Sunday 22 January 2017

Known unknowns

"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. "
  - Donald Rumsfeld.

Same concerns on reality and information is asked in useful contexts in other places, such as the book Mostly Harmless Econometrics.

When I moved out of my humble context as a school teacher in a mid-sized town in Northern India, for a further education in public policy in Singapore and then New York, I did not know much about Rumsfeld or Angrist or their famous confusions, but those were not the only things I did not know, I did not know many things I did not even know.

Whenever I thought, "oh now I get it" I would see how much I do not know and how many holes there are in my perfectly good enough thinking. Very humbling. Now, that I am in the third year of my PhD and have passed my oral exams, my prof.s think of me differently. They act differently. I got the bees and birds talk from my advisor the other day, when he told me my career path and choices. I think the tables have turned. Now I am not just the one asking questions, I am the one who is supposed to supply answers.

So here I am in search of known unknowns, something that I can measure, something I can inform the policy with, something of value to the community, rummaging through ideas and paper, rejecting dozens of original ideas every day. Very humbling.

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