Re: Emergence: The No-Stats All-Star
Posted by
Russ Abbott on
Feb 16, 2009; 3:34am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Emergence-The-No-Stats-All-Star-tp2330583p2332958.html
Thanks Nick. I know (and love) the story. Here's my
blog post about it. It shows that a pen of chickens is an entity.
-- Russ
On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 7:07 PM, Nicholas Thompson
<[hidden email]> wrote:
Russ,
For years, chicken breeders selected their chickens at the individual level, even though they were placing them in close quarters in crates of nine chickens. Chickens had to be debeaked and they were constantly pulling dead chickens out of the pens. . So, one day, a couple of poultry husbandry guys got a bright idea. They selected the best PENS of chickens for breeding. Pen rates of reproduction went up and the need for debeaking went away. If anybody is curious, I will chase down the reference.
I guess even a pen of chickens can be a black box.
N
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
----- Original Message -----
Sent: 2/15/2009 10:32:44 AM
Subject: [FRIAM] Emergence: The No-Stats All-Star
After sending the previous message I started reading this (long) article: The No-Stats All-Star - NYTimes.com. Here's a key paragraph.
The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions among the team's elements. To get at this they need something that basketball hasn't historically supplied: meaningful statistics. For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game. ("Someone created the box score," Morey says, "and he should be shot.") How many points a player scores, for example, is no true indication of how much he has helped his team. Another example: if you want to know a player's value as a rebounder, you need to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood of the team getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player's zone.
That's a nice illustration of emergence. It may be subtle, but it's not magical or mysterious. To create the emergent level of abstraction that the paragraph refers to, the components have to work together in the right way.
-- Russ
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