Summary
Computational irreducibility is the idea that some processes have no shortcut: the only way to find out what they will do is to run them, step by step. Stephen Wolfram named it in work going back to the 1980s; it is central to his book ‘A New Kind of Science’ (2002). Studying cellular automata – grids of cells following short, fixed rules – he found patterns no formula could jump ahead of.
So knowing the rules isn’t enough. Wolfram writes that “there can be no way to predict how the system will behave except by going through almost as many steps of computation as the evolution of the system itself”.
Rationale
Wolfram’s claim concerns computation; carrying it over to culture is analogy, not proof. Still, it gives a hard edge to our hunch that some things are learned only “through trying them out”.