The former should be symmetric with ancestors and include all children. However, it should not include self since ancestors + descendants should not have duplicated. The latter is symmetric to superclass in the sense it only includes direct children.

By adopting a convention, we expect to have less conflict with other frameworks, as Datamapper. For this moment, to ensure ActiveModel::Validations can be used with Datamapper, we should always call ActiveSupport::DescendantsTracker.descendants(self) internally instead of self.descendants avoiding conflicts.