I don’t recall anyone having commented on the most important aspect of Donald Rumsfeld’s thoughtful little pome, The Unknown, namely the omission of one important permutation:
| knowns | unknowns | |
| There are known | These are things that we know we know. | We know there are some things We do not know. |
| There are unknown | The ones we don’t know We don’t know. |
This is, moreover, not just a one-off. Re Osama, Rumsfeld once said that he is “either alive and well or alive and not too well or not alive”, which is not quite the same thing, but you sense my needs and
My drift
As we know, George Bush, Swedenborgian professor of Hebrew at New York University, was the brother of Timothy Bush, the great-great-great-grandad of the incumbent president. Lars-Erik Wiberg, who attended the same church as MIT Swedenborgian geologians, Whitehead and Shrock, recalls Shrock describing knowledge in terms of Four Frames of Mind (caps probably Wiberg’s).
Since everything in the world is roped together by a series of Illuminated shaggy hound narratives, which stay well away from Mr Ockham’s Doggie Parlour, how is it that Mr Rumsfeld missed out on one of these frames? What is he trying to tell us?
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I have no idea why Rummy would have left one of the cells empty, but I will say that I took a class in Knowledge Management Systems this semester, and KM consultants see that cell as their bread and butter.
In their jargon it is called “tacit knowledge” and their job is to help you capture it, tame it, burn your brand onto its rump, and move it into the Known Knowns corral.
(At which point you can fire the staff who knew things you didn’t know and move operations offshore to where people know only what you tell them to.)
My comment morphed into its own blog entry here.