Lots and lots of in class repetition for multiple years.

And my memory is sketchy, but it may only have been select scenes. I’m looking at the page count now and I’m doubting that we performed all 210 pages.

Our last year of middle school we performed at least a portion of the play in a local German language competition that was mostly high school participants. In theory we only had to memorize our own lines, but most of the main character actors knew most of the other characters’ lines, too, for whatever portion we performed.

EDIT: I expect most (native speaker) adult performers of it have nearly the whole thing memorized, though. Props to them.

Middle school for me. Herr Nielsen had us memorize both that, and Wilhelm Tell.

>It absolutely is a red herring.

No. An essential part of my main point is not a distraction from my main point.

I was using a particular element (of a meaning of a word) to distinguish that meaning (which someone applied here) from a different meaning (which someone applied in the article).

If you want to use a different definition of any of the words I have used, or make a different point than I was making, that’s your prerogative. But that’s you making a different point or using a different definition, not me dropping a red herring.

>Your genes understand things. Intelligence is nested across scale. Single cells have intelligence and solve problems. Tissues have intelligence and solve problems.

Great. But that’s not how the other user was using the words, and not how I was using the words. I was distinguishing between multiple common definitions to remove a confusion, not telling you how you have to use them.

That’s fair. We don’t know whether it is conscious/understanding, and may never know.

But my poor phrasing aside, swarm intelligence is used to describe scenarios where we are eventually able to explain the behavior without any need to resort to a hypothesis that has the group construct obtaining either understanding or a consciousness.

It’s not a red herring in this context, because the definition of intelligence I think most people are colloquially applying (that the other user seemed to apply), and that I am trying to distinguish swarm intelligence from, is a property of conscious minds.

But if you prefer, we can use different wording. The etymological root of intelligence means “to understand.” As far as I can ascertain, the swarm doesn’t understand. It merely behaves much as if it did.

Other constructs (like you and me!) manage to understand things, but that’s not what swarm intelligence describes.

Intelligence arising out of a construct is not the same thing as the construct itself having been directed or planned by an intelligence.

For example, swarm intelligence might describe the behavior of a school of fish as seemingly directed by a master intelligence, but it’s not postulating that the school of fish has developed its own consciousness independent of that of the member fish.

It’s the same thing here though. He’s calling it swarm intelligence because swarm intelligence is a niche technical term.

Semantics matter in both cases.

He’s just using jargon.

“Swarm intelligence” has a niche definition that is different from the colloquial definition for “intelligence.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

Essentially, systems (composed of simple individual units) organizing themselves in a way that gives us the impression of a centralized plan or guiding intelligence, where no such guiding intelligence exists, but where the overall pattern emerges as the result of basic interactions between member units.

This gives me hope that someday we can end child marriage in the United States.