Greedy, but Not Blind: Teaching Optimization to Listen
Budget meetings have a familiar rhythm. Someone brings the spreadsheet. Someone brings the map. Someone else brings the sentence that ruins the spreadsheet: “This district looks inefficient on paper, but the roads are worse than the data says.” Classical optimization knows what to do with numbers. It does not naturally know what to do with that sentence. In public health planning, infrastructure rollout, retail site selection, and ESG investment, those sentences are often where the real institutional knowledge lives. Unfortunately, once the sentence enters the room, the algorithm usually leaves through the back door. Or worse, the organization pretends the sentence has been “encoded” into a weight, because apparently all human judgment becomes rigorous once it is multiplied by 0.37. ...