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Battling Entropy

• saagarjha 8y ago
  This article begins with an analogy to the thermodynamic concept of entropy, and then attempts to relate it to other kinds of "entropy" by making the simplification that entropy is equivalent to disorder. That's all fine and well, but then I really thinks it goes too far: you really can't try to "reduce entropy" in your business by looking at a physical process, nor is coughing "the transfer of energy as heat". It's getting dangerously close to the kind of pseudoscientific platitudes that ended up making something like this marketing description of the Pepsi logo, which "uses" general relativity in its description: https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell-021109.pdf https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
  • kgwgk 8y ago
    The Pepsi Orbits Dimensionalize exponentially. The most profound thing you’ll read today! (The last diagram is a bit disappointing, though.)
    • l33tbro 8y ago
      I'm not sure Peter Arnell (the guy who authored the Pepsi rebrand) was ever setting out to be profound. I think he was just a brilliant opportunist who recognized that Fortune 500 marketing managers would pay hand-over-fist for his utter bullshit.
  • db1 8y ago
    Oh my god that pepsi document. It's real? Was someone actually paid to produce that document? As I scrolled downwards I just kept getting more and more convinced that it's some kind of ridiculous surrealistic joke thing.
    • zimpenfish 8y ago
      Seconded. It must be some kind of ersatz April Fool. (although I just know I'm going to show it to my marketing chum later and they'll go "Yep, that's the kind of thing clients want" and I will be sad.)
    • ebullientocelot 8y ago
      I know, right?? Some real gems: pg. 21: Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity. Actually no, the whole thing is patently absurd. Wow. What the fuck? Apparently this presentation earned a million dollar fee: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesign-document-1-million-for-this/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesig... In fairness it is marked as WIP.. I suppose it could have been completely scrapped and redone before presenting to the client :P Edit: AdWeek was less convinced at the time: https://www.adweek.com/digital/the-pepsi-logo-design-pdf-embarrassment-hoax-or-clever-advertising/ https://www.adweek.com/digital/the-pepsi-logo-design-pdf-emb... Can't find anything definitive on what this actually was, seems like a lot of "hoax or not?" type pieces with no conclusion that I can see.
      • deleted 8y ago
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      • coldtea 8y ago
        >pg. 21: Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity. Which is trivially true. Forces of emotion (how consumers feel about the brand) is what shapes brand identity. Gestalt here means something greater than the sum of its parts, which brand identity is -- what we perceive as a "brand" is not a single thing but tons of them (the logo, the product line, their retail shops, the ads, our past experiences with their products, the cultural significance of the brand, and so on).
    • sosuke 8y ago
      The Pepsi doc is real https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesign-document-1-million-for-this/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesig...
  • esalman 8y ago
    Interestingly, biological beings seems to defy the second law by working to reduce disorder, or surprises, in the sensory system. This is the meat of Karl Friston's Bayesian hypothesis of the brain.
    • leni536 8y ago
      > biological beings seems to defy the second law Well, maybe they seem but they certainly don't. Biological beings are not closed systems.
    • saagarjha 8y ago
      The second law only applies to closed systems, which living things are not. While they may internally reduce entropy, when you consider them along with the environment they live in, they end up producing heat and other disorder that is far in excess to the small amount of order they have created.
    • infinite8s 8y ago
      You forgot to include the sun in your analysis.
      • carapace 8y ago
        And the rest of the sky. ;-)
    • jacobmoe 8y ago
      The energy radiated from the earth is in a higher entropy state than the energy it absorbs. If the theory that biological beings defied the second law were true, you'd expect the opposite to be the case. Life is a kind of machine that uses useful low entropy energy to create organisms, emitting less useful high entropy energy as a byproduct. Not all that different than any other kind of energy-using machine.
• rubenhak 8y ago
  This was good read
• Rainymood 8y ago
  >The second law of thermodynamics states that “as one goes forward in time, the net entropy (degree of disorder) of any isolated or closed system will always increase (or at least stay the same).”[1] That is a long way of saying that all things tend towards disorder. This is one of the basic laws of the universe and is something we can observe in our lives. Entropy is simply a measure of disorder. You can think of it as nature’s tax[2]. I don't understand this. Please note that I've never had any physics training so I'd love for someone with a more formal physics education to help me out here. Why is this a measure of "disorder"? In my eyes, a perfectly uniformly distributed of zero temperature mass (or maybe absolute zero, not sure) of grey energy is the perfect order? The fact that stars are forming together and creating heat -- that -- is the disorder in my eyes. We are all disturbances in the energy of the universe. I would call a perfectly uniformly smoothed out heat-death of the universe perfect order (i.e. the opposite of chaos). Or am I completely wrong here?
  • SEMW 8y ago
    You're making the (very common) mistake of taking a poetic English-language interpretation of a physical law -- which is necessarily lossy/imprecise, since the actual law is mathematical -- and over-interpreting the words without referring back to the actual law. You can see the law (in the context of thermal & statistical physics) at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(statistical_thermodynamics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(statistical_thermodyn.... You can of course argue that 'disorder' isn't a good way of translating the maths into English, but shrug, it's the one people seem to have settled on. And of course, that's orthogonal to whether the actual law is true or not.
    • eru 8y ago
      'Information' is another way to translate. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
  • deanjones 8y ago
    It always confuses me as well (and I have at least some Physics background, having done a year as an undergrad). I think this is because I confuse it with the statistical measure of the entropy of a distribution, where a uniform distribution will maximise entropy.
• dr_dshiv 8y ago
  Entropy has been increasing since the big bang, when it was at minimum value. While the total energy didn't change since then, there has been a vast increase in the potential locations of that energy and a vast increase in the number of different interactions possible within that energy. This increases entropy because the possibility space has increased. Boltzman entropy is defined as the number of potential microscopic possibilities that could equivalently produce the measurable macrostate which is observed. (No wonder people just call entropy disorder -- it's complicated). So, the entropy of a glass of water consists of all the possible combinations of position and momentum that all the water molecules could be in. When the water is frozen, the possibility space is smaller than when the water is hot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy How does this relate to order? I think of this in terms of the likelihood of a random transformation of the system to affect it's functional interaction with other systems. So, let's say you randomly transform the position or momentum of a part of a house, it is likely change functional interactions of people in that house. However, when the same material in the house is just sitting in a pile of rubble, it has more entropy because a random transformation of the rubble won't really affect the function of the rubble -- it is still, for all intents and purposes, the same pile of rubble (even though it would take just as many bits of information to describe with precision). I'm not a physicist, but a humanist who thinks it is important to understand physics. So open to correction here.
  • kgwgk 8y ago
    Thermodynamical entropy is not a physical property of a system. It’s a property of our description of the system as a macroscopic state. Quantum (von Neumann) entropy is a related but different concept. It’s worth noting that it is constant for a closed system. Cosmological entropy can be defined in different ways. In summary, entropy means many things and not all “entropies” behave in the same way.
    • eru 8y ago
      Interesting enough, even though entropy is in some sense a property of a description of a system, there are things like 'entropic forces' and they play a big role in physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_force
• ForHackernews 8y ago
  > Let’s imagine that we start a company by sticking 20 people in an office with an ill-defined but ambitious goal and no further leadership. We tell them we’ll pay them as long as they’re there, working. We come back two months later to find that five of them have quit, five are sleeping with each other, and the other ten have no idea how to solve the litany of problems that have arisen. The employees are certainly not much closer to the goal laid out for them. The whole enterprise just sort of falls apart. Is that true? I mean, it sounds intuitively appealing (especially if you fancy yourself a boss-type) but has anyone actually done this experiment? Maybe some of those 20 people are ambitious and take it upon themselves to lead the project, maybe they all form a self-organizing collective and make sensible decisions by consensus, maybe they hold a vote to elect a de facto CEO...
  • gdhbcc 8y ago
    There was a german entrepreneur who did something like that. He picked a bunch of young software developers and gave them an office and budget to do what they like with it. It didn't end well, they spent the budget on gaming chairs and spent most of their time playing video games
• wiredfool 8y ago
  Sonnet against Entropy The worm drives helically through the wood And does not know the dust left in the bore Once made the table integral and good; And suddenly the crystal hits the floor. Electrons find their paths in subtle ways, A massless eddy in a trail of smoke; The names of lovers, light of other days Perhaps you will not miss them. That's the joke. The universe winds down. That's how it's made. But memory is everything to lose; Although some of the colors have to fade, Do not believe you'll get the chance to choose. Regret, by definition, comes too late; Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate. John M Ford (originally here: http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/003789.html http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/003789.html)
• bocklund 8y ago
  The definition of the second law of thermodynamics at the top is not right. A closed system can have energy put in from the surroundings to decrease entropy. Only isolated systems that cannot exchange energy with the surroundings follow the second law. Only the universe is truly isolated (see the common definition of the second law), You decrease the entropy (disorder if you like, or not) of things by putting energy in.
  • rocqua 8y ago
    > A closed system can have energy put in from the surroundings to decrease entropy. Then it wouldn't be a closed system anymore. What you call an isolated system is the same as a closed system. At least, in the common parlance of thermodynamics.
    • bocklund 8y ago
      Closed means mass cannot go in or out. Heat and work can still be exchanged. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolated_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolated_system
• crimsonalucard 8y ago
  People think that entropy increasing is basically atoms going from a state of organization to a state of random distribution. All you need to do is look at the universe to see how off this definition is. The universe started as a big bang: a soup of randomly distributed particles. Then the atoms proceeded to self organize into perfect spheres called planets and stars which in turn organized themselves into flat ordered spiral structures called galaxies. If entropy is increasing always how does this happen? It happens because your understanding of entropy is off.
  • dougk16 8y ago
    I've always considered the "increasing disorder" definition of entropy to be a simple analogy that most people can relate to in their everyday lives, not necessarily a formal definition. Indeed I would be interested to know if you can even formally define order vs. disorder since it seems to require a subjective observer. For example the universe doesn't consider a glass sitting on the table to be "more ordered" than one that has shattered on the floor. It's just like, our opinion man. But even if you use the order vs. disorder analogy, it's arguable that the universe was close to perfectly ordered right after the big bang. After all it was a pretty smooth and uniform distribution of matter/energy at some point, and that seems more ordered to me than what we have now with all these random clumps of star junk everywhere :) Anyway I like to consider entropy as the amount of usable energy in a system. A whole glass has more energy to release (e.g. by shattering) than a shattered one does. Maybe this is the formal definition of order vs. disorder?
    • have_faith 8y ago
      > Anyway I like to consider entropy as the amount of usable energy in a system. A whole glass has more energy to release (e.g. by shattering) than a shattered one does. Maybe this is the formal definition of order vs. disorder? I think this is correct. Like the sand castle example: there are very few ways the grains can be arranged in order to be a sand castle, but orders of magnitude more ways of being re-arranged into a pile of sand. It could then be said that the sand castle has less entropy, and left to nature, will slowly but surely move towards the predictable high entropy state of being a pile of sand. The reverse is not true. Without work the low entropy state will struggle to reach the orderly state of the sand castle. Someone else mentioned the big bang, which I guess would be the work that created the orderly universe as we see it. But that work was expressed a long time ago and without more work matter will just move to an un-orderly state again.
• stevedekorte 8y ago
  " Too little autonomy for employees results in disinterest, while too much leads to poor decisions." The author appears to confuse autonomy with a lack of feedback mechanisms. Economies are based on a vast number of autonomous agents (independent organizations) who are selected for survival via market feedback (prices) and the long term trend in these has been towards ever greater agent granularity (vertical disintegration).