I'm glad you take interest, it's unfortunate that I never seem to have enough time to explain everything, and I usually just end up having to write down stuff which others are unable to understand. My desperation to share my thoughts with others, though, compelles me to reach out even if I'm not always understood.
Let me start answering you:
Beginning here, prior to you responding, I wonder initially how you define "need" and how you might define "want" in context to usual philosophy in this area?
My Science of Needs, and Philosophy of Needs, collectively just called Opusology (from latin for "need"), treats "need" as something quite different than the way languages treat it. Because languages are often used just to affect people, to make them be or do stuff, studying "need" is quite pointless in language. In language need just becomes a mess of a concept.
In Opusology, instead, "need" is an object intended to be perpetuated. To be perpetuated, it has "subneeds", needs of needs, which I just call the
conditions, the conditions for perpetuation. The way that the Law of Reduced Domain works in here, is to set the stage for that any infinitely long network of needs of needs, will create an evolutionary chain of possible actions that require someone to constantly adapt towards fixed points in an imaginary space of possibilites. The movement towards these points mean that those points are the only points at which you are completely and fully guaranteed. However, in order to reach those points, you'd have to also expand, not just adapt, because by necessity of how guarantees work (that they mean someone serving your interest is in control).
The implications for this is massive, both on the scale of fundamental truths about reality, as well as the very notion of truths. For instance, this understanding also predicts that destructive ways can never occur except as a passing phenomena, because any reasonable person would have to adapt in ways that eventually required the removal of the destructive ways. To exemplify it: evolution does not like pessimists.
It also predicts, though not as clearly, that only cooperation is the way forward, and that merging, instead of consuming, is the way by which opusologically aware beings will be forced to act, because consuming involves destroying what you take, and destroying implies destructive ways. Those who are not opusologically aware become instead various shades of a mixture between nature and opusology, between chaos and order (to put it poetically).
Initial response to your "law of Reduced Domain", I'm thinking you may be thinking Stoically here? At least, with regards the label of this, it seems like you are possibly thinking that in order to be relatively satisfied in one's conditions, you could reduce what inputs (members of your Domain) such that it limits what you could or would expect.
Yes! But there's just one thing you miss here, and that is that any such movement, to be a proper reduction, needs to be a delivered change, meaning that the change is seamless, prepared for to the full extent, you don't experience the actual change as a "loss". Any other type of action would be a trade-off, which is a different phenomena.
As to this, though not certain yet how you relate it to 'guarantees', I agree this CAN be true but only if such a domain has either not been 'teased' from one's environment OR if you've actually had a literal taste of something 'accidental' from your environment to which you found interesting enough to include in your future 'domain' to seek for.
I'm not sure what you mean either, but it sounds like you kinda got my idea, so it sounds like I kinda agree with you xD I think you mean that: if effort was required, it'd be a trade-off, at least that's what I'd say (a trade-off implies there are parts of an action that costs more security than is gained). I meant pure luck (of course, finding luck, like a natural resource, does make you have to adapt towards it to cultivate it, but this adaptation is not a trade-off in itself, whereas "making" the natural resource, like building an artifical lake and fill it with fish, is a trade-off. Nature didn't give you that lake).
If one's environment lacks X, while such a lack can be real and 'necessary' in some way, the lack of knowing it even exists would make you interpret whatever you feel presently for its lacking is considered 'normal' to you. Only until you experience X and learn it enhances your life or, alternatively, decreases any pre-existing condition, you cannot determine it as necessary.
This is where our thoughts become a bit divided, because here normal is given authority over needs, despite normal being a product of imagination, whereas nature runs its own course with or without or concept of normal.
For example, those preferring prohibition do so on the thinking that if one rids the environment of either the supposed X that provides the acquired 'need' OR denying one from experiencing X through fear of penalty or threat of harm, such acts as limiting the domain of others so that they won't know what X is to be missing it. The problem here is that as long as the environment still has X OR for those who exist who have experienced it and now desire X, prohibiting it penalizes those already experienced of X even where unavailable and unless X is able to be absolutely removed from existence, its likelihood of others to try still exist. The trouble occurs when the prohibition also makes one curious to its supposed demand.
This way of thinking is inconsistent with opusology, since opusology treat everything local and individual, and with an infinitely incrementing precision, meaning that because a need is to be perpetuated, there will always be a greater list you can make of how things should best be for it to be perpetuated. You will find errors you correct, and clarifications you can make, and there's always going to be more you can make.
Opusology on a societal level is an enormous task of calculation that involves pulling multiple needs together towards a fixed point for them all (a person, though not strictly speaking a person so don't think of the definition of a person, can be treated as a need-object. Opusology has a definition of people as well, to convert them into need-objects, but that's another story).
Take smoking, for example. A never smoker, in error 'thinks' the act is realistically 'unnecessary' and 'undesirable' with usual naivete. They may demonstrate they logically understand addiction and credit their own Stoic insistence not to try the supposed 'evil' X, but they nevertheless still ACT as though anyone still has the means to alter anything based solely on some 'logic' of willpower (or assumed lack of it in others).
Opusology does allow for a problem to exist, it does not shy away from facts. But opusology, with its evolutionary perspective, considers such a thing as smoking to be something that must be combated with science. Science, if it doesn't have the answer now, it eventually solves the problem by finding solutions to "deliver" smokers out of smoking. Of course, not just science does this task, but all of societies disciplines must unite together to bring together a pool of resources that gives the knowledge and the force to make the deliverance: changing them to non-smokers, without a loss. So not winning instantly isn't a problem. Also, this touches on another principle of opusology, which is that the opusological world and the non-opusological world cannot directly mix, because that's like order and chaos. Once you introduce one to the other, sure you can have shades, but those shades are really just localized consentrations that are spread out enough for it to look like a shade across. This also means that opusological people cannot meaningfully mix with other people without treating them as "lesser people", this is an unfortunate but necessary feature of opusology, because opusology itself is to vulnerable to be a hybrid way of thinking, you can't think opusologically with only half your brain, or half your people. Then it simply isn't opusological. It also implies that opusological people would look upon other people as objects for cultivation. They become a long waiting list of normal people to be converted into opusological people to allow for opusological thinking at ever higher organizational levels.
But your actual description doesn't fit with this label. You appear to be saying that for anything you receive requires an equal and opposite loss in the same value as what you take in. This is Newton's third law being used a little awkwardly. If you relate this to the above, then your reducing of the domain is only about claiming that if you accept what you have to begin with, you cannot expect to get anything more.
This isn't an accurate way of thinking about it, but nice observation though.
The action you perform is an investment in guarantees. The return value is what is uncertain. You can end up incurring unforeseeable damages to the things that guarantee your well-being, so as long as you puruse the uncertain action, unforeseeable things might occur. However, when you no longer perform that action, new guarantees might have accumulated. Think of it like eating: going on a hunt will cost you a lot of calories, but you might find food also. When you first have the food, the food can be called guaranteed although a lot of things might go wrong with it of course, but let's stick to positive presumptions in order to keep it simple. Because hunting is not necessary every day, and because you have a high chance of finding food, you have a lot of time to just enjoy yourself. That tapping into the uncertainty though, is not good, therefore an opusological way of thinking is to try and strive for a large surplus of food, and multiple food sources, such that you can have many bad hunts in row, without it being bad for you. Having family members could also guarantee your life if you become sick, and multiple people storing surpluses leads to an even greater surplus that allows for any one individual to have even more bad hunts before it can become a problem.
It can also be used for balance. You are always as weak as your weakest point, and opusology uses this principle to attain guarantees at your weak points, at the cost of your strong points.
This is NOT what occurs in living things due specifically to the unpredictable reality of our external nature.
The unpredictable part is what I refer to as "luck". Bad luck is not a concept of itself but it falls under "loss due to incomplete knowledge", which says that things will sometimes prove themselves to be insecured because there's something you don't know about and haven't had the opportunity to find out about.