Comment on Modularity and Buzzy

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 15:09:58 GMT

When a system achieves sufficient complexity, we have a tendency to reify it. I don't know what that bias is called.

Me neither, but the fundamental attribution bias is (I think) related to it.

That is, I suspect that the same mechanisms that leave me predisposed to treat an observed event as evidence of a hypothesized attribute of an entity (even when it's much more strongly evidence of a distributed function of a system) also leave me predisposed to treat the event as evidence of a hypothesized entity.

Labels aside, it's not a surprising property: when it came to identifying entities in our ancestral environment, I suspect that false negatives exerted more negative selection pressure than false positives.

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