People working in emergence might be familiar with those terms, but the abstract is not very good. The point of the abstract is to provide the paper's main poi

People working in emergence might be familiar with those terms, but the abstract is not very good. The point of the abstract is to provide the paper's main points, methods, and findings, so that the uninitiated reader could understand whether the paper is relevant to them. We have too many papers in various databases to spend hours decoding the abstracts. I would have rephrased the abstract like this: "We study why it's difficult to model systems with emergent behaviors. Through logic and experiments, we tried to create such models, and found that the more constrained a system is, the more challenging it is to model. Our work helps resolve conflicting theories and aims to support further research." Then, the more in-depth explanation can go into "Technical Abstract" just below. I used to write "obfuscated" abstracts as well when I was new in academia, and I'm not proud of them. But I used to worry a lot about people perceiving my work as shallow if I didn't. Over time, my abstracts became "We wanted to know X and tried Y. We discovered Z." And my peers quite liked them, as opposed to the earlier ones. There are many problems with "posturing" abstracts - they are opaque to most readers, they kill the paper's reach, and many people will just dismiss them as posturing, even if they are not and there's real substance. But that's what happens when you obscure the substance well enough with jargon.