Donald Rumsfeld tacit knowledge and the Relevance Paradox
From Energy-Experts
Donald Rumsfeld's theory of knowledge
"Donald Rumsfeld's theory of knowledge - as expounded in March 2003, when the then US defence secretary engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophising: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." What Rumsfeld forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown knowns" - things we don't know that we know, all the unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality and intervene in it" - Slavoj Zizek Guardian, Saturday June 28 2008
Rumsfeld actually put it very well, we all suffer from "unknown unknowns" and these can allow us to have technically incorrect opinions, which we sincerely believe are soundly based, but are not. Our certainty comes from the knowledge we have which appears to be complete, so we see no reason to investigate other spheres which we already know (or think we know) are wrong or irrelevant.
Another way of putting this is the Relevance Paradox, where there is important information which if we had, we would use. but because we don't have it, we don't at that time see the relevance of gaining it.
An example of this would be that many people sincerely believe that because self evidently it is not windy all the time, then wind power cannot be a serious contender to generate large amounts of power. They only hold this view because they have never felt the relevance of finding out about grid inter-connectors, switchable loads, standby plant and so on, because their present state of knowledge tells them this is irrelevant.
Civil engineers built numerous irrigation schemes in the post war years, which inflicted serious water born diseases on people they were supposed to help - they didn't know about the UN guidelines on how to simply design these schemes to minimise the occurrences of these diseases - the engineers were the victims of the relevance paradox.
Tacit knowledge – the “unknown knowns”
Tacit knowledge is all the knowledge that cannot be written down and formally transmitted and learnt by other people from such writings, instructions, procedures or rules. It seems a trivial point but is far reaching. Language is a tacit knowledge – children learn to speak it, but adults have to be given grammar lessons for a foreign language, and yet the child native speaker would not know what a noun or a verb or a clause was and don't need to.
One of the reasons learning to ride a bike is so hard, is that in fact, in order to turn left, say on a bike, you actually have to first turn the bars slightly to the right, which tilts the bike, over to the left, and only then do you turn the bars left. Very few people know this piece of formal knowledge but it doesn't stop them riding a bike, and it wouldn't help their children learn to ride the bike if they were told this..
Even learning algebra as Professor Harry Collins has shown in his classic paper “Collins, H. M., (1974) `The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks', Science Studies, 4, 165-186.” has shown involves tacit knowledge – “X is the unknowns, but is it the same unknown on Wednesday or Thursday, does it matter if it is writing “x” of “X”, if it is written in chalk or printed in a book. There are whole list of tacit rules that cannot actually be written down. but can be learnt by doing algebra under instruction”
Collins also showed how tacit knowledge is vital in say the building of a certain type of laser – even when the originating lab tried to tell other labs in absolute detail how to do it, they couldn’t – the originators actually had to visit them and do it themselves because there were things they were doing – very technical things, which they were not aware of and couldn’t not therefore articulate.
Tacit knowledge also comes into designing atomic bombs: Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 101, No. 1 (Jul., 1995), pp. 44-99 (article consists of 56 pages) Published by: The University of Chicago Press
When the US restarted its atom bomb building programme, although it had all the books, blueprints and designs, the new guys couldn't o it, and they had to get the old boys out of retirement to tell them how.
Tacit knowledge clearly also applies to our field of trying to work out what to do in Energy….to come to correct policy decisions also involves a lot of tacit knowledge and this can only come from dialogue with other practitioners, and this is what we see being transferred invisibly in all the Claverton dialogues.
Implications for UK Governance
It can be plausibly argued, that the failure to understand this very basic issue, and to design knowledge networks, that either are in government or feed into it, explain the hopeless state of many of our public services, and the catalogue of stupid counter productive decisions and policies implemented or inflicted on the UK over the years.
Fred Starr's Fifth Unknown
Dr Fred Starr has also pointed out the fifth unknown for politicians, managers and sales people are the "Known Knowns which we would prefer to remain Unknown" .
Or rather, as is often the case, they are Known, but no one dares talk about them for fear of losing their job or some other retribution. This is of course the well known taboo.
6th Known - Known Knowns by some people
That is things known or suspected by some people, that people in power don't want even discussed in case they prove to be true, meantime they can pretend they are unknown. This would be things like the graduate engineers who interconnected the National Grid sub regions in the 30s one night as an experiment, without telling there bosses and against all instructions. They turned it all off again after a while with no ill effects. Whilst the sky didn't in fact fall in on them, when what they had done leaked out, they all got a jolly good telling off. It was normal to run interconnected all the time by 1938.
