Section 43 Valence

Hearts and wedges: Marking which variables are deemed to be important / valuable (“heart” symbol?); and which can be intervened on (“wedge” symbol?) In theory, this information can be a way to model or understand or predict someone’s behaviour (“they’re going to want to intervene on X in order to get Y”). For this to work we need to also encode the fact that they believe that X leads to Y: a causal map about somebody’ causal map. We can also generalise this to deal with multiple actors each of whom can value and intervene upon different (sets of) variables.

I’ve been having a battle with myself about metalanguage here. The problem is with the word “value” which is the best word to talk about the state or level of a variable but also the best word to talk about the valence which something has for us, how good it is.