Originally Posted by
Quertus
@NichG - Where to start?
For the Cunning Strategist, it's not goalpost moving, it's not missing the point, it's... a really odd miscommunication? So, for our "spherical cows in a frictionless vacuum", let's assume in a conversation about Agency that there is no "noise", and all... Agents(?) successfully achieved all Goals that were valid / possible in the scenario. Does that... no, that doesn't work with what I said, either. Sigh. I see that, juxtaposed with the "child romance" example, one might assume that "Cunning Strategist" was a joke, but I actually meant it seriously, as in "someone who achieves their goals through unconventional and unpredictable means" (obviously that's not a definition of that term, simply an explanation of what I meant to imply in that context, rather than the opposite of a "cunning" strategist, whose actions are unpredictable because they're (unsuccessful and) dumb).
Anyway, that aside, what are our knowns and unknowns in this... example? conversation? theory?... you are describing? My limited experience in this field involves the company starting with only data, attempting to locate patterns, attempting to hypothesize names (ie, "goals") for the buckets of patterns that were created, manipulating the environment (in this case, the code) to attempt to facilitate these hypothetical goals (or to facilitate the company's goals, given said hypothetical customer goals), and observing the results. In other words, the worst, dumbest blind Business Analyst through Data Analysis I can imagine. Is my roundabout way of saying, warning: I'm a bad audience, because my experiences have left me biased against this field.
ANYway, what I was asking was, with what you were describing, what were the inputs, and what were the outputs? Are you walking in with a finite set of modal goals, and trying to parse the data for patterns that allow you to sort users into modal buckets? Because it sounded to me like one of the outputs you described was "these are the decisions that matter for differentiating between goals", but I was uncertain what you were claiming were the required inputs in order to achieve that output.
You know, I think I break character more when talking with you than with anyone else. :smallbiggrin:
What makes this particularly complex is that, with sufficient X (am I committing the Fallacy of Four Parts or otherwise obfuscating differentiatable details if I call X "Agency"?) there are multiple paths to goals; someone with goal A may usually take action A*, and someone with goal B may usually take goal B*, but someone with goal B could take action A* when taking a different path to B. Or someone with the goal not!A could take action A* simply to obfuscate their motives if their goal was "not to be detected" (someone with an unpopular goal, a spy, someone trying not to show favoritism, or my favorite half-remembered example where a girl points out to a (depressed?) woman that her love interest talks to everyone but her -> he's in love with her too and trying to hide it. And, yes, there is so much data in each choice (I'm reminded of the 12 spheres puzzle), compounded by the fact that "becoming king" could be a goal for one person / character, but a side-effect for another's choices.
So, yeah, with all that said, I'm struggling to ascertain just what modern data theory can tell us in this setup. But I do like the way you framed it in terms of Expression - any elaboration along those lines would also be welcome.