Comments on: UFOs Rumsfeldian Style!

By: Nathan Myers

Nathan Myers — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:54:08 +0000

He should have been ridiculed for leaving out the fourth, and most damaging kind of ignorance: things you think you know that are not, in fact, so. Many of the worst debacles of that administration arose from their unwillingness even to consider that they might suffer from this oh-so-prevalent affliction.

By: Norm

Norm — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:12:54 +0000

While in a general context, Rumsfeld’s quote is a good way of expressing how our knowledge is limited, the press conference where he said it focused mostly on the situation in Afghanistan at the time. In that context, it sounded like he had absolutely no idea what was really going on there, so I found the derision heaped on him then and since to be justified. The idea behind the quote is certainly not original to Rumsfeld; I found earlier formulations being attributed to Henry David Thoreau and to Socrates.

By: llewelly

llewelly — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:32:32 +0000

I’m with Alex. The Rumsfeld quote actually describes a very good way to think about what is known and unknown (though it is by no means original to Rumsfeld, except perhaps in that specific wording).
It’s too bad that quote gets black-balled because of all the awful, greedy, and stupid things Rumsfeld did.

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 06:21:27 +0000

Why do you say that the quote was “justly ridiculed”? I thought that the only decent thing Rumsfeld did while working for the US government was say that.

By: Joshua Zelinsky

Joshua Zelinsky — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:12:43 +0000

Arguments from ignorance are very popular among creationists (no surprise there). Literally last night I had to explain to a friend that just because we don’t have a fossil record of every single living thing from the first humans down to 1 celled creatures it doesn’t mean that the earth is 6000 years old.