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I don't really understand where this post is supposed to be going, but I agree with Yudkowsky regarding all the "emergence" I've ever heard about: A fun exerci

I don't really understand where this post is supposed to be going, but I agree with Yudkowsky regarding all the "emergence" I've ever heard about: A fun exercise is to eliminate the adjective "emergent" from any sentence in which it appears, and see if the sentence says anything different...Does not each statement convey exactly the same amount of knowledge about the phenomenon's behavior? Does not each hypothesis fit exactly the same set of outcomes? Before: Human intelligence is an emergent product of neurons firing. After: Human intelligence is a product of neurons firing. Before: The behavior of the ant colony is the emergent outcome of the interactions of many individual ants. After: The behavior of the ant colony is the outcome of the interactions of many individual ants. http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/

btilly 16y ago
Does not each statement convey exactly the same amount of knowledge about the phenomenon's behavior? Does not each hypothesis fit exactly the same set of outcomes? No. When you talk about an emergent property, you are saying that there is an issue of scale to pay attention to. Below some threshold the phenomena does not show up. After another threshold it clearly shows up. And this is sometimes a useful piece of information. Take, for example, the statistical algorithms used by Google translate. Effective translation is an emergent behavior of the corpus the algorithm has to run off of. If you provide it with a small corpus, you get garbage translations if anything. If you provide it with a large corpus, you get good translations. And the knowledge that size matters is sometimes useful information. For one thing it tells you that the results from a small corpus are not indicative of how effective the algorithms are.
ataggart 16y ago
It is useful to denote when ordered outcomes occur as a result of action but not of intention. Russ Roberts covers it well: http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/Robertsmarkets.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/Robertsmarkets....

btilly 16y ago

Does not each statement convey exactly the same amount of knowledge about the phenomenon's behavior? Does not each hypothesis fit exactly the same set of outcomes? No. When you talk about an emergent property, you are saying that there is an issue of scale to pay attention to. Below some threshold the phenomena does not show up. After another threshold it clearly shows up. And this is sometimes a useful piece of information. Take, for example, the statistical algorithms used by Google translate. Effective translation is an emergent behavior of the corpus the algorithm has to run off of. If you provide it with a small corpus, you get garbage translations if anything. If you provide it with a large corpus, you get good translations. And the knowledge that size matters is sometimes useful information. For one thing it tells you that the results from a small corpus are not indicative of how effective the algorithms are.

ataggart 16y ago

It is useful to denote when ordered outcomes occur as a result of action but not of intention. Russ Roberts covers it well: http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/Robertsmarkets.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/Robertsmarkets....