Excellent NYT piece by Errol Morris via Browser exploring the Dunning-Kruger Effect: the fact that our incompetence/ignorance masks our ability to recognize our incompetence/ignorance:

Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.”  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.”

Of course there are different sorts of ‘unknowns’. 

Facts I know I don’t know (eg the longest river in Uzbekistan).

Facts which may or may not be facts (are there any rivers in Uzbekistan).

And phenomena which I am unaware might even exist (by definition indescribable).

See this:

To me, unknown unknowns enter at two different levels. The first is at the level of risk and problem.  Many tasks in life contain uncertainties that are known — so-called “known unknowns.”  These are potential problems for any venture, but they at least are problems that people can be vigilant about, prepare for, take insurance on, and often head off at the pass. 

Unknown unknown risks, on the other hand, are problems that people do not know they are vulnerable to.

All of which goes to point up the stupidity of wasting too much time on ‘risk management matrices’, another New Labour blight on public life:

Embassies have to complete every few months a spreadsheet which lays out ‘risks’ to policy and the accomplishment of our Objectives.

The first demand for one of these arrived in Warsaw, attaching the Asia Directorate’s model as a splendid example. I crossly sent back an email saying that maybe, after everything which had happened in the Asia region not that long ago, a risk assessment which omitted the word tsunami might be thought to be a little … ridiculous? I predicted that in a few years’ time these banal exercises like so many others would have collapsed under the weight of their manifold contradictions.

I was told off for being ‘unhelpful’.

The real problem in foreign policy objective/target-setting is indeed the unknowable unknowns – the impact of a tsunami on Indonesia’s fortunes, or indeed 9/11.

Which again is why it is so stupid to organise British/EU policy round the things the Treasury thinks it can measure.

But then precisely because we are stupid enough to do just that, we can’t recognise that stupidity.

QED.