That was Donald Rumsfeld!? I always assumed this came from some techie or agile guru given how much it's used as a concept in project planning.
Rumsfeld was complicated, but there's no doubt he was very effective at leading the Department. I think most people fail to realize how sophisticated the Office of the Secretary of Defense is. Their resources reel the mind, most of all the human capital, many with PhDs, many very savvy political operators with stunning operational experiences. As a small example, as I recall, Google's hallowed SRE system was developed by an engineer who had come up through the ranks of Navy nuclear power. That's but one small component reporting into OSD.
Not a Rumsfeld apologist, by any means. Errol Morris did a good job showing the man for who he is, and it's not pretty (1). But reading HN comments opining about the leadership qualities of a Navy fighter pilot who was both the youngest and oldest SECDEF makes me realize how the Internet lets people indulge in a Dunning-Kruger situation the likes of which humanity has never seen.
Wait, really? That makes _so much sense._ It also makes me upset that all of my attempts to sway other SRE orgs over to Nuclear Navy practices have been met with doubt.
- ex nuke submariner
While we are at it, that infamous Dunning-Kruger study showed didn't even claim what people like to pretend it claimed. In addition the more nuanced claim they did make is not supported by the evidence they collected and presented in their paper. (Their statistics are pretty much useless, and as with any social science study, it has a small 'n' and it doesn't replicate.)
But the mythology 'Dunning-Kruger effect' is too good to pass up in Internet discussions, so it survives as a meme.
So, the current fashion of denouncing Dunning and Kruger doesn't jive with me. It was too obvious to discount and I had no idea of the concept when I saw it my own data. I think the misunderstanding has to do with the idea that it's about dumb people being dumb. It's about all of us. We all get it wrong. Even the smart ones. Paradoxically, the smart ones just get it wrong in the less desirable direction.
I think that academic fashionistas may be too clever by half here. Unless you have original data to back up a claim, the internet points aren't worth it. Focus on getting things right.
"What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown knowns," the things we don't know that we know."
I've found it's really critical during the project planning phase to get to not just where the boundaries of our knowledge are, but also where are the things we're either tacitly assuming or not even aware that we've assumed. An awful lot of postmortems I've been a part of have come down to "It didn't occur to us that could happen."
Would that not be an unknown unknown?
To me the corporate version of the unknown known is when a a project is certainly doomed, for reasons everyone on the ground knows about, yet nobody wants to say anything and be the messenger that inevitably gets killed, as long as paycheck keeps clearing. An exec ten thousand feet from the ground sets a “vision” which can’t be blown off course by minor details such as reality, until the day it does.
Theranos is a famous example of this but I’ve had less extreme versions happen to me many times throughout my career.
Another example of unknown knowns might be the conflict between companies stated values (Focus on the User) and the unstated values that are often much more important (Make Lots of Money)
As an example, there are a lot of unknown knowns that you accumulate over the years in certain lower level languages that need to be spelled out more clearly to someone who is coming at it as a later endeavor. It's entirely possible to spend all your time in a completely managed language nowadays and the concept of the stack, heap, etc., will be largely alien to you. These ideas and their limitations need to be spelled out clearly in order for someone to build the same knowledge base and intuition.
Unknown knowns are essentially endless in nature and extremely hard to find unless you have someone who simply doesn't know to basically fall into traps and guide you toward finding your hidden knowledge.