Life Span

The working handle for this part of the project, "Draw them out" pattern. The key vulnerability of the the obfuscation while anonymous pattern is the schizophrenia it causes in interactive discovery. Identity for some time has been known to be one of the best methods of organizing at a high level of abstraction. Anonymity is antithetical to identity. Seeing clearly without filters and post-processing the data is most conducive to extracting the essence of a domain. Obfuscation is antithetical to unbiased data acquisition since its intent is to introduce artificial noise for the precise purpose of obscuring essence.

Many organizational mechanisms fall victim over time to the entropy of static modeling. As growing self-serving ego skews data the illusion of the data's value becomes more entrenched. Ego projection is the dark under belly of repeatable patterns that are initially useful. Manufacturing is a goood example here. We manufacture a product that solves an immediate, say, agricultural problem. The initial good news is that we have more food. An infrastructure builds up around making the product more efficiently. More food less cost. Long after the efficacy declines the things that made the manufacturing successful take on a life of their own. It is not until actual visible damage clearly outweighs the benefit do we start to undo this originally good idea that has turned into not such a good idea.

Combining these two key concepts and feeding them to the heuristic engine was the next step. Two members of the team came online to tell him they were ready to oversee the next run. When the remaining two became available he was fairly certain this machine assisted effort would yield tangible results. His only concern was the gender makeup of the overseers. More and more, this question seemed critical to the project. And this was so even though nothing so far in the decoding process explicitly pointed to it.

He had developed a deep reverence for what she advocated and the methods she would use to gain a useful perspective to the inquiry. This was not to say, he understood her methodology or even her motivation. And perhaps that was the most important element of their collaboration, acceptance that reverence is not necessarily dependent on detailed understanding.