4 ms·

"Emergent behavior" is just a fancy term for "too complicated for us to understand". Things you consider obvious would be considered "emergent" to somebody a bi

"Emergent behavior" is just a fancy term for "too complicated for us to understand". Things you consider obvious would be considered "emergent" to somebody a bit dumber than you, and things you consider "emergent" would be considered obvious to somebody a bit smarter than you.

npteljes 3y ago
Not really. Emergent behavior is when the system's behavioral patterns are seemingly disconnected, not obviously derived from the fundamental rules. Emergent behavior is on a different "level" than the originally described actions and participants. Emergent behavior is crowd behavior vs individual psychology, biology and physics to chemistry. I agree on the part that these "levels" are not actually separated. It's just how us humans happen to think about things - one could say, it's an emergent behavior in itself that comes from how humans form abstract thought. But nevertheless emergence is a useful concept. And I also agree that we don't know what the fuck is going on. To be honest, I think that we can't know, that no human being ever can achieve complete understanding. And thus, we cannot really say that we're going to do something, and this and this will happen. We don't actually know, but we do manage.
akira2501 3y ago
It's a specific term with specific understanding, which you are attempting to redefine to fit your argument. This does not have anything to do with the intelligence of the beholder. For example, writing software, you can have two working parts of the system, that when operating in concert, produce incorrect results. It may be that you just failed to predict the invariant, or you misunderstood the timing, or changed some other small thing. In almost all cases, you can work backwards to discover the source of the behavior. This is what a "case study" is, and they're quite popular on this site. The danger with your mentality, I feel, is that telling someone "you don't know what you're doing" is very unlikely to alter their behavior. It's entirely ignorant of human nature. It's much more useful to explain to them why you believe they will fail in terms that don't belittle their intelligence. Sure, it's less of an edge for you to sharpen your wit against, but considering the subject matter, is this really the appropriate subject for scoring your own points?
bregma 3y ago
We used to use the terms "magic" and "science" for those concepts (consider Clarke's Law).

npteljes 3y ago

Not really. Emergent behavior is when the system's behavioral patterns are seemingly disconnected, not obviously derived from the fundamental rules. Emergent behavior is on a different "level" than the originally described actions and participants. Emergent behavior is crowd behavior vs individual psychology, biology and physics to chemistry. I agree on the part that these "levels" are not actually separated. It's just how us humans happen to think about things - one could say, it's an emergent behavior in itself that comes from how humans form abstract thought. But nevertheless emergence is a useful concept. And I also agree that we don't know what the fuck is going on. To be honest, I think that we can't know, that no human being ever can achieve complete understanding. And thus, we cannot really say that we're going to do something, and this and this will happen. We don't actually know, but we do manage.

akira2501 3y ago

It's a specific term with specific understanding, which you are attempting to redefine to fit your argument. This does not have anything to do with the intelligence of the beholder. For example, writing software, you can have two working parts of the system, that when operating in concert, produce incorrect results. It may be that you just failed to predict the invariant, or you misunderstood the timing, or changed some other small thing. In almost all cases, you can work backwards to discover the source of the behavior. This is what a "case study" is, and they're quite popular on this site. The danger with your mentality, I feel, is that telling someone "you don't know what you're doing" is very unlikely to alter their behavior. It's entirely ignorant of human nature. It's much more useful to explain to them why you believe they will fail in terms that don't belittle their intelligence. Sure, it's less of an edge for you to sharpen your wit against, but considering the subject matter, is this really the appropriate subject for scoring your own points?

bregma 3y ago

We used to use the terms "magic" and "science" for those concepts (consider Clarke's Law).