A year of unknowns

People made fun of it at the time, and long afterwards, but it's a nice way of expressing a very important distinction.

"As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know." 

This is the famous quote of Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense under President George W. Bush. He said this back in 2002 at a Defense News Briefing.

When Rumsfeld was saying this, he was part of an effort to prove that Saddam's government in Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction, so the phrase is linked to efforts of obstructionism by statesmen. But the distinction is a useful way of thinking about the future.  

Most interesting is the concept of the unknown unknown. Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls these "Black Swans," events that you aren't prepared for, which strike without warning and turn your system upside down. You never know when unknown unknowns come, but I think these are more likely to occur in a confluence of known unknowns. It is like entering a pitch black room for the first time. The door is a known known, but for the rest, you don't even know whether it's a room, or an opening to another dimension, a heath, an abyss, whatever. I think there are enough known unknowns out there in 2017 for this to be happening.

The first known unknown is President Donald Trump. Everybody is talking about the possibilities for our region he brings. It is likely to be an era of direct communication, no diplomatic niceties or politically correct language. Get ready for a non-negotiable list of "do this" and don't do this" attitude, a very transactional time. What...