Failed imagination, not information scarcity, constitutes the core security worry.

Evidence

Rumsfeld gave the following response to a relevant question in Morris’s film: “In my confirmation hearing … the best question I was asked was, What do you worry about when you go to bed at night? And my answer was, in effect, intelligence. The danger that we can be surprised because of a failure of imagining what might happen in the world.” — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 519

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Frames ‘speculation’ nearshore: Rumsfeld’s fear of surprise is really a failure of imaginative contingency, which is the same warrant as speculative finance.
• XREF: Connects to Taleb’s unknown unknowns and to the book’s thesis that homo speculans is defined by imagining contingencies.

Related

• Rumsfeld ranked failures of imagination above known risks as the top threat. (similarity 0.89)