Dear Wm,

thanks for the thought. I tend to prefer a deep thread that tracks objections, suggestions, changes in viewpoint and so on, over a buncha shallower threads that focus on a buncha narrower topics within the overall subject. Maybe that’s because my personality type is the xNTP (if you practice the Myers Brigs personality profiles for understanding people). I am always amazed at the attorneys I work with who will diddle every single tree in the forest – they tend to be extreme xSxJ types in MB terms. It seems that about 25% of the population falls into each of these classes, so the attitudes change with the personality.

Every so often, posters suggest a new thread name, but I personally see all this material as related specifically to self interest. And I think that a database of text fragments that are indexed and efficiently organized for understanding text is the way to process text for self interest. Please see my response to John Bottoms below for a deeper explanation of how I am working to organize the text.

I also see Chomsky as an excellent source of highly rational thought, so starting with his observations, tracking his theories about the political structure, corporate actions, and individual behaviors (which he researches and validates based on corroborating sources). Therefore, Chomsky’s writings, along with the corroborating sources, can provide a more logically consistent and complete corpus to load into said database.

That is why I prefer to treat this thread as a longer term topic instead of breaking it into smaller topics with the same messages filed differently.

Thanks for the suggestion though. I guess its just my personality that drives my selection of topic names.

-Rich

this is a critically important and interesting subject, in its own right. It seems to me to be quite different from self interest ontology, even though of course self interest is involved in the question.

Might you want to introduce it as a new thread?

--
William Frank