Manu, thank you for touching on something very fundamental here.
I'm reminded of another piece of fiction that remains salient in my mind, from the Journal of the Whills:
"First comes the day
Then comes the night.
After the darkness
Shines through the light.
The difference, they say,
Is only made right
By the resolving of gray
Through refined Jedi sight."
Journal of the Whills
The stanza is a balanced enigma to me, what with the cyclic shining and darkness. I muse to myself that the observer sees an objective phenomenon which
does occur, but it falls to the final two lines to help the observer interpret the thing seen - the profound 'refined Jedi sight'. Through this refined sight, the Jedi is able to
resolve
the gray into its component light and dark parts and understand the nature of the cycle. When a Jedi acts, the 'right' difference the Jedi makes must be informed by this nuanced understanding and insight.
Now comes the challenge of balancing meaningless granularity with meaningless generality. Consider the
Coastline Paradox
:
The measurements one uses to record the distance along a coast affects the measured distance. The coast's length changes massively if you measure by tens of kilometers, kilometers, meters, centimeters, or millimeters. In one measure scheme, the observer is potentially skipping entire peninsulas and bays. In another, perhaps the observer misses inlets and the mouths of rivers. The more granular measurements are longer and more accurate, but there comes a point where the granularity becomes less meaningful. The best measurement really depends on who I am and what I care about. The 'reality' of the shoreline changes if I'm a ship captain, an oil prospector, an international governing body, or an erosion scientist.
Jedi must judge when it is appropriate to generalize and when granularity is more suitable. There are risks inherent to generalizing overmuch through inappropriate or dangerous
heuristics
, though sometimes those same heuristics save valuable time when time matters most.
Wise judgment determines where the proper lens is on the sliding spectrum of focus, and the Jedi deliberately makes that decision before moving forward to inject 'right' difference.
