The invisible undercurrent, undertow of self-made rules… Or if you prefer, the invisible strings that move the puppet…

What they talk about when they say “there are known knowns… etc.”

Donald Rumsfeld stated:
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 ones 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 tend to be the difficult ones.

He definitely said that differently than how we mean it, and yet it is worded in a way that makes sense to most people, so I am quoting him.
So what unknown unknowns are we talking about?

Imagine living a thousand years ago, when everyone in the Western world thought that the world was flat… In other cultures they thought that the world was sitting on the back of a giant turtle.
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