Digital immigrant

An email exchange about Bushisms and Rumsfeldisms got me thinking a bit. Yeah, really just a bit because yesterday was unbearably hot. Our friend Donald Rumsfeld once made the following observation:

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.

So I’ve been in love with this since I read about it late last year. And I’ve been talking to people about it. But Mr Rumsfeld forgot about the fourth category — unknown knowns, ie, there are things we know but we don’t know that we know them.

Remember that time in Standard 1 when your teacher wanted to know what bees eat? Your hand shot up and you told her that the bees eat royal jelly. That is an example of an unknown known, ie, you didn’t even know that you knew the answer until the teacher’s question got your mind working. You were surprised and chuffed with yourself. And remember that time in Standard 9 when one of your teachers wanted to know which country had had a border conflict with Ethiopia? You surprised yourself by answering that it was Eritrea.

So perhaps I should write Mr Rumsfeld a friendly email to let him know about this fourth dimension.