When a committee meeting on AI 'best practices' turns into something else entirely, one mathematician learns that two small words might open more doors than any amount of expertise. By Lew Ludwig Image generated using Gemini, with prompts created by ChatGPT. I was invited to advise a committee tasked with developing "best practices" for AI use at an institution. Before the meeting, I received the questions they planned to discuss. Some of the questions were genuinely curious. But others troubled me. They weren't asking what I thought — they were framing my positions in the weakest possible light and asking me to defend them. It felt less like an invitation and more like a cross-examination. Even so, I showed up. I'd been invited as the "expert," after all. Surely there would be room for a broader perspective once the discussion got going. I was wrong. The Finger Test At the start of the meeting, I tried to establish some common ground.…