[gwern]

> I thought people recognized that they don't appear out of nowhere.

I don't think that paper is widely accepted. Have you seen the authors of that paper, or anyone else, use it to successfully predict (rather than postdict) anything?

[charcircuit]

I haven't paid attention and the paper seems to be arguing against the existence of the phenomenon of emergence behavior and is not related to predicting what is possible with greater scale.

[gwern]

> is not related to predicting what is possible with greater scale.

If they can't predict new emergence, then 'explaining' old emergence by post hoc prediction with bizarre newly-invented metrics would seem to be irrelevant and just epicycles. You can always bend a line as you wish in curve-fitting by adding some parameters.