The Offshore Voyaging Reference Site

Quote Of The Day

There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable.

Thomas Schelling

Wow, while Schelling was a public policy wonk, does this ever apply to voyaging, particularly when we have only sailed inshore and so are surprised by how different things are when we head offshore.

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Paul Padyk

John,
This is brilliantly succinct and represents, in my opinion, the battle all of us do within ourselves over when to “pull the ripcord”. In emergency medicine, we always had to be on guard to avoid solely relying on what we had seen (bias confirmation/early closure), without also including what we had read or heard about. In other words, we form emotional “motivating, probability forming” memory from things we’ve done and what has happened to us; whereas we form intellectual “probability debating” memory from things we’ve read or heard about but not experienced. Add in personal risk aversion/tolerance and I believe ten different people will give ten different probabilities about any unfamiliar scenario.
Best,
Paul

Bruce Brown

This may be a variation on the theme of differential risk between things you know you don’t know and things you don’t know you don’t know.

Paul Browning

The reaction by many in the news media to Donald Rumsfelt’s “known knowns … unknown unknowns” comment convinced me there wasn’t much wisdom amongst journalists. I well recall my farming father and his mates talking about “the stuff you know you know, the stuff you don’t know you know, the stuff you know you don’t know and the stuff you don’t even know you don’t know” so this was all common sense to me.

Recently one of my sons, who had similarly grown up hearing me articulating this doctrine talked of having a similar response to Rumsfelt when he discussed this in a class he was taking conducted by a university, especially the condescending response of the professor. My response, “get to hell out of that class, you’ve got a lot more to teach them than they have to teach you!”

Thomas Lyons

If I may paraphrase Mark Twain, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble; it’s what you think you know that ain’t so.”