Posted on 08/27/2014 7:14:28 AM PDT by NOBO2012
My high school physics teacher used to tell us that in order to understand physics you first had to be curious. His First Directive was wonder about things.
I bring this up only because it is a source of constant amazement to me how uncurious everyone around Big White is - and by everyone I do mean EVERYWON. They receive a lot of information in their newsfeed that they tweet, text and Instagram on to others, along with an original witticism when the spirit moves them. If the news comes from a trusted source, i.e. somebody in their Twittersphere, they consider it solid. When they receive their own tweet back from someone else, they consider it confirmation. Its the perfect closed loop information system.
Everyone is in constant contact with 100,000+ other people around the globe who are equally uncurious; everybody sending and receiving the same thing without wondering about what it means, or questioning its veracity. Thats why most White House staffers eventually end up with media jobs.
Unfortunately this type of closed loop information system can have drawbacks; like your talking points might be contradictory or work at cross purposes. Or your message gets garbled somewhere along the re-tweeted chain of added witticisms:
Like when you send someone out for a good high fiber cereal and they come home with gay Cheerios.
At its worse, a closed loop system can result in a situation where nobody knows what to do about anything, as they suddenly discover they are devoid of any actual information that would allow them to know what they are doing. At that point the value of wondering about things you dont know anything about becomes obvious.
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. Donald Rumsfeld
Suffice it to say we are now operating firmly in that most dangerous quadrant: we dont know what we dont know.
I wonder why the whole world is still following us.
Posted from: Michelle Obamas Mirror
Failure to recognize that there will be unk unks is a recipe for disaster.
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