David's Sling by Marc Stiegler

spacecraft launches.
    Hammond speaks. "This is the main screen upon which the Institute carries out its largest and most important decision duels. Its not used too often for that purpose. What we re looking at now is one of our demonstration duels—a duel held over a decade ago to determine the merits of strategic defense."
    PAN. Bill looks back at the display in fascination. The colorfiil splashes that streak through the wall resolve, as he approaches, into lines of text. With a few exceptions, the entire screen holds only words, arrows, and rectangles. The rectangles enclose and divide the text displays.
    They stop at a console perched high above the audience: clearly it is the display master controller. Hammond continues. "As you can see, the overall dueling area is divided into three sections." He taps a track ball on the console, and a pointing arrow zips across the screen. It circles the left half of the screen, then the right, and finally runs up and down the center band of gray. "Each duel pits a pair of alternatives against one another. Often, the alternatives are negations—one position in favor of some action, and one position against that action. The left part of the screen belongs to the proponent for the action, and the right half belongs to the opponent. These two people are known as the slant moderators . They have slanted viewpoints, of course, and they actually act as moderators—anyone can suggest ideas to them for presentation. Of course, no one calls them slant moderators. The nickname for slant moderator is decision duelist ."
    The pointer continues to roam across the center band. "The center is the 'third alternatives' area, where ideas outside of for-or-against may be presented by either of the duelists, or by anyone in the audience. In the duel we have here, the third alternatives section remained closed—no one came up with any striking ways to finesse the question."
    The arrow shifts upward. Above the colored swirl of text boxes stands a single line of text, a single phrase. It dominates the screen, with thick letters black as asphalt. The lettering seems so solid Bill wonders whether it is part of the display, or whether it has been etched into the surface in bas relief.
    This one phrase running across the top overlaps all three sections of the screen. Bill presumes that top line describes the theme of the duel, the title of the topic under discussion. Reading it now, he sees it does not. Instead, this dark, ominous line—so striking and hypnotic, as if sucking the light from the air—reads:

    LET ACCURACY TRIUMPH OVER VICTORY

    Despite the hypnotic pull, Bill tears his eyes away from the words. They disturb him.
    Hammond speaks. "It's easy to get wrapped up in one's own point of view on a topic. After much study of the matter, we've concluded that you can't overemphasize the need for objective search for rightness , as opposed to victory ." He smiles. "As it happens, we keep records on the duels written by certified slant moderators. We do not keep our records based on who wins the duel. We keep them based on whether the decision that comes out of the duel is correct . Thus, a duelist can have a perfect record even if he 'loses' every time he moderates."
    A dark-haired woman wearing a smart business suit asks, "How do you know who's right? Sometimes it takes years to find out, and sometimes you can never find out. ''
    Hammond concurs. "You're quite right. We can't trace the correctness of all the duels, so not every duel yields a record. However, we don't lose things just because it takes a long time to determine the outcome. The memories of the Zetetic data bases are very long indeed. In fact, the Zetetic data bases have started to free those of us who work here from our own short-term concerns. Even if we forget events and decisions as quickly as the news media forget, the knowledge remains available for recall with only a slight effort. We have automated the tracking of all the predictions