It’s been bothering me that the only category on my site where I can put these posts about emergence is “Blogo-eroticism and Other Hype.” Since I intend to get past all this back and forth about what emergence isn’t (as quickly as possible) and start posting on what it is and how I think it could be valuable, I need a place to put those posts.
But for me, emergence is only one piece of a larger puzzle. I’ll never forget hearing financial engineering professor Andrew Lo wax poetic about what inspired him to go into his field. As a child, he had read Isaac Asimov’s science fiction classic Foundation
and became enchanted with the idea that human history, both past and future, could be explained and predicted if only one could find a rich enough mathematical model and deal with a sufficiently large number of people (to average out the quirks introduced by free will). Lo sees his research as very much infused with that idea.
I believe that emergence, network theory (popularized by Duncan Watts’ excellent book Six Degrees) and certain elements of behavioral economics together can form a basis for us to understand how learning and other forms of knowledge sharing will work differently in a networked age. So I’m collectively labeling these ideas as “aggregation sciences” and giving them their own theme on e-Literate.