The Rumsfeld Circle
There are lots of secrets in life and most are perfectly boring.
Secrets you are aware of are especially boring. To find them out, all you have to do is ask the person. Hack the computer. Steal the diary. Hire the CIA. Boring.
There are exceptions.
The most interesting secrets are the ones you don’t know about. They sit in a dark room, behind closed doors, and will probably decide your future. They aren’t sinister; unknown secrets have asymmetric sway because they’re asymmetrically exploitable.
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
In a way, these secrets are a type of genius: discovered advantages that are irreplicable since they can’t be described or copied. Life follows a power law — very few things tend to be by far the most important — and these secrets embody that distribution.
To better understand these secrets and how to find them, learn from Donald Rumsfeld.
“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 tends to be the difficult ones.” — Donald Rumsfeld
Rumsfeld’s theory of knowledge separates information into three categories: known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.
This is a helpful distinction of knowledge, but is an inaccurate image of how the categories relate. Rather than buckets, they form a connected circle.
Knowledge is a continuum between the known, the appreciably unknown, and the deeply ignorant. Information slips fluidly from darkness into awareness, to the familiar, and onto things we forget to have forgotten.
The boundaries are fuzzy. These transition zones are meaningful.
Learning — Learning lies between known and unknown, the transformation from ignorant to proficient. An education is to gain insight into the ideas perceived but not yet understood.
Conceptualization — Between the unknown and the deeply ignorant is the perception of existence. We cannot know our ignorance of things we do not perceive. Being able to conceptualize is the first step to learning.
Concepts are built by noticing patterns undescribed by previous knowledge, or by extending known patterns into new territory. These hidden ideas can be found by looking to places that don’t make sense: intellectual dark matter, Penrose staircases, and the ignored.
Intellectual dark matter consists of things we do not know but can determine must exist. This information is typically lost, proprietary, or tacit. Lost information could be forgotten, hidden, or deleted. Proprietary knowledge is intentionally obscured to maintain a competitive edge. The tacit are things implicit in behavior and actions, but that people are not aware of or able to explain.
Penrose staircases are things that cannot exist but do (or are pretended to exist). A Penrose staircase is physically impossible, but quite easy to draw or animate. It abuses human perception with a paper-thin illusion. This is instructive. It illustrates optics and innate biases, and primes you for other similar instances. When something can’t be but is, run the numbers. Draw a diagram. Understand the physics. Gut check.
The world is large and filled with smart people. Most are professionally imitative and will spend their time focused on what’s popular. Fields with lots of attention will be filled with secrets already discovered as individuals seek to outcompete one another. You are more likely to find new concepts in areas that are important but underdiscussed. What important things are few people talking about?
Consciousness — The trickiest of the unknown unknowns are those that we assume we know and have forgotten or are ignorant that we don’t know. These are also buried personal truths, hidden under our own egos, fears, cultural myths. When something you think you know is wrong — or forgotten — it becomes an unknown unknown. Likewise is true when you aren’t something you think you are. How much of the world passes by (hides within), negligent to the once known?
Self-awareness is hard to cultivate. Seek feedback from diverse confidantes. Keep a diary. Read philosophy. Listen to poetry. Meditate.
Deep Unknowns — Not all knowledge is easily conceived. Deep unknowns are things we cannot understand except by first conceptualizing other unknowns. Although no less unknown, these deep unknowns are less accessible. Deep unknowns are visible: thinkers who have ‘double flashes’ of insight, using one to skip on to the next. Darwin’s theory of evolution depended on two insights to explain the diversity of life: natural selection occurs from variation of traits in a population, and all species are descended from a few common ancestors with more similar species sharing a recent heritage.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” — Mark Twain
Self-awareness and conceptualization are two sides on the coin of ignorance. Great thinkers and doers can be a short flip away from heretics and failures. Genius perceives secrets the world is ignorant of. Fools and liars bluff blind spots, either in themselves or in others.
An expert is not someone who knows all there is in a field. An expert knows all they do not know, eliminating the unknown unknowns. Experts need not know all. Most domains cannot have experts. Most experts quickly regress from ego (self-blindness) or changing conditions.
A circle of competence can be built by eliminating deep unknowns, bringing all information within one step of conception or actualization.
Expertise and competency are precarious. Conceptualizing the broadly unknown is an asymmetric advantage; ignorance of your own blind spots is an asymmetric disadvantage.
You can’t describe an unknown unknown, but it is possible to estimate their approximate size.
Since there is great value in identifying these secrets, people will always be looking for them. In static (finite) games with unchanging rules most secrets will quickly be identified. Over time, fewer unknown unknowns exist to be conceptualized, so the number discovered will necessarily decrease. This rate can be quantified.
NASA estimates the number of near-Earth undiscovered asteroids by looking at the rate of discovery of new asteroids. Initially, when telescopes were first deployed for asteroid searches, the number of asteroids found grew rapidly. Over time, as more of the sky was mapped, asteroids were found at a decreasing rate. Researchers extrapolate that rate to estimate a final number.
In dynamic (infinite) games with changing rules new secrets are generated with each new generation of the game. As rule changes may interact with one another and be introduced at irregular times, it is not possible to similarly estimate the number of unknowns. It is easier to guess where the new secrets will live: downstream from the new rule.
Twain, Schopenhauer, and Rumsfeld agree: what you aren’t aware that you don’t know is what has the greatest ability to surprise. Probing this realm, sizing it, and reducing it is critically important.
Thanks to Naomi Jung for feedback and design help :)
