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,
Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu)
----- Original Message -----
From: Russ Abbott
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
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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