Krimel said to dmb:
I believe I made mention of this post in our discussion of betterness. I said it is a relative term. Here in indicated as relative to its opposite. To first claim that Quality or DQ aims at "betterness" and then claim the term subsumes worseness as well is just horse hockey.

dmb replies:
Horse hockey? I imagine it's very difficult to find skates that fit a horse and it's hard to imagine how they could pull off a slap shot without falling down on their horse faces. (This is not a criticism of Mick White, by the way.)

But seriously, better and worse are "subsumed" under Quality in the same way that hot and cold are both subsumed under temperature. Better and worse are relational just like hot and cold are relative. In both case, the terms have meaning in relation to each other. Without "down", the idea of "up" means nothing. And so it is with all concepts. So I'd say that the notion of "betterness" in isolation, without its opposite, would be a steaming cow pie of an idea.

Krimel said:
By the way I went through a lot of pain reading that Wilber stuff for you and I have been dropping digs at Wilber for a month now. What's a guy gotta do to pick a fight around here?

dmb says:
Sorry about that. School kept me busy until recentlty. But I've only noticed a few vague digs. If memory serves you've been saying that he "abuses" this or that idea. I guess the idea there is that it is some kind of violation of the rules to do anything except accuarately and precisely duplicate what has already been concieved and written. This attitude can only stem from a pretty serious misunderstanding of the nature of his work. I mean, the whole idea is to alter and thereby improve the ideas he's gathered from elsewhere. Piaget springs to mind. Anyway, it seems to me that the LAST thing he wants to do is leave these ideas as they were. Instead of "abuse", I'd characterize his use of these ideas as a creative synthesis. He's using this material to build a new thing and sometimes that means there is going to be sanding, trimming, connecting previously unattached pieces and all sorts of alterations. Maybe you'll take your favorite example and explain the difference between the original idea and Wilber's version of it. This might give me a chance to see this so-called "abuse" much more specifically. Then we'll have a nice fight about that.

Also, I feel compelled to respond to your comments about my (lack of) reading comprehension skills. Despite the probability that it'll only make me look defensive and pathetic, I gotta tell you that my scores have been consistently very high. A million years ago when I was in college, none of the other history majors had a better score. (98%) And over the past year I've been writing papers for the very purpose of demonstrating comprehension of the assigned readings and I've earned an "A" every time, except once, which was nearly an "A" (89%). So what's my point? I'm not terribly concerned about that particular criticism. I'm sure you could think of a more plausible attack.

dmb

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