Hmm.
While closing tabs recently I stumbled on a particularly interesting (to me) HN discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506007) from a couple months ago.
I'm taking the following comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506951) out of the context it was posted in, but I don't believe this particular case takes liberties with the original intent:
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> analog31
> ... Economics is largely about an emergent phenomenon, thus falling squarely on the "is" side of things.
> Emergence is a relatively recent concept in the linguistic timeline. For most of human history, everything seemed to be either of human action and human intention (turning on a light), or neither of human action nor of human intention (the weather). As such, languages did not emerge (ha!) that easily expressed emergent behaviors, things that were of human action but not of human intention (traffic jams).
> Similarly, one can see this with the subject of biological evolution (another emergent phenomenon). It's been nearly two centuries since Darwin got that ball rolling, and still almost any discussion about evolution is rife with inaccurately implied intention.
> One other consequence of this linguistic difficulty is that it leads people to propose solutions to perceived problems as if they were just about human action/human intention...
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I think emergence is perhaps the most intuitively accessible way of reasoning through the impact of bureaucratic network effects. We've simply never before in history had to deal with human social cohesion at the scale we do today, so we've never reached the point where we've *had* to understand the dynamics correctly in order to make any progress.