August 12, 2019 Monday
Bedtime Story
Known Knowns, Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns
Tonight we shall read through a comment
made by the United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, one of the most
influential Cabinet members of the Bush administration and also one of the most
powerful Pentagon chief.
Let me remind you that he was the one under
whom the United States military ushered into the 21st century with
invasion of Afghanistan followed by invasion of Iraq after the September 11
attacks.
He is a highly accomplished American
politician graduating from the Ivy League Princeton University (political
science) and then after serving the Navy for three years started his political
career at the young age of 30 by getting elected to the Congress from
Illinois’s 13 Congressional District.
He has served the administration of three
American Presidents at very senior positions starting from Richard Nixon,
followed by Gerald Ford and finally ending up with George W. Bush.
“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
one 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.”
When he retired from politics Rumsfeld
published a book by the title “Known and Unknown: A Memoir” in 2011 that went
to get itself listed at number one on The New York Times Bestseller List for
hardcover nonfiction category.
Although Rumsfeld was making a political
point and cunningly maneuvering the public opinion to his side to approve his
decision to invade Iraq lacking substantial evidence (there was no evidence in
fact that Iraq was in possession of active weapons of mass destruction or that it
was harboring and supporting al-Qaeda) this sentence in essence goes to the
very heart of epistemology.
Perhaps it was the Iraq War that proved to
be his end of his political career very ironically through the “Revolt of
Generals” when in 2006 many retired generals accused Rumsfeld of abysmal
military planning and lack of strategic competence.
Some have reported that this view of the
generals “mirrored the views of 75 percent of the officers in the field, and
probably more.”
Finally Rumsfeld was forced to resign in
November of 2006 as the Secretary of Defense which turned out to be the end of
his political career as well; he was in a sense one among the hundreds of thousands
of casualties of the Iraq War.
While many of us would chose to prescribe
to the knowability thesis every now and then mathematical logicians such as Kurt
Gödel and Alfred Tarski keep coming up with theorems that prove our limitations
in one way or the other with respect to the knowability thesis.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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