[paraph1n]

> "Critical" has a precise meaning in these kinds of systems; it essentially means when correlation lengths diverge (or, with a finite brain, become the size of the whole).

If someone doesn't know what "critical" means, they also don't know what a "correlation length" is, so I don't think this clarification is very helpful. Who was the intended audience?

[coldtea]

People interested to learn more?

We don't just learn a new subject through simpler ELI5 explanations.

We also learn by immersing ourselves further into the subject (like here, were we were given an alternative, still elaborate explanation), until things "click".

In immersive learning (like how kids learn language and most other wordly things naturally outside of explicit teaching) we also get to understand the meaning of an unknown term by compounding other unknown terms, and making correlations, connections, and deductions.

[martopix]

The meaning of critical in complex systems is accessible only if you studied physics or theoretical neuroscience or something related. I'm pretty sure correlations are familiar to most people in STEM, such as the average reader of HN

[drdeca]

I found it helpful.

Presumably the “correlation length” is something kind of like “some length where there is much larger correlation of pairs of things at most this length apart, than there is between pairs of things that are much longer than this length” (but that’s largely just a guess)

[panda-giddiness]

I think you've assumed that they've just substituted some jargon with some other jargon, but that's not really what happened here. Rather, "critical" is left undefined, even though it's an ambiguous word; evanb merely provided a definition.

> Who was the intended audience?

From that definition? Obviously physicists, lol