On 6th June 2002, at the NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Donald Rumsfeld, the then US Secretary of Defence, gave a Press Conference, after which he took questions. In answer to one of those questions, he made his now infamous speech, which became known as the “Knowns & Unknowns” speech. What follows is an adaptation & re-wording of that speech in the context of the TX4 under bonnet fire. Enjoy!
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The original speech is the first question taken by Donald Rumsfeld on this link; http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2002/s020606g.htm)
Query: Regarding the TX4 under bonnet fires and conflagrations causing mass destructions of TX4 taxis; something has been said to the effect that the real situation is worse than the facts show. I wonder if you could advise what is worse than is generally understood.
Reply: Sure. All of us in this vehicle manufacturing business read technical & mechanical information. And we read it daily and we think about it and it becomes, in our minds, essentially what exists. And that's wrong. It is not what exists.
We say that because we have had experiences where we have gone back and done a great deal of work and analysis on technical & mechanical information relevant to the TX4 and looked at important under bonnet areas of the TX4, fire target areas, looked at important technical & mechanical subject matters with respect to those TX4 under bonnet fire target areas and asked, probed deeper and deeper and kept probing until we found out what it is we knew, and found out when we learned it, and when and at what time in the past it actually had existed. And when we found that, it was not to our surprise! But we think anytime you look at it that way, what you find is that there are very important sections of technical & mechanical information relevant to these TX4 under bonnet fire target areas, where a lot of money, and a lot of time has been spent with a lot of wonderful people trying to learn more about what's going on under the TX4 bonnet. And we did not know some significant event for two months after it happened, for four months after it happened, for six months after it happened, in some cases 11 and 12 and 13 months after it happened.
Now what is the message there?
The message is that there are no “knowns”, and also, there are many “unknowns”. How many “unknowns,” who knows? There are thing we know that we know, and there are things that we do not know that we do not know, but how many things there are that we do not know that we do not know, we don’t know!
There are also known “unknowns.” That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also past unknown “unknowns”. These are things we didn't know that we didn't know, but we do know them now, and so these previously unknown “unknowns” have now become known “unknowns”.
So when we do the best we can and we pull all this technical & mechanical information relevant to the TX4 together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation & the problem that is really only the known “knowns” and the known “unknowns”. It does not take into account the unknown “unknowns”, because we don’t know what these are! But, each month, we discover a few more of these unknown “unknowns”. So these newly discovered unknown “unknowns” thus become known “unknowns”. And when we find out what these known “unknowns” are, we might then be able to comprehend the “unknown” & if we are lucky that known “unknown” will become a known “known” & we then know!
It sounds like a riddle. It isn't a riddle. It is a very serious and important technical & mechanical information concept about the TX4, which of great significance.
There's another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So, if you haven’t got any evidence that in itself is not evidence that what you are looking for is not there, or does not exist. It may well be there! It may well exist! It is basically saying the same thing in a different way. Simply because you do not have evidence that something is getting hot under the TX4 bonnet does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't get hot under the TX4 bonnet and by definition that this extreme heat under the TX4 bonnet therefore does not exist. That is incorrect & wrong thinking! And yet almost always, when we make our final TX4 under bonnet fire hazard assessments, when we look into the engine compartment under the TX4 bonnet, we end up basing it on the first two pieces of that puzzle, rather than all three.
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