Absolutely -- an academic environment I was in used to have a lot of government callers come by, asking for predictive power to solve any number of humanitarian

Absolutely -- an academic environment I was in used to have a lot of government callers come by, asking for predictive power to solve any number of humanitarian crises, terrorism, crime and so on. We collectively used to ask them every time, 1. What data they had to work with. 2. What was the human baseline that they were currently executing with. 3. What performance would make a difference to this process. ... and as you say, the answers we would get would tend to sound something like. 1. Almost nothing. 2. Unclear, un-measured. 3. Something well beyond incredible, well-intentioned humans with incredible data. In that case the lesson was often to simply not try, but it does sometimes feel like other areas of government like E2E-breaking legislation, in that well-intentioned folks will try and try and try again and eventually get someone to fund and execute on the project, feasibility notwithstanding. In this instance with United... the data that we're getting via Ars and this case is so unclear and one-sided that it's hard to know how well things actually work... it'd be fun to consign them (for now) to "don't even try" if we had the info to do so, but it feels like it's a matter of time either way and so... I think the ideal with most of these cases is to eventually ship something that's actually high quality.