I wonder if part of messiness might stem from confusing various domains and ranges. For example, for human, we have a complex of wants—some are driven very much by physiological factors, some by cultural factor and some by individual factors (including things like what I did yesterday or 5 hours ago). We might call these our preference domain.
Then we need some function mapping the preferences into the range of behaviors that are observable. Assuming that there is something approximating a function here (caveat—not a math guy here so maybe that is misused/loaded here). From that we have some hope for deducing the behavior back to the preference.
However, we should not consider the above three sources as coming from the same domain, or mapping to the same range. Confusion may come in from both the fuzziness (I’m implicitly agreeing with the general cannot infer preferences from behavior that well as a general proposition) of the “correct” function as well as a confusion of associating a behavior to one of the three ranges, and then attempting to deduce the preference.
If I see A doing x and ascribe x to the physiological range and then attempt to deduce the preference (in the physiological domain) when x is actually in the individual range for A I will probably see a lot of errors. But maybe not 100% error.
I do think there is something to the we’re all human so can recognize a lot of meaning in action from others—but things like culture (as mentioned) does influence performance here. So, what is an acceptable accuracy rate? Is the goal mathematical certainty or something else?
I wonder if part of messiness might stem from confusing various domains and ranges. For example, for human, we have a complex of wants—some are driven very much by physiological factors, some by cultural factor and some by individual factors (including things like what I did yesterday or 5 hours ago). We might call these our preference domain.
Then we need some function mapping the preferences into the range of behaviors that are observable. Assuming that there is something approximating a function here (caveat—not a math guy here so maybe that is misused/loaded here). From that we have some hope for deducing the behavior back to the preference.
However, we should not consider the above three sources as coming from the same domain, or mapping to the same range. Confusion may come in from both the fuzziness (I’m implicitly agreeing with the general cannot infer preferences from behavior that well as a general proposition) of the “correct” function as well as a confusion of associating a behavior to one of the three ranges, and then attempting to deduce the preference.
If I see A doing x and ascribe x to the physiological range and then attempt to deduce the preference (in the physiological domain) when x is actually in the individual range for A I will probably see a lot of errors. But maybe not 100% error.
I do think there is something to the we’re all human so can recognize a lot of meaning in action from others—but things like culture (as mentioned) does influence performance here. So, what is an acceptable accuracy rate? Is the goal mathematical certainty or something else?