Sunday, July 05, 2009

Interesting ...

... Rumsfeldian Stem Cells.

I link to this because both Nicholas Wade and his commenters seem to think that this business ok and unknown knowns and knowns are something Donald Rumsfeld made up - proof that they get most of their information from the media. However, as the following paragraph from my review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan makes plain, this is not the case:

Taleb tells an interesting story about a brainstorming session on risk held at Lake Como in Italy and sponsored by the Defense Department. It seems that "the military people there thought, behaved, and acted like philosophers. . . . I came out of the meeting realizing that only military people deal with randomness with genuine, introspective intellectual honesty. . . . Defense people wanted to understand the epistemology of risk. " Which is why they are comfortable using "the expression unknown unknown (as opposed to known unknown). " Yes, folks, Donald Rumsfeld wasn't speaking gibberish; he was on the cutting edge of epistemology.

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