THE Q:
"What do the patterns of higher quality have that those of destruction,
decay and disorder don't?"
ERIN:
I had trouble responding to the question because I got stuck on the wording.
The question is making quality and nonquality two separate categories that we
are supposed to compare. Quality is a matter of degree not an either-or;that
is it is not you have it or you don't it is how much quality does something
have. So just to appease me I am going to respond to this question instead
"what do higher quality patterns have more of than lower quality patterns"
ROG:
The question is very imperfect, and I agree that some of the value in the
exercise is in redoing the question (though I must admit to being surprised
at how consistent the desire to rewrite it has been as well as how different
the suggested revisions). I would argue though that the question can be
interpreted as one of degree. It suggests that "higher" quality is not
predominantly destructive, decaying and disordering. It suggests that
something is different between high and low quality patterns, and that
destruction, decay and disorder lean strongly to the low quality side of the
scale. But I digress.
ERIN:
To answer this I am going to use an analogy. Let's say I wrote a poem and
had
everyone interpret that poem. In choosing the highest quality interpretation
I
would choose the one that was closest to my intention or meaning of the poem.
A postmodernist would argue that every interpretation has both an subjective
and objective component to it so they are all equal(everybody gets an A ;)
BUT
MOQ says some interpretations have more quality. One interpretation has more
quality than other because its meaning is closer to actual meaning of the
poem. So a higher quality pattern is one that is closer match to what both
patterns are trying to pattern. Make sense?
ROG:
Your particular analogy uses the term "pattern" in a particularly restrictive
(though valid) fidelity-to-the-original-experience manner. This adds a tough
spin to the original question, which lent itself more to issues of morality,
behavior and pattern continuance (high quality is that which sustains the
pattern, low quality destroys the pattern, etc). Luckily, the word
"disorder" occurred in the original Q, and it certainly applies here. You
are evaluating the quality of a pattern based upon its fidelity to something
else. In this case, randomness is bad. Errors are bad, and errors are
elements that are not ordered according to the pattern in the original. So,
yes, your analogy does lead to disorder as being low quality.
ERIN:
I know this is a vague answer but it is a vague question. If you want a
specific answer I think we have to narrow the question to a specific topic. If
quality is a relative term I can't encompass an answer to encompass all
quality. On the other hand if quality isn't relative I still need to know
what we are "patterning" to know which patterns have quality or not.
ROG:
I was using the term pattern in the generic MOQ sense of "everything can be
defined as a pattern of values". You know?
Rog
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