document updated 13 years ago, on Jan 20, 2011
- 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.