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Entropy Is Fatal

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Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#31

Post by bogeholm »

IncRnd wrote: post #14
superb-owl wrote: post #3

I'm not sure "Entropy" is the right word for what the author wants to talk about, but the article raises some interesting points > 1st poison: Unlimited and uncontrolled growth IMO this is by far the biggest poison, and the one our society is most prone to ignoring. Every company, government budget, population, etc is considered "successful" if it's growing, and "failing" if it's shrinking. And the growth is always m…

> 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.

> Entropy is a "term-of-art" that has a specific meaning that differs from that in the general populace or in thermodynamics.

Would you care to explain that? The term ‘entropy’ originates in statistical mechanics / thermodynamics: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#32

Post by DeathArrow »

sophacles wrote: post #13
darkerside wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long run, most J curves are actually S curves

I question the "most" here, rather than "all". Examples of J curves that aren't S curves?

>Examples of J curves that aren't S curves?

Reindeer population growth in Alaska.

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#33

Post by harshreality »

I wouldn't call it entropy exactly, but this is also the theory behind Joseph Tainter's _Collapse of Complex Societies_. He proposes that too much governmental overhead through accretion of laws and bureaucracy is the cause (aside from obvious alternatives like being defeated in a war, etc.) of a society's or country's collapse.

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#34

Post by vincentmarle »

bogeholm wrote: post #31
IncRnd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Entropy is a "term-of-art" that has a specific meaning that differs from that in the general populace or in thermodynamics. Would you care to explain that? The term ‘entropy’ originates in statistical mechanics / thermodynamics: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

There are many more definitions of entropy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(disambiguation)

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#35

Post by frouge »

harshreality wrote: post #33

I wouldn't call it entropy exactly, but this is also the theory behind Joseph Tainter's _Collapse of Complex Societies_. He proposes that too much governmental overhead through accretion of laws and bureaucracy is the cause (aside from obvious alternatives like being defeated in a war, etc.) of a society's or country's collapse.

And more complexity in laws and many more things increases inequalities in our society. The more stuff (i.e. laws) the more you need people (lawyers) to understand them, the more intelligent people you also need (i.e. cryptos). All this creating a larger gap between social classes.

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#36

Post by toss1 »

sumy23 wrote: post #9
toss1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that productivity growth is still necessarily limited in the end by physics. Remove the unnecessary actions to produce X, and you're down to the bare minimum set of actions. Now speed up those actions and you'll eventually reach some minimum time requirement, and the output of X is a function of Required_Actions * Required_Time and how many Producing_Units you have and available time. Seems it'd be asymptoti…

Everything is limited by physics. But I think the limit is not close to where we are right now. Consider a smart phone. Physically, what is it? Some silicon, glass, a lithium-ion battery, and some other trace metals. If you were to have the raw inputs in front of you, it would be a small pile of dust. Yet, with just that small amount of material, a person can get access to a near infinite amount of information and en…

I don't think at all that we're near the limit of human ingenuity.

The quibble I had was with the "sustainable", which in that context, I read as indefinitely/infinitely sustainable (and it seems other responders have similar issues).

I agree that there should be a lot more human ingenuity ahead of us than behind us (assuming that those seeking power over others, e.g., megalomaniacs and autocrats, don't first destroy us).

That said, productivity of any one thing is certainly never an x^y sort of curve but eventually flattens and becomes asymptotic, if not declining.

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#38

Post by kubanczyk »

throw10920 wrote: post #29

I like the idea presented. The application of it to various constructs brings about ideas as to how to reverse the entropy: Software: try to build orthogonal features so that maximum value can be obtained with minimum complexity; build tools with well-designed deprecation mechanisms, then have releases where underused/redundant functionality is first deprecated and then removed entirely. e.g. all the major extension…

> Governments

This would be a major constitutional change, by which I mean that it introduces new limits on government. Politicians would have some understandable inclination to oppose it. Not saying it isn't needed, it obviously is.

In this context "be a minimalist" is a thought stopper in all its grace.

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#39

Post by Lyapunov_Lover »

The author makes a mistake here.

It's fine to think of entropy as messiness; that's the Boltzmann picture of statistical mechanics. The mistake is thinking that lowering entropy, or getting rid of the mess, is a satisfactory strategy.

Think of it as a negative feedback system, like a thermostat. Keeping entropy low means continually correcting errors. This is a successful strategy only if the world always stays the same, but it notoriously does not. Some degree of messiness is needed to remain flexible, strange as it may sound. There must be room to make the good kind of mistakes and happy little accidents (as Bob Ross would put it).

Because the author chose an analogy rooted in statistical mechanics, here's another: supercooled water. Take a bottle of purified water and put it in the cooler. It gets chilled below freezing temperature without freezing. If you give it a shake, it instantly freezes. The analogy may sound a bit vapid, but noise is the crucial ingredient for the system to "find" its lowest-energy state. The system crystallizes from some nucleation site.

It's the same with evolution. Mutations are a must. Keeping our genetic entropy low isn't a viable option, because that means we'll get stuck and die out. There must be opportunity for randomness, chance, chaos, noise; all that jazz.

This is how China became an economic powerhouse under Deng Xioping, for instance. They experimented with various policies and if something accidentally turned out to work great, it became something of a "nucleation site". The policy that worked in, say, Shaowu, would spread all across China. But it would never have worked if they stuck with a rigid, Confucian strategy of keeping "entropy" low at all times.

Entropy isn't necessarily fatal. Entropy can be used as a strategy for adaptation.

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#40

Post by biomcgary »

toss1 wrote: post #36
sumy23 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is limited by physics. But I think the limit is not close to where we are right now. Consider a smart phone. Physically, what is it? Some silicon, glass, a lithium-ion battery, and some other trace metals. If you were to have the raw inputs in front of you, it would be a small pile of dust. Yet, with just that small amount of material, a person can get access to a near infinite amount of information and en…

I don't think at all that we're near the limit of human ingenuity. The quibble I had was with the "sustainable", which in that context, I read as indefinitely/infinitely sustainable (and it seems other responders have similar issues). I agree that there should be a lot more human ingenuity ahead of us than behind us (assuming that those seeking power over others, e.g., megalomaniacs and autocrats, don't first destroy…

Sustained innovation is finding a series of technologies with S-curve growth that can be transitioned away from as they approach their asymptotic limit. Then, society can stay in exponential phase until it hits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Type_III
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