years some researchers have explored the notion that people are genetically predisposed to consuming alcohol at risky levels. That was not really foreseen years ago. As Mr Rumsfeld says, there are always things that we are not aware that we don't know. The best that can be done about this is be aware of that fact ("we don't know everything"), and be prepared to react when we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns (that is, when we become aware of the blind spots in our thinking).

See, clear as mud!

Comments

Petrea Burchard said…
It might have helped if he'd had you as a speech writer, or if we'd had you to translate. ;)
Anonymous said…
I agree with Petrea....your translatioon made perfect sense...Rumsfield...not on any day I remember.
Dina said…
It just scares me how many unknown unknown certain big countries have.
Kim said…
I'm with Petrea! Thought provoking and great post.
-Kim
Seattle Daily Photo
Kris McCracken said…
We all have unknown unknowns. I guess the bigger you are, the broader the scope, and (probably) the wider the potential to not know that you don't know something!

[Oh dear, now I’m talking like him...]

Popular posts from this blog

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

Theme Thursday again, and this one is rather easy. I am Tasmanian, you see, and aside from being all around general geniuses - as I have amply described previously - we are also very familiar with the concept of WATER. Tasmania is the ONLY island state of an ISLAND continent. That means, we're surrounded by WATER. That should help explain why I take so many photographs of water . Tasmania was for a long time the place where the British (an island race terrified of water) sent their poor people most vile and horrid criminals. The sort of folk who would face the stark choice of a death sentence , or transportation to the other end of the world. Their catalogue of crimes is horrifying : stealing bread assault stealing gentlemen's handkerchiefs drunken assault being poor affray ladies being overly friendly with gentlemen for money hitting people having a drink and a laugh public drunkenness being Irish Fenian terrorist activities being Catholic religious subversion. ...

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

This is the moon. Have I mentioned how much I adore the zoom on my camera? It's Theme Thursday you see, and after last week's limp effort, I have been thinking about how I might redeem myself. Then I clicked on the topic and discover that it was BUTTON. We've been hearing a lot about the moon in the past couple of weeks. Apparently some fellas went up there and played golf and what-not forty-odd years ago. The desire to get to the moon, however, was not simply about enhancing opportunities for Meg and Mog titles and skirting local planning by-laws in the construction of new and innovative golf courses. No, all of your Sputniks , "One small steps" and freeze dried ice cream was about one thing , and one thing only : MAD Now, I don't mean mad in terms of "bloke breaks record for number of scorpions he can get up his bum", no I mean MAD as in Mutual assured destruction . When I was a young man you see, there was a lot of talk about the type of m...

But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

Can you believe that it is time for Theme Thursday already? Today we are not talking chocolate , toddlers , mess or ignominy . No, today we're dealing with ANIMAL . Now I could have posted a picture of a possum, numbat, wombat, wallaby or any other furry killing machine that roams our fair isle, but I figure that I'd use a far more deadly creature as an example of an animal . Some people - I know them as fools - have chosen to embrace that highfalutin idea that human beans are for some ungodly reason superior to animals. Of course, what these imbeciles seem to forget is that were are simple animals ourselves ! Anyone with a baby, toddler, teenage boy or Queenslander in their household could tell you this. Look at Henry [above]. One chocolate frog in the back of the car on a sunny day and all of a sudden it's Elagabalus meets Bacchus for a quick shandy in the Serengeti and we're down on all fours carrying on like a cat in heat. Fair dinkum, anyone who chooses to ...