What happens when an entity doesn’t have an intrinsic fixed preference about something, but rather it emerges as a consequence of other (possibly changing) underlying properties?
For example, if a naturalist were to consider a flock of a million starlings as a single entity, and try to map out the flock’s preferences for moving in a particular direction, they might find a statistical correlation (such as “during winter evenings, the flock is 50% more likely to move South than North.”).
I think there needs to be an additional step in the “working with preferences” : preference testing. I think, once you have a representation of preferences in a format from which you can make predictions of future behaviour, you need to explore the bounds of uncertainty, in the same way that statisticians do confirmatory factor analysis after having done exploratory factor analysis.
What happens when an entity doesn’t have an intrinsic fixed preference about something, but rather it emerges as a consequence of other (possibly changing) underlying properties?
For example, if a naturalist were to consider a flock of a million starlings as a single entity, and try to map out the flock’s preferences for moving in a particular direction, they might find a statistical correlation (such as “during winter evenings, the flock is 50% more likely to move South than North.”).
I think there needs to be an additional step in the “working with preferences” : preference testing. I think, once you have a representation of preferences in a format from which you can make predictions of future behaviour, you need to explore the bounds of uncertainty, in the same way that statisticians do confirmatory factor analysis after having done exploratory factor analysis.