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Comment by sparky_z | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood why people mock him for saying this. It frequently shows up on lists of stupid political quotes/"Bushisms". But not only is it absolutely true and important for planners to understand, it's stated clearly and concisely. Do most people just look at it and see word salad? I don't get it.

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I actually like the quote. But there are a couple reasons Rumsfeld deserves to get raked over the coals for it:

1. The Bush Administration lied like war criminals to lead us into the Iraq War. So even though he may have been referring to technical operational complications of winning the peace in Iraq or whatever, it was easy to construe it as more bullshit gibberish to justify a crime against humanity.

2. Related to 1. There were plenty of known knowns with Iraq that the Bush Administration treated as some variety of unknown. It sounded a lot like he was using a clever philosophical aphorism to make excuses for stupid blatant errors of judgment.

An NPR recap of the path to war at a time when the full scope of the fraud was still coming to light:

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=528939...

Because Rumsfeld was constantly getting philosophical in briefings about “what is a war? Clausewitz said…” when his job was to win an actual, concrete war in Iraq, and we had no idea who the hell were setting the IEDs and kidnapping foreigners. He was too far up his own ass to notice he was losing.

Well he is a Princeton man.

He was winning, the war machine was rolling and fresh contracts signed, in blood.

It might be interesting to see a list of "often-mocked sayings that have a point".

Two that I know of involving politicians and the Internet are

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

I'm sorry to say that I've personally made fun of both of these people for these soundbites in a way that I now regret.

It seems a bit charitable to say that the series of tubes has a point? I'm sure you can also attach a point to a random set set of words.

The context makes it even more damning.

What's wrong with the analogy? Tubes each have a limited capacity, so do the various ways I connect to the net. That capacity can fill. Tubes connect and their contents routed similar to the contents of internet traffic. If you drew a diagram of water tubes and a diagram of internet connections they'd both resemble each other.

I'm still not sure why this is a bad analogy even in context.

In the context of the speaker's insane quote, in which he blamed streaming video for a 4-day delay of his personal emails, it doesn't make much sense. Also it's a rhetorical fallacy to suggest that because a thing is not another thing, then it must be a third thing. Really, the Internet is neither a truck nor a series of tubes.

Right. He's making an analogy about how things wait in line, and he's talking about for significant amounts of time, not fractions of a second. That's not how the internet works at all. Competing data flows slow down a bit but all run simultaneously.

We don't even have to get into the silly parts like "the people who are streaming through 10, 12 movies at a time or a whole book at a time"

Internet is a bidirectional graph with constrained bandwith (flow). Series of tubes is a perfectly fine analogy.

His thesis (about video streaming) was false, but his analogy was ok, people jumped on it for the wrong reasons (as it often happens in politics).

It's not hard to make an analogy work if you want to simplify the subject. Is a series of tubes a better analogy than trucks on a road network?

Ok, that's a good analogy too (packets being a thing).

"A series of tubes" was meant to be a contrast to the truck analogy.

"the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

The tube vs truck analogy doesn't really make much sense here. Tubes aren't exactly famous for having discrete items queue up within them.

Another is Bill Clinton's "It depends on what your definition of 'is' is", where the point was that it could either refer to "currently" or "on an ongoing basis".

An interesting case in which African-American Vernacular English would have been more expressive, as AAVE draws the distinction between "is" as in currently and "be" as in habitually. Clinton, as the first black president, should have been better able to express himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitual_be

> Clinton, as the first black president, should have been better able to express himself.

Clinton? Or you intended to write Obama?

It depends what your definition of 'black' is: https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/08/toni-morrison-wasn...

Clinton has been called "The first black president" before: http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/clinton/morrison.html

There's a sentence in the article that is a bit misleading (or at least unclear from the phrasing):

"AAVE speakers use 'be' to mark a habitual grammatical aspect not explicitly distinguished in Standard English."

Standard American English does have explicit ways to mark habitual aspect[0], however it lacks one for the present tense (which is how habitual "be" is used in AAVE). Personally, I think Standard American English would benefit from adopting it.

As an aside, I've never understood that joke about Clinton. Was it a reference to something in particular?

[0] For example there is "used to" for the past tense, "would" for the past tense, "will" for an unspecified time, and a combined form with the present progressive:

I used to go to the beach every day.

I would often drink while lounging in the sun and get sunburnt.

I will make the same mistake again I'm sure.

Every time I do, I'm increasing my risk of skin cancer.

> As an aside, I've never understood that joke about Clinton. Was it a reference to something in particular?

It's a reference to his defense of saying he wasn't lying with the phrase "there's nothing going on between us" when questioned about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

He explained that this was true because they were no longer seeing each other at the time of questioning, but the way he said it was striking. "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the—if he—if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement"

I think it's easy to see why people would latch on to that and make jokes about it.

I meant the joke/comment about Clinton being the first black president. But I saw someone else link this, which seems to be the source:

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/08/toni-morrison-wasn...

Did Gore actually say that he invented the internet? The linked Wikipedia article says that it's an urban legend.

While I don't have the exact quote, it's something more along the lines of "my actions caused the creation of the Internet" or "the Internet wouldn't be here if it weren't for me." There's actually not one quote since it was multiple instances that he took credit for the Internet (as we know it today). And not wrongly, really: he sponsored bills which provided federal funding for the Internet backbone system and the broadband consumer transport networks that define the Internet we use today.

But of course it was all too easy for some people to claim that he was taking credit for TCP/IP and HTTP.

The quote is "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" which is often misinterpreted as Al Gore saying he "created the internet" which I doubt was his actual intention. At a political/governmental level, he was actually quite instrumental in legitimizing and evangelizing the importance of network communications as well as funding programs that were necessary for its creation. He probably should have phrased it as "I took the initiative in the creation of the internet" or that he was "instrumental in the creation of the American internet".

No, at the time it was mocked but over time people's attitudes changed. It even has a Wikipedia page. ("While the remarks initially led to some ridicule towards the Bush administration in general and Rumsfeld in particular, the consensus regarding it has shifted over the years, and it now enjoys some level of respect.") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns

I think the problem is less with the statement itself, and more to do with him using it to help justify the Iraq war, where some of the "known knowns" and "unknown unknowns" were actually speculation, exaggerated, or even made up completely.

Most people just look at it and see word salad. He is in fact stating, correctly if not clearly for a general audience, a fundamental lesson of project planning. But the whole "known-unknown / unknown-unknown" thing is way above most people's heads.

It’s not stated as clearly or precisely as I think it could be. I’ve heard it articulated better without giving each epistemic category its own jargon like “unknown unknowns”.

There are things you know, and things you don’t know. Furthermore there are things you know you don’t know. But be aware that there are things you don’t even know you don’t know.

Perhaps. I suppose that comes down to matter of taste. But either way, I certainly don't think his formulation sinks to level of mockably bad. Especially since it was spoken off the cuff in response to a question from the press.

It's easier to mock someone for the strange sounding words comming out of their mouth, rather then try to understand the meaning.

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