It still irks me that people mocked Rumsfeld's explanation of unknown unknowns. The guy was probably a terrible excuse for a human being, but he wasn't stupid, and that quote was a pretty good explanation for why we shouldn't be overconfident in our knowledge:

"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."

It's the context that makes it crazy. Someone asked if there was any evidence of a link between Iraq and WMDs, at a press conference, and this is how he avoided giving an answer or taking any accountability.

I unironically paraphrase this at work all the time when talking about ops concerns. That and “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”

If it makes you feel any better, think of it more as a catchy synecdoche to communicate “the man was a dangerous incompetent” than a formal verification disproval of his claim.

Anyone who's ever worked on a software project can attest to this

Wisdom tends to sound obvious, and obvious statements aren't novel. The digital society values the novel over the wise.

Rumsfeld heard it from some smart guy in NASA and repackaged it to sell Iraq war. This is similar to the influencers bandying around 'algorithms';

Rumsfeld is more like the Big Lebowski in parroting whatever to make him look smart. Never for a moment he stopped to think about the amount of damage that would haunt the veterans that served there.

He wrote a book about leadership but he lacked balls to do anything about Abu Ghraib for example, nor he did anything to stop the war. IMO he is just another corporate coward.

In his most stunning display of 'leadership', he used autopen to stamp his signature on condolence letters sent to the families of soldiers killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Imagine that!