It's sort of like the wishful thinking in programming, a thinking tool to produce hyptheses. You start with a rough idea and then you fill in the details.

I saw the point of the sequence on emergence as that oftentimes people label the rough idea, and then say "Done!", and the language used to discuss whether or not they are actually done rarely distinguishes between labeling a function and implementing that function in code.

I agree that there is a meaningful technical concept there--the dynamics of the interactions of components are different than the dynamics of those components, though they are reducible to them--but I think that EY is right to complain that unless you've done the math to figure out what those interaction dynamics are, you don't have much more predictive power than you did before.