Hey Friday What a gracious posting - compliments to you! Listen, Friday, while I am attracted to your idea of working out a more rigorous interpretation for Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety (LRV), I fear that there are simply too many simplying assumptions in the rigorous proof that don't map onto the living world of human endeavors for this to succeed. As I mentioned before, I find the interpretations of LRV - any one of these offered by you would serve adequately in my opinion - most useful. Thus, on the utility side, I am in complete agreement - develop multiple choices for achieving any valuable outcome. Indeed, the stretch principle I introduced decades ago was an attempt to promote such thinking and subsequent behavior. The Stretch prinicple simply says that if you have n ways of achieving some valued outcome X, remove them all temporarily from your repetoire and put yourself in the context where you must achieve X. This will force yourself to develop alternatives and thereby enrich your set of choices. There are, of course, alternative self manipulations - imagine how your ability to hear nuances of speech would shift if you spent a day with a blindfold in the  care of a sympathetic blind person. All the best and a pleasure to have the exchange, John