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Donald Rumsfield summed this up nicely: > There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are th

Donald Rumsfield summed this up nicely: > 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 do not know we don't know. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns

qwerty_asdf 13y ago
It's quoted in the article, and the article draws a good rationale for why our own confidence shrinks in the face of awkward self-awareness. Nevertheless, whenever I feel like I'm confronting bullshit artistry on a profound and deliberate scale, Donald Rumsfeld is my yard stick, and a distorted image of his smirking face is conjured in my mind's eye, and replaces the bullshit artist's face, and that quote rings through my head with lots of reverb and phased, flanged echo. The next unit of measurement in scales of bullshit artistry, in terms of greater precision and smaller units, is Bill Clinton's debate regarding the meaning of "is": It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the—if he—if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton#Independent_counsel_investigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton#In... The conversion ratio between Rumsfelds and Clinton-Lewinskies is 1 Rumsfeld = 1 Mega-Clinton-Lewinsky.
d23 13y ago
It'd be a nicer quote if it wasn't tainted by the fact that it was used to bullshit a nation into a war we didn't need to fight.
deleted 13y ago
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primitive_type 13y ago
I can't see why Rumsfeld is given credit for this, when Plato / Socrates essentially summed up the same idea thousands of years prior: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

qwerty_asdf 13y ago

It's quoted in the article, and the article draws a good rationale for why our own confidence shrinks in the face of awkward self-awareness. Nevertheless, whenever I feel like I'm confronting bullshit artistry on a profound and deliberate scale, Donald Rumsfeld is my yard stick, and a distorted image of his smirking face is conjured in my mind's eye, and replaces the bullshit artist's face, and that quote rings through my head with lots of reverb and phased, flanged echo. The next unit of measurement in scales of bullshit artistry, in terms of greater precision and smaller units, is Bill Clinton's debate regarding the meaning of "is": It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the—if he—if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton#Independent_counsel_investigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton#In... The conversion ratio between Rumsfelds and Clinton-Lewinskies is 1 Rumsfeld = 1 Mega-Clinton-Lewinsky.

d23 13y ago

It'd be a nicer quote if it wasn't tainted by the fact that it was used to bullshit a nation into a war we didn't need to fight.

deleted 13y ago

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primitive_type 13y ago

I can't see why Rumsfeld is given credit for this, when Plato / Socrates essentially summed up the same idea thousands of years prior: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing