Now what is the message there? The message is that there are known "knowns." There are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know.
But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know.
So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.
It sounds like a riddle. It isn't a riddle. It is a very serious, important matter.
There's another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is basically saying the same thing in a different way. Simply because you do not have evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist.
And yet almost always, when we make our threat assessments, when we look at the world, we end up basing it on the first two pieces of that puzzle, rather than all three.
~ Donald Rumsfeld
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Rumsfeld
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