61–70 of 119 posts
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.
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…
From the article: >> ...a program with more lines of code is better... Immediately reminded me of Bill Gates' comment on how measuring progress on a designing and building a software project by using a Total_Lines_Of_Code metric is about as dumb as measuring progress on designing and building an airplane using a Total_Weight metric. What you want in both is the least amount of code/material that will actually do the…
The big issue near as I can tell, is that defining what the job actually is, and what accomplishing it actually looks like is the hardest part most of the time.
Many of the most innovative solutions also come from changing pre-built assumptions about what they can look like.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
noise is the way out of local optimums ?
I've observed this personally! After finding a solution to a problem and repeating it numerous times, I'll often randomly change one parameter of the solution (I'm talking about things like opening jars, not building complex systems, but it could apply there as well) to see if it works better. This often happens randomly because I ask my self "what if I did this?" as I'm performing the action. The result is that almo…
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Growth is possible by increasing outputs from the same level of inputs. Certain types of growth are unsustainable, yet other types of growth, e.g. productivity growth, is definitely sustainable.
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…
Biology will put limits in place long before physics will.
Sadly, most techies completely ignore or miss this point.
Asimov was way ahead of TFA :)
I like to think that life is a thermodynamic mechanism that:
- locally reduces entropy by consuming
lower-entropy energy and casting out
higher entropy stuff
- reproduces
For example, life on Earth consumes low-entropy (because colimated and short-ish wavelength) sunlight and molecules of various types (e.g., CO2) and uses that to build locally-lower-entropy things (plankton, plants, animals, ...), in the process emitting lower entropy things like detritus, feces, etc., but especially longer-wavelength light in all directions. Because Earth's climate is roughly in equilibrium, if you examine all the light going in (colimated, low-wavelength sunlight) and all the light going out (longer-wavelength IR in all directions), the energy must balance, but the entropy must be much higher on the outbound side. Similarly, Venus must be dead because it reflects so much sunlight, thus failing to use it to improve local entropy, thus it must be dead.
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…