A right diagnosis can produce a harmful remedy

A scene from a story. Illustration, not evidence. Nothing in it is a finding. What it stands in for, and what it does not establish, is set out below.

And what the finding directed was the suspension of the badge.

She sat with that a long time. Because she had argued, carefully, over eleven pages, with citations, that a declaration is not a measurement — and the remedy that argument had produced was the removal of the declaration. Not the installation of a sensor. There was no mechanism anywhere in that instruction that would cause anybody to look at anything, ever. The dial had been taken off the wall of a house with no thermostat, on the correct grounds that the dial was not connected to anything, and two million four hundred thousand people had been informed, within five business days, that the dial had never been connected to anything.

She had been right about the reading and had never once thought about the room.