Here’s the law in full rescued from its original wiki page.

“What you don’t know, you don’t know - and you can’t make it up”.

This law is attributed to former Raytheon vice president Bruce Dunn. Although Bruce used it in the context of evaluation of evidence for scripture, it is highly applicable in the case of cluster failure where all that is observed is inability to communicate.

Because in this case, one knows very little - except that we can’t communicate with the given node. Nevertheless, the temptation is great to pretend to greater knowledge.

This law and its implications are somewhat important to me. I have elevated this apparently unsung melody to one of my core beliefs. I am using it on a daily basis to explore myself and my connections to others.

I am asking myself on a regular basis “What do I know?” and “Is this, what I am currently thinking, based upon assumptions?”.

I think this can be helpful far beyond the realms of high available compute and I’d like for it to have a new place in my humble blog for generations to come.