如何评价拉姆斯菲尔德的这句名言？

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知乎用户 哈立德 发表

我们有已知的已知，已知的未知，我们更有未知的未知。作为经常引用这句话的人，谈一下自己的感触：

拉姆斯菲尔德先生知道美国军队的种种，也能了解塔利班的部分种种。这是已知的已知。

但他不能确定塔利班的战略，真实实力，抵抗方式，烈度，战争延续时间。这是已知的未知。

就算美国战胜塔利班，但是在未来的时光中，什么叫胜利，对双方战争的意义和作用。根本不能知道。那是上帝的专属范围。这是未知的未知。

在我们每个人的生活中，这种例子其实充满了我们的生活：

我们结婚，我们以为了解对方的种种。这是已知的已知。

但我们并不确定也没理由确定共同会面对什么。这是已知的未知。

具体的每一个婚姻，对男方，女方，关联方，子女都有无限可能，这是未知的未知。

我们做生意，以为了解了足够的信息。这是已知的已知。

但我们知道还有很多事情不能确定，赔赚很难说。这是已知的未知。

就算我们赔了或者赚了，对我们真有什么意义和价值或者好坏的影响。我们不知道。这是未知的未知。

+++++++++++++++++++++

这句话表达了拉姆斯菲尔德先生对上帝，无法预见的人生，不属于人类所能窥见的上帝的安排的敬畏和尊重。

就像阿甘和这片羽毛一样。

知乎用户 新疆的猫 发表

是个言必信、行必果的人呐！

可称君子。

——————————

注: 以上言论未经验证。可能只是微博段子。

目前仅知的事实是: 一个对中国不友好的帝国主义反动头子在七一前夕死了。

你问我开心不开心？

当然不开心啦。

知乎用户 舌在足矣 发表

Rummy speaks the truth, not gobbledygook

By Mark Steyn

Last week, the Plain English Campaign announced its Golden Bull Awards for the year’s choicest gobbledygook and presented (in absentia) its prestigious Foot-In-Mouth honour to Donald Rumsfeld.

This was his winning performance: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me,“the US Defence Secretary began,“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.”

If the Plain English Campaign thinks that’s the worst use of English this year, then the Plain English Campaign is plain nuts. If there’s a point to these guys, it’s that there’s an awful lot of bureaucratese and jargon around that officials use to evade responsibility and it’s useful to have someone point that out.

If one had to extend it to the war on terror, I would be in favour of pointing out the laziness of the “root cause” crowd - all the poverty-breeds-resentment, resentment-breeds-desperation, desperation-breeds-terrorism, terrorism-breeds-generalities, generalities-breed-clichés stuff.

Any response to the latest Palestinian atrocity that involves “ending the cycle of violence” and “getting the peace process back on track” is also worthy of derision.

But Rummy does not fall into this group. The Defence Secretary is perhaps the best speaker of Plain English in English-speaking politics, and it would be a less despised profession if there were more like him.

Want an example? At some Pentagon briefing during the Afghan campaign, a showboating reporter noted that human rights groups had objected to the dropping of cluster bombs and demanded to know why America was using them. Rumsfeld replied: “They’re being used on frontline al-Qa’eda and Taliban troops to try to kill them.”

Plain enough for you?

Or how about his dismissal of France and Germany? “Old Europe”: within a week, Rummy’s two-word throwaway had become the accepted paradigm of transatlantic relations. Belgium - Old Europe. Poland - New Europe.

I mention these examples not in mitigation, but because his little riff about known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns is in fact a brilliant distillation of quite a complex matter.

Let us take an example close to the heart of arrogant Texas cowboys: John Wayne is holed up in an old prospector’s shack. He peeks over the sill and drawls:“It’s quiet out there. Too quiet.”

What he means is that he knows the things he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know the precise location of the bad guys, but he knows they’re out there somewhere, inching through the dust, perhaps trying to get to the large cactus from behind which they can get a clean shot at him. Thus he knows what to be on the lookout for: he is living in a world of known unknowns.

But suppose, while he was scanning the horizon for a black hat or the glint of a revolver, a passenger jet suddenly ploughed into the shack and vaporised both him and it. That would be one of Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns: something poor John Wayne didn’t know he didn’t know - until it hit him.

That’s how most of the world reacted to September 11: we didn’t know this was one of the things we didn’t know. For most people in these islands, terrorism meant detonating bombs in shopping streets, railway stations and park bandstands - killing a couple dozen, maiming another 30, tops.

As Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote: “The failure to prevent Sept 11 was not a failure of intelligence or co-ordination. It was a failure of imagination.” In other words, it was an unknown unknown: we didn’t know enough to be alert for the things we didn’t know.

There’s a legitimate argument about that. Given al-Qaeda’s stated ambitions, given its previous targeting of the World Trade Centre, given the number of young Arab men taking flight lessons in America, given Mohammed Atta’s indiscreet remarks to a Department of Agriculture official, maybe 9/11 should have been a known unknown - one of those things we were scanning the horizon for.

Friedman argues that “even if all the raw intelligence signals had been shared among the FBI, the CIA and the White House, I’m convinced that there was no one there who would have put them all together, who would have imagined evil on the scale Osama bin Laden did”.

Maybe so. The Cold War was a half-century of known unknowns. We didn’t know the precise timing or specifics of what would happen, but we knew the rough shape so well that, from Dr Strangelove to Where The Wind Blows, the known unknowns generated the most numbingly homogeneous body of predictive fiction ever seen.

It’s trickier now. This is an age of unknown unknowns. We know some of the things we don’t know - the precise state of Iran’s nuclear programme, who North Korea’s been pitching its wares to, where the missing Soviet nuke materials have gone walkabout, who else has the kind of “explosive socks” found by Scotland Yard and MI5 last week - but we have no real idea in what combination these states and groups and technology and footwear might impress themselves on us, or what other links in the chain there might be.

And we might not know until we switch on the television and the screen’s full of smoke again, but this time it’s May 7 and Rotterdam, or February 3 and Vancouver, or October 23 and Glasgow. And we realise once again that there are things we didn’t know we didn’t know.

Rumsfeld’s line is a cool, clear-headed way of understanding this new world. The fact that the Plain English Campaign chooses to mock Rummy, rather than the platitudinous Colin Powell or the mellifluously banal Dominque de Villepin or any of the other politicians unwilling to rise the challenge of the times, is a reflection on them rather than the Defence Secretary.

Whatever credibility the Plain English Campaign might once have had, they have blown. They sound, to put it in plain English, like a bunch of smug tossers.

知乎用户 WilsonY 发表

我非常喜欢拉姆斯菲尔德的这句名言。首先，它根绝了任何讲理的可能，否定了唯物主义之外所有哲学层面上的思考。其次，这里面透着一股国防部长死皮赖脸任打任罚的流氓劲头。举例说明：

老张知道自己儿子是自己的儿子，这叫做已知的已知。老张知道自己不太清楚为啥他儿子长得不像他和他老婆，这属于已知的未知。有一天老张开门送儿子上学，巧遇隔壁老王，呀真亲切，老王和我儿子长的都是一张娃娃脸真可爱，老王捏捏儿子的脸蛋，打了个招呼开心的走了，未知的已知。

所以注意力不要放在已知的已知，而应该去把控已知的未知，这一块才是风险的决定。放在老王的例子里，儿子像不像不是问题，没意识到儿子像老王也没关系。怎么把控已知的未知，上医院验验便知，祝风险可防可控。

知乎用户 CJiang 发表

这里就不得不提到另一个大佬鲍威尔了！

“文官”出生的拉姆斯菲尔德 “管武”（防长）。“武将” 出生的鲍威尔“管文”（国务卿）。

任内 “拉防长” 对内军事改革效果显著，对外战争也打的漂亮（不考虑正义与否）！把能干的事都干成了！而且深得布什二世的信任！

反观 “鲍总理” 在任务内内政外交毫无建树（相较原先在就军中的威望），而且屡遭在朝同僚的掣肘，小布什也不待见他，做了一届匆匆下台！

黑白双煞解体后，拉姆斯显然成为智商一般小布什的 “最强大脑”！左右世界政局帷幕后的男人！没有他小布什只能成为一个让人发笑的“段子高手” 了！

所以拉姆斯真的是个牛人！就连说的话也牛！你看不懂？那是应为你不够牛！

知乎用户 叼诺细姑 发表

法随言出！

知乎用户 Zzwyrmslayer 发表

到死 他都是对的。。。。 又发现了一些未知的未知 手动狗头

知乎用户 Thomas show 发表

单从字面上理解，就是这位前国防部长把我们的未知领域分成了两类，一种是我们已经确认未知的了，比如宇宙有多大；第二类是我们之前没有确认是未知的东西。第三句话其实从动态的角度又把这一类划成了两个类别，一种是我们突然发现了一个新的未知领域，比如发现了一种不能识别的生物，另一种就是某个我们已经知道的领域变得未知了，比如基地组织的武装分子人数，可能是之前被低估了。至于他想传达的意思，那就需要题主提供语境了。以上全是个人观点。

知乎用户 马孔多在下雨 发表

不会打太极的政客不是好防长。

知乎用户 海上月是天上月 发表

是最典型的模棱两可
“模棱两可”：违反排中律的要求，犯了两不可的逻辑错误。
· 排中律：law of excluded middle
在同一思维中，两个互相矛盾的思想不能都假，必有一真
· 两不可的逻辑错误，常常表现为对两个互相矛盾的命题全都否定；也表现在对两个互相矛盾的思想断定不做明确的表态，而是闪烁其词，隐匿其思想观点。
（详见《逻辑》主编：王莘 P24）

拉姆斯菲尔德的这句新闻发言词属后者。

知乎用户 Donald Yang 发表

他公开支持川普的。

知乎用户 gjwillis 发表

其实这句话比较完整地说明了他要说明的哲学思想。

知乎用户 郑汉男 发表

gre 长难句经典例句啊… 充分表达了美国国防部面对中东信息不足的窘境。

知乎用户 武星辰 发表

他说的话自洽性还是可以的，逻辑上没有毛病。

他还说过：只要我活着，中国共产党就活不过一百年！

他用生命证明了自己没说错。

他死于 2021 年 6 月 30 日 (^_^)

美国前国防部长唐纳德 · 拉姆斯菲尔德。88 岁美国前国防部长唐纳德 · 拉姆斯菲尔德（Donald Rumsfeld）2021 年 6 月 30 日去世。他在美国前总统福特和小布什任内两度出任防长。在小布什任内，美国发动了阿富汗和伊拉克战争。据美国有线电视新闻网 (CNN) 报道，福特执政时期，拉姆斯菲尔德成为美国历史上最年轻的防长。小布什上台后，他二度担任防长，期间 9.11 事件发生，他主导美军入侵阿富汗，推翻塔利班政权，并在 2003 年指挥美国为首的联军进攻伊拉克。

“将伊拉克问题归咎于拉姆斯菲尔德既不正确又不公平。” 作家布拉德利 · 格雷厄姆 2009 年所著的拉姆斯菲尔德传记中这样写道，“但是许多事情都是他按照自己的规则行事后造成的后果。” 拉姆斯菲尔德在 2011 年的回忆录中表示，他对伊拉克没有一丝遗憾，但承认伊拉克的未来仍然存有疑问。

2004 年，美军被揭发在伊拉克首都巴格达附近一间监狱内虐待囚犯，引发国际社会批评。为此，拉姆斯菲尔德两度向小布什提出辞职，但都被拒绝。

拉姆斯菲尔德去世消息传出后，小布什当天发表声明，称拉姆斯菲尔德是 “堪称楷模的公职人员”。小布什在声明中称， “他是我们武装部队的忠实管家，美国因他的履职而更加安全、美好。”

知乎用户 厚德载物 发表

他认识到了人类经验主义的局限，他保持了开放的心态，这是一种个人辩护……

人有四种认知状态

不知道自己不知道——初生牛犊不怕虎，无知者无畏

知道自己不知道——满腹狐疑，初学者心态

知道自己知道——学成者，知其然也知其所以然

不知道自己知道——成人智慧，赤子之心。已经把正确的所知转化为自己认识和思考的潜在假设。“举手投足间散发着气质而不自知”

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