This morning, I enjoyed a brief meeting with Lisa Baldwin. Baldwin is a mover and shaker on the Buncombe County Board of Education. We were able to share some woes about board games. For one thing, rubber stamps are useless, but highly-prized. People who ask questions are viewed as troublemakers. Sometimes the demonization is due because the troublemaker suffers psychosis. Other times, those who want to avoid the exertion of due diligence find it easier to discredit the troublemaker with trumped-up psychoses and aspersions thereto.
As a general rule, there is never enough information to make an informed decision, and government reports are the worst for saying nothing. Broad brushstrokes are painted with wide line items. There are too many variables when free agency is a factor, so asking for numbers does have the appearance of engaging a fool’s game. Precision exceeds accuracy, so it is wiser to be instinctive than technical in inferences. Yet, rubber stampers gain joy from going through quantitatively analytical gyrations before taking shots in the dark. It’s a form of lying.
In the end, those who play board games with confidence either have access to divine inspiration or believe they can predict human behavior, see into the future, and solve two equations in hundreds of unknowns with misleading data.
