It's Simple, Really--Was Re: Plain English Awards - Rumsfeld Honoured

[msbeadsley]

>"Reports that say something hasn't happened are always interesting to
>me because, as we know, there are known knowns - there are things we
>know we know.  We also know there are known unknowns - that is to say
>we know there are some things we do not know.  But there are also
>unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know."

> Iggy here:
> 
> How scared should I be by the fact that I understood that perfectly 
> and wasn't confused by it at all?

Me, too, Iggy! To translate as best I can:

> "Reports that say something hasn't happened are always interesting 
> to me..."

I took this to mean: "It's (nearly?) impossible to prove a negative, 
so what do such reports really mean?"

> "...as we know, there are known knowns - there are things we 
> know we know..."

There are facts about which we agree, that are not in dispute, that 
make up our accepted picture of *how things are*.

> We also know there are known unknowns - that is to say we know 
> there are some things we do not know

We have acknowledged gaps in our information: for instance the 
precise whereabouts of certain individuals we'd really like to locate 
(and eradicate).

> "But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we 
> don't know."

Information has to have a context to be useful. Otherwise the answers 
are just random bits of data with no relevance. For instance, 
noticing the pre-9/11 pilot training some Muslim men were undergoing 
might have been useful; knowing that many or most of them were 
graduates of radical Islamic jihadic schools could have been *very* 
useful.

(Some possibly helpful analogy/background: Sometimes we learn things 
organically, like our mother tongue. Repetition and the need to 
communicate with the big people who bring the baby bottle and change 
our diapers and hopefully cuddle us all come together and gradually 
we acquire, we grow an understanding, of our language in context. We 
also learn things more deliberately, like a second language later, 
which we learn by attaching each "foreign" word to the the one we 
already know, thereby giving it a context at one remove. (Hence the 
notion of getting to the point of "thinking in (for instance) French" 
for a native English speaker (as opposed to constantly translating in 
ones head).)

With intelligence (the military/CIA kind; not always an oxymoron) we 
have to figure out what's important and what isn't; resolving all the 
pixels into a picture is the hard part, because each one (we know 
it's a word; we just have no idea what the word means) has to be 
manually manipulated until the picture becomes clear.  Until we know 
how and where the bits fit in, they're (to go a step further and then 
come back), they're "unknown knowns"; and so the bits we don't have 
yet (answers for which we have not yet discovered the questions) are 
the "unknown unknowns."

Simple, yes? (Is that even close to what you got, Iggy?)

Sandy