document updated 2 years ago, on May 30, 2024

Rumsfeld has been mocked for discussing known unknowns and unknown unknowns, though this has long been an important part of military decision theory that he was espousing.
Socrates is credited with saying "The only real wisdom is knowing you know nothing", though I prefer the formulation "Wisdom is knowing what you don't know".
- Granted, the crux of Socrate's statement is that you can never eliminate unknown-unknowns, and that's an important limitation to remember.
- However, the goal of a proper education is to reduce the number of unknown-unknowns by changing them into known-unknowns. And this is unintuitive — many people assume the purpose of education is to turn them into known-knowns. This article explains this SO SO well.