Fable
The evidence on the desk was queued up again
The inquiry hall checked regulations for the common people every day. In the front hall there was a file retriever who, after hearing a question, would bring back a stack of similar case files from the archive and arrange them in the order he first thought relevant. At first, the director only looked at the first stack. The retriever said the most similar were placed on top, and the answer writer followed that. Small questions were fine, but complex matters often went wrong.
Someone suggested pulling more scrolls. Ten scrolls became fifty, and there was indeed more evidence, but the desk became a mess. The answer clerk got lost among old rules, new rules and similar-but-inapplicable exceptions, and was in fact more likely to cite the wrong one.
The curator also added titles, years, and red tags to the files. The order improved somewhat, but it was still impossible to judge which volume truly answered the immediate question. For example, "seven-day returns" often appeared at the front, but large merchant contracts had other exceptions.
Later the hall added a small review desk between the scroll-seeker and the answer-sheet gentleman. Candidate scrolls were first placed here, where the reviewer checked each one against the identity, time, contract, and constraints in the question, reordered them, and sent only the most relevant few inside.
In a refund dispute, the most similar general rule was placed third, and the exception clause in the annual framework contract was moved to first. The answer changed accordingly, and the client was convinced.
So the curator added a review desk. The retriever still brings in the files that might be useful, but the reviewer re-examines the identities, dates, scope of applicability and exception clauses in the question, then decides which files should sit on top.
The reviewer often dropped the top-ranked dossier to third or fifth. At first the dossier seeker was unconvinced, feeling that he had already found something very similar. The curator had him look at the wrong cases: a dossier that seemed relevant did not necessarily answer the question; what really mattered was whether it could support the conclusion. The order on the desk changed, and only then did the answer writer put pen to paper steadily. Later, the inquiry hall also kept the review results. Which dossiers were often mistakenly ranked at the front, and which conditions would change the order—the seeker gradually learned to first recall possibilities, then hand the final ordering over to finer judgment.
The curator understood that finding the material was only the first step. Before entering a reply, the evidence still had to be reordered according to the current question; if the order was wrong, even a good gentleman could be led astray by the wrong file.