Heuristics explain some of the failure to predict emergent behaviours. Much of Engineering relies on “perfect is the enemy of good” thinking. But, extremely tiny errors and costs, especially the non-fungible types, compound and interfere at scale. One lesson may be that as our capacity to model and build complex systems improves, we simultaneously reduce the number of heuristics employed.
Material physical systems do use thresholds, but they don’t completely ignore tiny values (eg. neurotransmitter molecules don’t just disappear at low potential levels).
Heuristics explain some of the failure to predict emergent behaviours. Much of Engineering relies on “perfect is the enemy of good” thinking. But, extremely tiny errors and costs, especially the non-fungible types, compound and interfere at scale. One lesson may be that as our capacity to model and build complex systems improves, we simultaneously reduce the number of heuristics employed.
Material physical systems do use thresholds, but they don’t completely ignore tiny values (eg. neurotransmitter molecules don’t just disappear at low potential levels).