.
Doesn’t make sense; he should have said there may be unknown unknowns - saying that there are unknown unknowns contradicts the rest of the statement by declaring them ‘known’.
.
Doesn’t make sense; he should have said there may be unknown unknowns - saying that there are unknown unknowns contradicts the rest of the statement by declaring them ‘known’.
The observation actually makes sense. Rumsfeld’s problem is ignoring the unknown unknowns entirely and assuming the known unknowns would all turn out exactly the way he told himself they would.
The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld includes many more such gems, with appropriate line breaks. This is a good runner-up:
No, that just makes them known unknown unknowns. If he’d said “may be”, they’d be unknown unknown unknowns. As we know that they are things that we don’t know we don’t know, Rumsfeld’s statement is correct.
More seriously, I’m not quite sure why they’re picking on this particular statement. Rumsfeld has made a various of ridiculous and garbled statements over the past year (don’t ask me for a direct quote, but the BBC used to broadcast the “Donald Rumsfeld Soundbite of the Week” for comic effect), but this one is relatively clear once you untangle the wordage.