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From: Despair.com
Did you happen to read a Times “opinionator” piece by Errol Morris, “It Was All Started By A Mouse,” in January of this year. Now he has just begun a new Times series called: “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is.”
Interesting. I thought of you, and what you might have to say about all this, perhaps at a moment between your bike rides, lake sails, and the weight room.
Morris, or rather David Dunning, whom Morris is interviewing, cites the famous words of Donald Rumsfeld about unknown unknowns:
“Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech … It goes something like this: ‘There are things we know we know about terrorism. There are things we know we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know.’
He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, ‘That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.’”
In a comment following someone pointed out that engineers called unknown unknowns “unk unks.” What could you possibly say about them, let alone talk about them?
Now, in case you’ve forgotten, anosognosia is a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware or denies the existence of the disability.
So my question, are we all anosognosiacs? And if we are how have we survived as long as we have? And are we increasing, or decreasing the number of unknown unknowns out there as we proceed along the evolutionary path laid out for us by Darwin and followers?
Philip
