Known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns

Donald Rumsfeld's famous quote and what we should take from it (even if you hate him)

There exists an unfortunate phenomenon today (or perhaps it has always existed) of individuals having two different standards for ideas: a low bar for ideas coming from those they largely agree with (the tribe or the in-group) and an impossibly-high bar for those they disagree with (the out-group). Similarly, this dynamic also manifests when individuals get “cancelled”, which typically leads to the timeless question of whether one can “separate the art from the artist”.

It might already be obvious, but I am on #TeamSeparate — I don’t see why the ideas of an individual have more or less credibility simply because of the individuals actions before or after they generated the ideas (or their unrelated beliefs). I’m hesitant to even name specific examples of this because of easy it is to choose a an example that is off-putting to the majority of people. The name that typically gets me in hot water is Annie Duke. Without going into great detail, Annie has a very checkered past in the poker world (to say the least), but I think her work after leaving poker is extremely good, and no amount of bad behavior changes the value of her contributions.

There is likely a limit to this, however. I highly doubt it will ever be acceptable to say “say what you want about Hitler, but the guy did have some good ideas about…”. But even the Unabomber’s manifesto has some lines that would be celebrated were they to be attributed to Thoreau, Marx, or any number of popular revolutionaries. And that brings me to a quote that I’ve thought about repeatedly since it was uttered by Donald Rumsfeld after 9/11:

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 tends to be the difficult ones.

Now, because this quote is over 20 years old (really? man, I’m old), people may forget how much play it got. Rumsfeld used it in the title of his memoirs, it motivated an entire documentary, and I doubt anyone who isn’t an historian remembers another line uttered by a Secretary of Defense. It feels like it’s in the same ballpark as “read my lips, no new taxes” and “you didn’t build that”. But many discount the profundity of the quote simply because it came from someone in the Bush administration or because it is associated with the war in Iraq, which, while understandable, isn’t a sufficient justification for discarding it.

So why has it stuck with me for all these years? I suppose I should admit that at the time that I first heard the sound bite, I was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who would be voting for Bush in the first presidential election I could vote in two years later. I’d like to think that isn’t a big factor, but I don’t want to fully discount it since I’m sure I was subject to the exact bias I described above. But I have revisited and revised many of my beliefs since 2002, and I haven’t really found myself updating much with regard to this quote.

Quick aside: I’m in a bit of a contemplative phase in my life right now, and I’ve been thinking a lot about happiness, purpose, and motivation. One person that I’ve turned to a lot in the last couple years has been Arthur Brooks. If you’re at all interested in learning more about being happier (or less unhappy, which is actually a different thing according to him), I cannot recommend his stuff enough (start here). Anyway, Arthur talks about the importance of finding meaning and finding purpose (your “why”). This is not easy, nor is it a particularly fun exercise. But a big, galaxy-brain idea that seems to keep following me these days is that we should all probably be doing a lot more things that are hard and/or not fun (save that for another post). So I did this exercise recently, and I realized that one of the things that really drives me — something I would actually die for — is the pursuit of truth. That may seem like something that is trivially true for nearly everyone, but I would push back on that strongly. In my experience, I find that VERY FEW people actually care about what is true and what is not, but I have to admit that I am generally sympathetic to these people. I mean, you have to be a little twisted to wander into an echo chamber and challenge generally accepted mythologies simply because it pains you to see large groups of people believing something that isn’t true. As someone who gave a year of my life to researching COVID, this is probably the best topic that I could cite as an example, and it just happens to be a particularly good one because there are narratives to be violated on both sides of the aisle (as much as it pains me to talk about partisanship in pandemics, this is the reality). On the left, many refuse to accept reasonable criticisms of COVID policy (school closures, for example), deny the early exaggerations of the vaccine’s efficacy in preventing transmission, and/or won’t acknowledge the effect of age or health on COVID’s virulence. On the right, far too many deny the effectiveness of the vaccine, or worse, deny that COVID is even something to be worried about. Neither side has a monopoly on truth, and yet we seem to believe that “our side” is right about everything and the other side is full of idiots.

Back to Rumsfeld. Putting aside the specifics of how one might actually use this “Rumsfeldian matrix”, I think the value of the quote lies in how it primes us to think about what we know (or think we know), what we know we don’t know (and consciously putting more things in this bucket) and what might exist in our blind spots. It’s a goal of mine to bring the idea of epistemic hygiene (read: thinking cleanliness — does your thinking stink?) to the masses, and being forced to confront what you believe (and the confidence in those beliefs) and to acknowledge just how many things you don’t know. Of the three elements in Rumsfeld’s trichotomy, the “unknown unknowns” is undoubtedly the most nebulous, but I think that’s possibly the one that is most deserving of consideration. Think for a second about something important that you’ve changed your mind about recently (if this is a struggle, you’re doing something very, very wrong). Once you have something, consider the fact that you almost certainly were not even able to imagine changing your mind prior to the moment in which you changed it. To me, that feels like something that is less of a “known known” and more of a “unknown unknown” because you didn’t know that you didn’t know.

Now, how would your approach to your beliefs change if you thought this were a likely evolution for all of them?