Entropy Is Fatal

Also inevitable.

> I'm not sure "Entropy" is the right word for what the author wants to talk about, but the article raises some interesting points

It's not the right word. Entropy is a "term-of-art" that has a specific meaning that differs from that in the general populace or in thermodynamics. This website can't be loaded over HTTPS:// without sufficient Entropy.

There may be a slight nit with this enframing of entropy. Actually, the article visualizes it quite nicely:

the assumption that the world is a closed system - depicted here by the black border around the particles, showing it is closed off from the world.

Sure, in a closed system, eventually you get something like heat death, within the box.

But life, and the world, are an open system - at least especially from the human-scale life experience. You can't say that heat death is sure to happen.

Does entropy increase at the macro level? Pretty much yeah. But to define what 'macro' is, is hard enough to make any answer dubious or uninteresting - is it the entire universe? Is it the solar system? In either case the scale at which it appears closed much bigger your life, which is coincidentally a scale at which it may seem open - bc the world is not uniform and ergodic at the living-as-a-human-scale. We each experience a different life story (another debate for the future, perhaps? :^) )

If you like you can imagine that the entropy in your own particular life could always decrease while the entropy somewhere else far away undergoes a commensurate simultaneous increase.

As I remember it, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Flow) wrote in the book The Evolving Self that basically the meaningfulness of your life is:

    (the flow you experience == the entropy/time 'life bandwidth rate' you experience) 

    x 

    (the good you do for others)

By going for a minimalist approach, you try to maximize the Signal-to-Noise ratio. If you'll allow for some eyebrow-raising application of mathematics to philosophy for a sec...

the Shannon-Hartley theorem tells us that the channel capacity C depends

    B: the channel substrate bandwidth,

    SNR = Power(Signal) / Power(Noise), both in decibels. 

as

    C=B log2(1 - SNR)

Here, C could stand for how good a life you're leading. So you'd either want to increase the signal, or decrease the noise, or increase B (the 'underlying capacity for enjoyment of life'). I guess it is a matter of debate whether you can improve the SNR more by tapping in more, or tapping into noise less. Probably something you can try to adaptively improve by 'gradient descent' ie 'trying out new ways of living', lol

Growth should probably be more precisely defined in the vast majority of cases to avoid confusion and misunderstanding. In terms of systems, the quantity that grows or shrinks should be concrete (i.e. not a rate, certainly).

For example, human population. Let's say the birthrate in a population is growing, so a naive conclusion would be that the population, a concrete object, must also be growing. This is not true if the deathrate is growing by the same amount. Now, this is the standard kind of thing you see in a intro to differential equations course: a river feeds a lake at rate X, and another river drains a lake at rate Y, and so is the lake growing or shrinking? Ooops, we neglected to take evaporation into account, so we get the wrong answer.

Economists are among the worst offenders in this misuse of concepts. Take 'productivity growth' - this is actually growth in the rate at which product is produced, right? If productivity is flat and market demand is flat and human population is flat, well, that means everyone is getting what they need, if say the product is cell phones, for example. If everyone has a cell phone, and cell phones are replaced every five years, then what is productivity growth? Maybe you can make the cell phone manufacturing line more efficient, by recycling the materials from old cell phones into new cell phones, or by automation etc. Nevertheless, the desired rate of cell phone production is fixed, and everyone has a cell phone.

Of course the market should be broken up between different producers to encourage competition, but here growth in production of a better cell phone with higher demand is counterbalanced by shrinkage in market share by another producer, as net demand is flat.

Unfortunately, if the cell phone makers form a cartel, and raise their prices in unison, some economist will call that 'economic growth' based on the fact that they're extracting more money from a market with fixed demand, which is just ludicrous - but that's modern neoclassical economics for you.

2^x