[Peakoil] Demand for oil to grow 'for decades'

[Paul Pollard]

The 'wilful blindness' that Margaret Heffernan describes can also be described 
as 'unknown knowns' - the missing combination that Donald Rumsfeld left out. 
Following is a letter from me that the Canberra Times published about a year 
ago.

Paul

'Adrian Marron, in his article on the CIT (CT 31 January), mentioned Donald 
Rumsfeld's famous known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. This 
piece of homespun philosophising about factors in decision-making will 
probably immortalise Rumsfeld.

There is however the fourth combination which Rumsfeld did not mention, the 
seemingly contradictory unknown knowns. Yet these could be just as important, 
if defined as those factors which we can and should know about, but which we 
choose to ignore or wrongly assess.    

The Iraq war and Rumsfeld's own assessments provide good examples of this: 
ignoring the extreme unlikelihood of Saddam Hussein having deployable weapons 
of mass destruction; ignoring the complexity of Iraq society; and the belief 
that in such a society you can rapidly build democracy having destroyed key 
social institutions. Rumsfeld will also be remembered for his unknown knowns.' 


On Tue, 28 Feb 2012 02:59:36 am W & C Steensby wrote:
> In my earlier message I hearked back to an earlier posting about a book.
> That was to a separate mailing list; getting muddled! This is what I was
> writing about:
> 
> Margaret Heffernan in her splendid book, "Wilful Blindness, or Why We
> Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril," describes a disturbingly long list of
> cases where people, institutions, corporations and governments simply
> cannot accept a proposition that runs contrary to what they believe or
> want to believe. (EVERYONE should read this book.) One sentence: "When we
> are wilfully blind, there is information we could know, and should know,
> but don't know because it makes us feel better not to know." (p330) Wilful
> blindness seems to be built into us all, but Heffernan is confident that
> we can learn to and do better.
> 
> Regards,
> Walter
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