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Entropy Is Fatal

kerkour.com

41–50 of 119 posts

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree. Growth is not the only thing valued. Value companies are a big part of the US Markets for example. Dividend stocks are a thing. But growth isn't about one company ever increasing. It's about new companies innovating and taking over old ones. As long as there is innovation, there will be growth. Change should be embraced. I personally see no reason to advocate for stagnation of human progress with the s…

I guess my point (wrt corporations) is that companies should turn from Growth into Value a lot sooner. E.g. I would have preferred Google to become a Value company once it became the dominant search provider, instead of constantly looking for new revenue streams.

I agree with that wholeheartedly. I'd go further and say that I think companies are getting too big to the point where different divisions have no relation to each other at all. Any major tech stock has this problem. The problem is I have no idea how it could be discouraged. It feels like whenever something is regulated it just results in something completely different than intended.

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#42

Counterpoint, "Entropy is Life": Diffusion is an entropy driven process, and is fundamental to most biological processes. Plus other more specific entropy driven reactions [0 + google it]. Lazy metaphors... [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep04142

Counterpoint to your counterpoint :) I think local entropy has to decrease first to create the concentration gradients that are harvested by diffusion. So life must also rely on decreasing the local entropy. All depends on how you define the system.

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

none of these seem consistent with how the original article uses "entropy". The original article specifically mentions thermodynamic entropy in its strained analogy.

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#44
post #4

With respect to the author, the article fails to show that in fact “entropy” is related to “complexity” and how the two are related. Entropy should not be thought of as “overhead” or “wasted energy,” which is what I believe the author is getting at. Instead, entropy is the tendency to disorganization. So, the analogy could be the more stuff you have, the more disorganized it becomes; but this is a weak analogy in my…

> entropy is necessary for complexity to emerge. Something about this particular line does not sit well with me. How would we define the relationship between entropy, complexity and information ?

thermodynamic entropy is to heat as Shannon entropy is to information?

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's absolutely an S-curve. Any animal population will eventually run out of resources.

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#46
post #9
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…

> Everything is limited by physics.

Everything is controlled by the maths of physics and chemistry.

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#47

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 s…

noise is the way out of local optimums ?

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#49

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 s…

Perfect use of “all that jazz”

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#50

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 s…

noise is the way out of local optimums ?

pretty much
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