[jeantherapy]

you seem to reduce it down to pain. how is your notion of "pain" any different from not scoring well and being moved away from?

[lazide]

Some rewards can be worth certain penalties (pain) if within certain thresholds. Exhaustion fatigue can also play in.

You can of course boil them down to a single number, it just produces less nuanced types of decisions/operations, as it can’t differentiate between a cheap, painful, but bountiful choice and a expensive, no pain, mediocre choice.

[jkhdigital]

I think there needs to also be a concept of death—penalties from which recovery is impossible. Nonergodicity seems to be a requirement for the development of antifragility.