The Knowns

I knew that something was bothering me about it. Whenever I would hear talk of Rumsfeld's famous statement concerning the epistemological problems involved with the fog of war, I had a feeling of unease. And I don't mean the usual kind of "oh he's suck a dick" thing that most people cite, I mean I felt like there was some sort of awkward asymmetry, or unresolved incompleteness in peoples' discussion of the quote. Like when someone says "I was so mad..." and the necessary "that..." never comes.

I assumed that what I was missing was the full quote, in context. I am probably not hearing the whole thing, I told myself, and some part of it must imply a larger whole which will certainly yeild closure in this matter. Whenever I heard about the Unknowns, it was always in some sound-bytey clip on the radio or tv and referred to various other things, so it was not out of line to imagine that the clip was partial.

But I was wrong, here's the whole of what he said:

Reports that say that 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. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

Those of you who studied math will certainly recall that the number of arrangements of different elements is x! (or maybe that should actually be (x+1)!, I forget how that dang factorial key actually works) where x is the number of variables, two in this case, "knowns" and "unknowns." So four all together. Rumsfeld mentions these three possible permutations:

Known Knowns
Known Unknowns
Unknown Unknowns

and although I didn't know at first that it was the source of my discomfort, there was another known factor: the Unknown Knowns.