Valter comments on Say Not "Complexity" - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 August 2007 04:22AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (49)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Valter 29 August 2007 08:34:35AM 7 points [-]

Actually, the "emergence" and "complexity" pseudo-causal explanation are much worse than Felix's "gravity" example: the answer "Gravity!" does explain the fact that the block falls to the floor by noting that it is a specific instance of a general phenomenon for which we have very precise information on how it works (attraction force is constant x m1 x m2 /d^2). We may not know why gravity exists, but that is a different (higher level?) problem.

In the case of "emergence" and "complexity", we just don't know.

P.S. I do think that "emergence" is a useful concept to describe situations where modelling is more conveniently done at a (more) aggregate level, but that's yet another story.