[ExI] Yet another health care debate

[Jef Allbright]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 7:27 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>>
>> It's surprising to me that on this list it's still unsettled
>> that while gradients are essential to the ratcheting forward
>> of "progress", fear and want (and other impairments for the
>> sake of simple contrast) are not.
>
> Ja.  Keep in mind, fear and want aint what they used to be.  Fear pf
> starvation shouldn't be a part of it, nor homelessness.  But we can have
> fear of a hand-me-down Intel 386, and want of a Sony LCD screen, that sorta
> thing.  That would keep us rising and going to the office.  Hey, works on
> me.  {8^D

Yes, works for you Spike (and me personally too), considering that
we're both agents already operating from a baseline of relatively high
relative satisfaction.  But scaling up to systems of **social**
decision-making this distinction becomes crucial.  It reinforces
biases framing the process in terms of conflict between agents
competing to attain narrowly subjective, myopic norms, workable within
the shared and relatively static context of the tribal environment of
social adaptation, but it's increasingly inappropriate to
collaborative search for solutions promoting an increasing context of
increasingly coherent values over increasing scope of consequences -
necessary for maintaining a place in the Red Queen's Race.

Question to the list:

Can anyone here suggest a simple term meaning "increasingly coherent
over increasing context" with regard to this property corresponding
with the expected competence of an agent's model of effective
interaction with its environment?  It seems such a fundamental and
generally applicable concept, similarly appropriate to philosophy of
science, but I get a **lot** of email offlist from people saying they
tend to get lost after about the second "increasingly" whenever I try
to express lexically, concepts better expressed mathematically.

- Jef