[HN Gopher] Entropy Is Fatal
___________________________________________________________________
Entropy Is Fatal
Author : sylvain_kerkour
Score : 120 points
Date : 2022-06-08 14:59 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kerkour.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kerkour.com)
| pizza wrote:
| 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
| jussivee wrote:
| This got me thinking. Minimalism or minimalist systems are often
| seen as systems with less energy. Or, we seem to think it takes
| less energy to remove objects than to add objects (complex
| systems). More stuff, more energy. But, minimalism needs a lot of
| useful work. Less stuff is not the same as a minimalist system.
| Using a music analogy, I argue, it's much easier (takes less
| energy) to fill an empty space with hundreds of notes than with a
| few carefully selected notes :)
| tdullien wrote:
| Recommendation: People should read the original "Parkinson's
| Law".
| iamjbn wrote:
| Integrate Bitcoin into your business and all the arguments in the
| write up just unwind.
| nathias wrote:
| This is what happens when people are philosophically illiterate,
| they see important concepts out there but just don't have the
| proper tools to think about them.
| throw10920 wrote:
| 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 repositories for a particular tool
| parse the machine-generated deprecation list, scan extensions,
| and email owners when they use deprecated APIs. Maybe provide
| "shims" where APIs are internally removed entirely but
| transitional packages are provided that implement the removed
| APIs in terms of still-present ones.
|
| Companies: deliberately design policies and organizational
| structures that are simple and minimize entropy; be prepared to
| pay some upfront financial costs to do so (e.g. because your
| policies aren't layers upon layers of hacks that grow every time
| someone makes a mistake), but reap rewards in the future as
| incidental costs of running your company are lower and less
| bureaucracy means workers are more efficient.
|
| e.g. instead of having a bunch of different rules about different
| kinds of vacation time, consolidate them all into 1 or 2 kinds
| (normal and medical?) and give everyone a bit extra to compensate
| for some of the edge cases that were smoothed over.
|
| Governments: legislators should spend some time attempting to
| "refactor" old laws such that fewer words and less complexity
| still results in effectively the same legal environment; reduce
| government functions (as much as some of you may dislike that
| idea).
|
| e.g. instead of trying to provide hundreds/thousands of different
| special-case tax breaks for low-income families, use a "sliding"
| tax rate where e.g. at $1k/year annual income your tax rate is
| 0%, at $1M a year your tax rate is n%, with linear interpolation
| between those two extremes (or whatever). Simpler, still somewhat
| fair, people might actually be able to do their taxes by reading
| the law, and no suspicious discontinuities[1]. Or something else
| - with some thought and a little experience in government, I'm
| sure _someone_ could come up with an income tax system that was
| an order of magnitude shorter than what the US has now.
|
| [1] https://danluu.com/discontinuities/
| kubanczyk wrote:
| > 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.
| cryptonector wrote:
| https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
|
| 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
|
| by which definition stars are _almost_ alive. I say "almost"
| because stars only manage to keep local entropy from growing very
| fast, but they don't manage to reduce it.
|
| 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.
| Lichtso wrote:
| Inspired by Erwin Schrodinger - "What Is Life? The Physical
| Aspect of the Living Cell" from 1944 ?
|
| > Schrodinger explains that living matter evades the decay to
| thermodynamical equilibrium by homeostatically maintaining
| negative entropy in an open system.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F
| proc0 wrote:
| This is negentropy (not my fav. word, but it is the term used).
| Indeed it's the signature of life, although I think there would
| be a threshold that all living creatures meet, but non-living
| systems do not. In other words life produces lots of
| negentropy, probably exponentially, unlike other systems like
| celestial bodies.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| There was a recent podcast episode from Sean Carroll's
| Mindscape [1] where they focus on and around the Krebs Cycle
| and discuss it as an example of Entropy. Turns out Entropy
| really is fatal.
|
| [1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/05/23/1
| 98-...
| superb-owl wrote:
| 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 measured in
| terms of percentage, meaning the growth is
| compounding/exponential.
|
| Sustainable living means getting comfortable with flat or even
| negative growth.
| toss1 wrote:
| 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 job, and being smarter than a simple "more
| is better"approach. Yet so many supposedly intelligent managers
| use such approaches...
| lazide wrote:
| Well, one is easy, the other is hard hah!
|
| 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.
| wildmanx wrote:
| > Yet so many supposedly intelligent managers use such
| approaches...
|
| Yet so many supposedly intelligent engineers work for such
| managers...
| nightski wrote:
| 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 same handful
| of companies serving humans for all time.
| superb-owl wrote:
| 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.
| nightski wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| Part of the problem is the tax code.
|
| Dividends (what a value company typically produces) are
| taxed at a much higher rate than long term capital gains
| (which a 'growth' company produces).
|
| Dividends usually at the same rate as income, from 10-37%
| at the federal level, and often the same if the state has
| an income tax.
|
| Long term capital gains are 0-20%, and many states don't
| tax them at all even if they tax income.
|
| Everyone has a significant incentive to go 'growth' in
| that environment.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Do you know what is a share repurchase or buyback? [I
| find it unlikely that you don't - but your comment
| doesn't make much sense if you do.]
| lazide wrote:
| A share buyback is a way to convert extra cash (or new
| debt) into almost a dividend. It's gotten popular lately
| for exactly this tax efficiency reason.
|
| It is not a guaranteed way to do it however, as unlike a
| dividend, there is no way to directly tie the repurchase
| of shares to x amount of actual long term market value.
|
| It often works though, and when markers were going up, it
| helps.
| ngvrnd wrote:
| The author wrote "uncontrolled growth", not "any growth".
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Growth really means productivity. That doesn't mean simply
| "more": it means "more with less".
| buescher wrote:
| "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer
| cell." - Edward Abbey
| IncRnd wrote:
| > 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.
| bogeholm wrote:
| > 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
| vincentmarle wrote:
| There are many more definitions of entropy:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(disambiguation)
| tingletech wrote:
| none of these seem consistent with how the original
| article uses "entropy". The original article specifically
| mentions thermodynamic entropy in its strained analogy.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| I would add the whole monetary system is designed this way with
| inflation.
| sumy23 wrote:
| 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.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| darkerside wrote:
| In the long run, most J curves are actually S curves
| sophacles wrote:
| I question the "most" here, rather than "all". Examples of
| J curves that aren't S curves?
| tlholaday wrote:
| Dark Energy astrophysics.
| uoaei wrote:
| You seem confident an "ultraviolet catastrophe"-like
| scenario won't play out there, too.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Examples of J curves that aren't S curves?
|
| Reindeer population growth in Alaska.
| dron57 wrote:
| That's absolutely an S-curve. Any animal population will
| eventually run out of resources.
| uoaei wrote:
| Wait a few decades and it will probably plateau at, if
| not shrink from, a maximum.
| sumy23 wrote:
| 2^x
| toss1 wrote:
| 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 asymptotic
| sumy23 wrote:
| 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 entertainment. And smartphones can run
| software, which allows the phone to be updated for near-
| zero marginal cost. And this is only something invented in
| the last few decades. There are so many amazing things
| being created around us all the time. I don't know how you
| can look at this situation and think "yup, we've reached
| the end of human ingenuity."
| Klapaucius wrote:
| If you look at the weight of the tech product (phone) in
| isolation, you are correct although not in a very
| meaningful way. If you look at the amount of physical
| material that went into the process leading up to
| producing that product, the quantity would amount to many
| tonnes of material in terms of crushed ore, fossil fuels,
| water consumption, chemicals, packaging and so on. A
| phone does not only represent its own grammes material,
| but an enormous tail of environmental impact in form of
| waste, emissions and extraction remains. (This is not to
| mention the human labor cost involved in obtaining some
| of the rare earths used, from countries with, ehrm, lax
| labor laws).
| toss1 wrote:
| 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.
| biomcgary wrote:
| 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
| lazide wrote:
| That's a bit like saying 'we can only make horses so
| efficient', which is true, but that's why we end up
| coming up with automobiles, airplanes, etc.
|
| As long as we have free brain cycles focused on solving
| problems or understanding something we do not yet
| understand, we'll continue to do better.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| > Everything is limited by physics.
|
| Everything is controlled by the maths of physics and
| chemistry.
| lazide wrote:
| Some would argue everything fundamentally is physics,
| including mathematical models of chemistry. I can't say
| they are wrong.
|
| Physics being math doesn't quite make sense to me yet, if
| for no other reason than a large body of physics laws are
| 'because that is what happens in real life' when you get
| down to it.
|
| It's clear the math is a tool to try to reason about the
| reality, not the other way around.
| wildmanx wrote:
| > It seems that productivity growth is still necessarily
| limited in the end by physics.
|
| Biology will put limits in place long before physics will.
|
| Sadly, most techies completely ignore or miss this point.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| 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 opinion.
|
| Here is a link to another article that discusses the link between
| complexity and entropy. The two are indeed related: entropy is
| necessary for complexity to emerge. Entropy is not, as this
| author suggests, a result of complexity.
|
| https://medium.com/@marktraphagen/entropy-and-complexity-the...
| bob1029 wrote:
| > 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_?
| pizza wrote:
| Minor lightbulb went off in my head: you might be interested
| in slide 17 here, from a presentation on Shape Dynamics [0]
|
| tldr: (Shannon) entropy [1]: expected
| description length of a state of a system
| (Shape) complexity [0]: a 'clumped-ness' metric: clump sizes
| / inter-clump separations information: not sure
| anyone ever really resolved this in a satisfying way :^) [2]
|
| [0] https://philphys.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/Barbour-
| Saig_Su...
|
| [1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/606722/how-
| do-di...
|
| [2] https://monoskop.org/images/2/2f/Shannon_Claude_E_1956_Th
| e_B...
| Comevius wrote:
| Information thermodynamics is what you are looking for, it's
| the unification of thermodynamics and information theory.
| Bear with me because I'm not a physicist, but my
| understanding is that information needs a medium, in which
| way it is similar to heat, and you can use the same
| statistical mechanics to describe it, or fluctuation theorem,
| which is more precise.
|
| My understanding is that this is pretty cool stuff that
| solves Maxwell's demon and also sort of explains biological
| evolution, because apparently a system responding to it's
| environment is computation, performed by changing the
| system's state as a function of a driving signal, which
| results in memory about the driving signal that can be
| interpreted as computing a model, a model that can be
| predictive of the future. Now apparently how predictive that
| model is equals to how thermodynamically efficient the system
| is. Even the smallest molecular machines with memory thus
| must conduct predictive inference to approach maximal
| energetic efficiency.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221703137_Thermodyn.
| ..
| tingletech wrote:
| thermodynamic entropy is to heat as Shannon entropy is to
| information?
| contravariant wrote:
| Hmm, not entirely sure if those terms fit exactly. It's
| easier to point out you can go from one to the other by
| setting to hamiltonian to the negative logarithm of the
| probability density (or use the Boltzmann distribution to
| go the other way).
| jschveibinz wrote:
| I agree it doesn't feel right. But complexity, like life,
| does emerge even though the 2nd law holds. It is a matter of
| scale. Entropy does not mean everything becomes disordered.
| And now I defer to the physicists, because as an engineer I
| am going out of my lane...
| quadcore wrote:
| As a side note, when John Carmack was asked why he always started
| a new engine from scratch, he used to say: "to fight code
| entropy"
| ngvrnd wrote:
| Also inevitable.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| > "The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an
| isolated system always increases because _isolated systems_
| spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium... "
| (emphasis added)
|
| There are no isolated systems in the context being discussed,
| i.e. houses and phones and so on. This is an important point:
| steady-state thermodynamics is a far more complicated beast than
| closed-system thermodynamics, and moving-state thermodynamics
| even more so.
|
| Furthermore, how does one distinguish between useful and useless
| work? Work is work, the value of work is something humans decide
| on socially. Say people are put to work building a pyramid, so
| the kings and priests have a nice high place to sit. Egyptian
| pyramids are impressive, but are they useful? Maybe in terms of
| some abstract notion like consolidating the power of the state or
| impressing one's neighbors.
|
| Anyway, here are some solutions to the author's points:
|
| 1) Unlimited and uncontrolled growth: match inputs to outputs.
| Delete as many old emails per day as you receive new ones. If
| it's important, copy and store securely offline. If you buy new
| clothes, send an equal amount of old clothes to recycler or the
| thrift store. If that's too much work, cut back on inputs
| instead.
|
| 2) Decision-makers have no skin in the game: If the decision-
| maker wants to build a pyramid, the decision-maker should be
| spending their days building that pyramid alongside their
| employees. Then they might decide that building pyramids is a
| useless activity, and perhaps building a bridge or a dam would be
| a wiser undertaking. Yes, investment capitalism has this problem.
| Put the shareholders to work on the production line or give them
| the boot, that's the solution.
|
| 3) Momentum is not a source of entropy I don't think. Entropy is
| more like diffusion than directed momentum. An object impacting
| another due to momentum could increase entropy, like a car
| running into a brick wall. Maybe the author is talking about
| something abstract like 'the momentum of bad habits is hard to
| break'? Here is where an injection of entropy ('shaking things
| up') might be helpful.
|
| Physics analogies can be rather overused, in conclusion.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| 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
| molbioguy wrote:
| 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.
| contravariant wrote:
| You can't decrease local entropy without increasing it
| overall. We can only live by moving towards higher entropy,
| it's how we tell the past from the future.
| akhmatova wrote:
| _In one word: Entropy is fatal._
|
| No it's not, and there's plenty of evidence that a certain amount
| of disorder is needed to be creative and flexible, to adapt
| quickly to change, and evolve.
|
| The key is to find a balance.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Great article. I could directly translate these thoughts to self-
| hosting. Having worked my way through linux, docker, systems,
| networks (etc.), since starting in 2017, I can say that the most
| important principle is Minimalism (and Reproducibility, but both
| go in hand). The points made by the author apply equally: Reject
| solutions that bring chaos, do not install everything - select
| services carefully, but make sure those services you host are
| stable and set up correctly.
| thisisbrians wrote:
| virtually nobody understands NFTs that doesn't actively
| participate in the space. do with that information what you will.
| hapiri wrote:
| When I read "fatal" I don't imagine the "death" but more
| "inevitable".
| Lyapunov_Lover wrote:
| 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.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Philosophically, many problems in our society might
| theoretically be attributed for optimizing for local maxima or
| other short term goals. Incentives and goals aren't aligned,
| and rules are far too rigid in favor in too few of the people.
| Democratic policies as in benefiting the people and democratic
| as in we elected this policy. Innovation and mutation are the
| spice of life.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Related: itcan be challenging to strike the right balance
| between efficiency at one pole and flexibility
| (/agility/resilience) at the other.
| [deleted]
| bryzaguy wrote:
| Perfect use of "all that jazz"
| googlryas wrote:
| See also: "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder" by
| Nassim Taleb.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This is why I feel wary whenever I hear the phrase 'best
| practices'. Although they're generally promoted with good
| intentions, they're often accompanied by a utilitarian
| certitude that rapidly hardens into dogmatic inflexibility,
| followed by defensiveness or outright dishonesty in response to
| unforeseen consequences.
|
| Most 'best practices' are good defaults, but the superlative
| rhetoric comes with the unstated assumption that any deviation
| is necessarily inferior, and that the best cannot be iterated
| upon. This drains agency from actors within a system, selecting
| for predictable mediocrity rather than risky innovation.
| agumonkey wrote:
| noise is the way out of local optimums ?
| lazide wrote:
| Pretty much the only one, near as anyone can tell, though an
| easy way to encourage or help someone or something get stuck
| in a local optimum is also a stable habitat/environment, as
| it avoids weeding out problematic noise from helpful noise
| until it is too late for all but the best luck to save it.
| a-nikolaev wrote:
| pretty much
| titzer wrote:
| Simulated annealing comes to mind.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| 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 almost invariably, I found a new way of
| doing something that's better than before. It often takes
| multiple tries, but it's something that takes little energy
| because it can be done throughout the day and the stakes are
| small.
|
| Applied to a larger scale, random adjustments to larger
| systems can be exactly what's needed.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I can even see this applied to human existence. Thinking
| out of the box is basically glitching your ideas.
| metamuas wrote:
| The main mistake you made was not realizing artificial complexity
| exists, that it is not natural, and that it is a form of control,
| possibly the most important. Evidence A: C++.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I disagree with the author, while I think there is value in
| minimalism, I like to embrace messiness, and I can use the
| "entropy" idea to show my opposite viewpoint.
|
| Entropy is a force of nature, it will always increase, second law
| of thermodynamics. And yes, it is fatal, we will all die in the
| end there isn't much we can do about it. But that's where the
| author backs out, saying that "organizational entropy" doesn't
| follow the laws of thermodynamics because there is a magic spell
| called "minimalism"... Why make a parallel with physics then?
|
| I think that just like thermodynamic entropy, there is no
| solution, we will all die, period. The only thing we can do is
| make the best of the time we are alive.
|
| And if we look at the author's ideal, it has zero entropy,
| literally absolute zero, nothing moves, which is not the most
| enjoyable situation...
|
| Furthermore, the proposed solution (minimalism) involves creating
| a small pocket of low entropy. In thermodynamics, that would be a
| freezer. But while freezers can lower entropy locally, they
| increase entropy globally, freezers need energy to function. And
| the colder your freezer, the more energy it consumes and the more
| entropy it creates. It means that minimalism can be
| counterproductive: the more you try to make things perfect, the
| messier everything around it becomes.
|
| So, don't try to put every atom at it correct place, you simply
| can't, absolute zero doesn't exist in nature, just admit that
| life isn't perfect, that it is sometimes better to do something
| useless than doing even more work trying to find if it actually
| is useless. And low entropy (nothing moves) is as boring as high
| entropy (just noise), the best is somewhere in the middle, life
| is in the middle.
| sandgiant wrote:
| I think the author misunderstands what entropy is. It's not a
| measure of complexity. If anything is the opposite.
| harshreality wrote:
| 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.
| frouge wrote:
| 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.
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