20 years ago, in a fundraiser meeting for a volunteer ogranization, a former bank merger consultant said something, with a knowing smirk, that I have carried ever since.

Everything is only what it looks like.

– Bank merger consultant

If you make the facts appear so that they conform to your story, then you can plausibly overcome any objection that may arise, and you can influence the outcome to the direction you want.

This principle appears relevant for bank mergers, and there is some evidence that it often works in other contexts too, although it is morally objectionable.

But the opposite is also true: nothing is what it looks like.

It is basic human tendency that we shortcut and simplify when we describe something. Sometimes we obfuscate half-consciously. We may be embarrased about the current situation, so we uphold a shared illusion that the issue will be fixed by somebody else, although the situation has been worsening for years.

On the short term, you may gain some glory if you surface issues. But you are not making long-term friends by doing it. Any issue is something somebody else should have handled, and that person might not like you making noise about it, if they think it makes them look bad.

The second-order problem is that the messanger will be shot. The third-order problem is that people start avoiding messanger role if they are always shot.

The consequence is that digging deeper into almost anything, you find it very different from what it looks like on the surface. Therefore, nothing is what it looks like.

If you need consulting related to system architectures in general, or LLMs or data integrations in particular, please do not hesitate to contact Mikko Ahonen through the contact page.