Hal to Avery, programs, joint execution

[Avery Andrews 930924.1229]
(Pepinsky 930993)

>Whenever I try to model this simplest exercise in social control
>(e.g., to see whether motive shifts
>between actors interact in the form taken by the two open triangles
>which together make a tetrahedron), I find actors shifting back and
>forth across Bill Powers's first nine levels, with a tendency
(Pepinsky 930923)

>reflecting a tenth-order global tendency to go one's own way or to
>keep reorienting what one is after with reference to the
>(re)orientation of others' "motives" (which I think in PCT terms
>translates as something like vectors between one's perception and
>one's referent.

This is a bit too abstract for me. At the moment I'm trying to figure
out how my wife and/or I manage to make coffee - basically, I think,
a four step program normally executed by one person, sometimes by
two, but almost always with negotiation.

  1) Put (the right amount of) ground coffee into clean coffee maker

  2) Pour in (the right amount of) freshly boiled water

  3) Wait a few minutes

  4) Insert clean plunger & push down (if it resists too much, you haven't
        waited long enough)

Joint execution would involve the initiator of the process saying something
like "I'm going to hang up some laundry, why don't you push the plunger",
or something like that (things aren't really so PC around our place, but
never mind). Note that many of the steps have perceptual
preconditions that may or may not require execution of some other program,
such as boiling water, grinding coffee, or washing something. Also the
perceptual reference levels for the outcomes for the actions ('enough' ...),
plus the existence of expections about what the outcome of various steps
will be (if you poured the water into the coffee and the resulting mixture
came up as bright blue, you'd be pretty freaked out, and certainly wouldn't
drink the result).

Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au