Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
Green Summer
(1864)

"…adequately stunning to render any controversy about their quality moot."

The one with the most information does not necessarily win any competition, for their competitor cannot compete on the same playing field, and might well default before an actual game can even begin. One might try to more perfectly pair levels of actual ExperTease, lest an encounter dissolve in jest or worse. A contest worth watching tends to be well-balanced, with each contestant nearly equally skilled, lest their play turn into a rout. Routs are notoriously awful to witness. Whomever one roots for tends to lose. When success turns into a foregone conclusion, who should even be bothered to watch? Likewise, no one except a player’s family enjoys a game between two teams without at least some expertise in the game. It’s a tenuous balance.

For The Muse, the potential that a data center presented needed to be carefully calculated. Nobody had gone to the trouble of researching and determining just how future tax revenues might impact our valley. While some complained about the underlying technology, she carefully calculated opportunity costs and expenses. Some seemed to reject any possibility out of hand, some, perhaps, due to some spurious ReceivedKnowledge they held about potential problems. She knew the Washington State Department of Ecology would largely hold responsibility for verifying and validating the data center owner’s designs and claims. As the oldest department of ecology among the states, it had a reputation and experience evaluating scores of existing data centers. Technology and siting decisions were beyond her control as a Port Commissioner, since the Port had merely sold the land to a data center developer, but she could at least try to satisfy herself by projecting the financial impact the development might have.

Who has standing to even develop such a study? Not The Muse, for her remit as a Port Commissioner does not prescribe a role for her in analyzing revenues, yet nobody else seemed to carry that responsibility, either. Her curiosity led her to inquire, which in turn prompted her to develop a model showing the source and timing of the likely tax revenues the data center might reasonably generate. She employed Claude®, an AI engine, as her partner, partly because it could determine which publicly accessible databases could be properly queried for historical data. Much of any model’s development gets spent just finding reasonable sources of background data, so partnering with an AI engine to shorten those search times made good sense.

She surprised herself when that partnership produced an animated model in an evening. The first iteration was crude but servicable, and encouraged her to continue iterating until she could fill in a bigger picture. Every inch of progress translated into not just a better model, but a deeper understanding of the elements and issues surrounding this impending development. She was employing the Socratic Method, asking questions and discovering ever-deeper ones, iteratively changing both her target and her understanding, but also leaving ever further behind any constituent with whom she might have intended to share the product of her research. She was delving more deeply than most had ever considered the effects of an industrial development on a public purse. Did she even have standing to share her results?

That became the question. She sought to validate her model by sharing it with her fellow Blind Men, each with their parochial perspective, arrayed around this particular Elephant. Her model had evolved into something more global than the perspective of any other elected official. No one person held authority over the breadth and width of such a development’s impacts. The Muse had crawled into many narrow nooks and crannies in pursuit of something that might pass muster as truth, though she was well aware that she was largely dealing in future projections, albeit ones informed by much more than idle speculation. She had become an expert, at least in her model. Who should serve as her audience? Who could be qualified to check the underlying quality of her conclusions?

She now possesses a paradox, one well known to experts throughout history. The best informed won’t necessarily be better armed for any engagement. Those holding the best of information inescapably need to interact with those holding much less, and those differences tend to clash. Further, some of the most critical issues cannot be expressed as black-or-white choices but rest on subtle distinctions often invisible to those not more deeply immersed in the nuances of some questions. Reasonable assumptions depend entirely on shared understanding, and deeper subtleties rarely seem reasonable to the less well-informed. The expert faces the real potential of engaging in little more than dialogues with the deaf, the expert’s deafness not the least influence on the quality of any attempted outcome.

She’s validating her model now, unsure if she can share it as broadly as she’d originally imagined. She lacks standing to speak for the system she has so successfully modeled, and her model seems incapable of coherently speaking for itself. She might have created a monster for all the usual good reasons, merely seeking understanding, but also purchasing existential angst. People have been encouraging her to widely share this model because it might help proliferate a deeper understanding than seems likely otherwise. As an employee of The Port, her actions are not solely her own decisions, and as a member of this community, she holds responsibilities beyond and beside her own expectations for herself. She must balance these, even as she sees naive conclusions being drawn that her modeling helped her resolve. She kept the transcript of her Socratic dialogue with Claude. I asked her if I could look through it. I left impressed and overwhelmed, clear that I lacked the expertise to even judge the quality of the result. I could judge the quality of the questions she and her electronic partner pursued, though, and they seemed adequately stunning to render any controversy about their quality moot.

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