Government policy · 事例
"But in 2023 you said the opposite" — prepping audit answers with the announcement's own sentences and a revision pair
これでできることAcross nine policy announcements and some sixty research reports, asking "what's the current position on deposit recovery?" returns the current decisions in the exact sentences the announcements printed, with the 2023 position alongside them, struck through, carrying a "Superseded" badge and a "Superseded by {note}" link.
Two days before the parliamentary audit. The first line of the expected-questions list a staffer sent over reads: "The 2023 package said you'd shrink the guarantee ceiling. In 2025 you swung back to expanding it. Why the change?" The director opens the 2023 announcement PDF on the shared drive and hunts down the paragraph. The paragraph is there. Whether that position still stands, and what overturned it, is written down in no document at all. The predecessor who drove the decision moved to another ministry two years ago, and the job has changed hands twice more since.
This person is a division director at a central government ministry, responsible for the policy response to rental-deposit losses. What she inherited is a folder left behind by three predecessors. Inside: nine policy announcements from 2019 to this year, some sixty research reports, inter-ministry consultation papers, National Assembly transcripts, and press clippings. This piece walks through dropping that folder into a Consilience workspace and asking "when did this position change?" It isn't a customer story. It's a hypothetical scenario — what someone holding this material could plausibly do with it.
The inheritance: nine announcements, sixty-odd reports
The material is all there. Every announcement spells out the position of its moment in plain sentences, and the research reports behind them sit on the same drive. What the documents don't hold is the relationship between announcements. Which sentence replaced which sentence is written in no file.
- Nine policy announcements — 2019 to this year. They never reference each other. Each one states only the position of its own day.
- Some sixty research reports — state institutes, academic societies, commissioned studies. Nothing marks which report backed which position.
- Inter-ministry consultation papers — opinions traded with Finance, Justice, and the Financial Services Commission. Objections that carried and objections that were ignored, mixed together.
- National Assembly transcripts — standing committee and audit stenographic records. Members' remarks and the director-general's answers of the day, verbatim.
- Press clippings — coverage right after each announcement. Sometimes they carry background the announcement itself left out.
Today: eyeball nine announcements, newest first
Here's how checking the current position works. Open all nine announcements newest-first and compare the relevant item by eye. If it isn't in the 2025 announcement, drop to 2024; if it isn't there either, drop to 2023. One item takes about thirty minutes, and even then you can't settle whether the position you found is still alive. Nothing tells you whether a later announcement's silence means the item was dropped or just wasn't mentioned.
"Why did it change?" has no answer in the documents at all. The reason for a reversal lives in the consultation process, and the consultation process is scattered across transcripts and opinion papers. So prepping an audit answer ends where it always ends: tracking down a predecessor's phone number.
We have every announcement. What we can't confirm is whether it's still the position.
Drop in the folder, write down the announcement dates
Setup is moving a folder and adding one date line to each announcement. Original files are never modified, and the workspace stays as markdown on your own disk.
Drop the predecessor's folder into the workspace
Move the whole thing in — announcements, reports, transcripts, clippings — and wait for extraction to finish. When the "Key facts" badge appears in a note's document sidebar, that note is processed. At this volume, it takes a while.
Check that "Capture your decisions and questions" is on
This Settings toggle is on by default. With it on, an announcement's decision sentences land in the graph word for word instead of being summarized. The exact sentence is what you have to read out in the hearing room, so this toggle is the premise of the whole job.
Date all nine announcements
Revision order comes from the date a note states about itself, not the file's modified time. Put the announcement date (say, 2023-09-26) in frontmatter or at the top of the body and the nine line up chronologically. The more a file's timestamp got flattened by copying off the drive, the more that one line decides the ordering.
Read the pairs in the "Revisions" panel
In the titlebar press "Open knowledge graph", then choose "Revisions" in the left rail. Each row shows NEW (the later announcement's decision sentence), REVISES (the earlier announcement's decision sentence), and the note trail "{later note} → {earlier note}". "Search decisions…" narrows the list. "Confirm" is what marks the earlier decision "Superseded" across the app; "Reject" dismisses that pair for good. High-confidence pairs arrive already marked "Applied", and "Undo" reverses them.
Re-scan when something's missing
If a revision pair you expected isn't there, check that both announcements state a date, then press "Recompute all". When you see "No revisions to review yet.", nothing is waiting.
Three questions the night before the audit
"What's the current position on deposit recovery?"
→ The current decision sentences, exactly as the
announcements printed them. The 2023 position you
pressed "Confirm" on comes back too, struck through,
with a "Superseded" badge and a "Superseded by
{September 2025 policy announcement}" link. Not deleted,
labeled.
"When did the guarantee-ceiling position change?"
→ One pair in the "Revisions" panel.
NEW = the 2025 announcement's decision sentence.
REVISES = the 2023 announcement's decision sentence.
Trail = "September 2025 policy announcement →
September 2023 policy announcement".
What the app hands you is two sentences and two notes.
The "why" is a person following those links into the
consultation papers and reports, and reading.
"Did anyone in the Assembly speak against this guarantee
position?"
→ Stance sentences carrying the against badge.
Each one shows the speaker's name and a link to the
transcript it came from.The first reason is how it's stored. An announcement's decision sentence is stored verbatim rather than summarized, and its address is that note plus a statement number. So when the question is "but in 2023 you said the opposite," you can read back the sentence that announcement actually printed. The "In your words" section on an entity page groups them by kind — "Decisions", "Open questions", "Claims", "Quotes", "Preferences", "Values", and "Stances" — and every sentence links back to its source note.
The second reason is ordering. Even though the nine announcements never mention each other, a later decision and an earlier decision about the same item get paired by the dates the notes state and surface as proposals in the "Revisions" panel. Each proposal waits in a separate analysis graph, stamped with a review status and the time it was proposed, and the markdown files are never modified either way. Nothing gets struck through until the director presses "Confirm".
What changes
| Before | Now |
|---|---|
| Track down a predecessor who left, just to answer "why did it change?" | Open the NEW/REVISES pair and the "{later note} → {earlier note}" trail in the "Revisions" panel and read both announcements side by side |
| Eyeball nine announcements newest-first to confirm the current position. Thirty minutes an item | Retired decisions carry a "Superseded" badge, so you only read the sentences that aren't struck through |
| You find the report behind a position, but which passage it was is gone with someone's memory | Every decision sentence links to its source note, and that paragraph opens directly |
| A new package lands and you re-trace its relationship to the previous eight from scratch | "Recompute all" sweeps the whole workspace for missed revision pairs, and a pair the app got wrong is dismissed for good with "Reject" |
The markdown files are never modified. "Superseded" isn't a stored value — it's computed at read time from whatever confirmed revision pairs exist right now, so pressing "Undo" makes the earlier decision current again on its own, with no leftovers to clean up.