Random thoughts...

What informs choice?

What informs the decision by another person on what stance to take in a particular issue?

Humans are like self running programs with a modification routine built - they are given a basic set of routines to learn and modify their knowledge base. So it is actually incremental over time.

The key should be to modify the modification routines so that learning is more "aggressive" or "proactive"...

There are parallels between - computers and humans...

May be at the "heart" of the matter - it is all electrical.