6 ms·

I view this phenomenon as a sort of sociological entropy. Anything bad that can happen will happen if the people tolerate it. Same with shitty politicians, encr

I view this phenomenon as a sort of sociological entropy. Anything bad that can happen will happen if the people tolerate it. Same with shitty politicians, encroaching of rights, etc. Its all just a matter of time.

gretch 6y ago
This theory doesn't hold up against the test of time. We used to have tyrant monarchs - Genghis Khan would roam the steppe and cutting people's heads off and that would be normal every day life. There are still bad things today, but more people have more rights and a higher quality of life.
- e15ctr0n 6y ago
  > Genghis Khan Genghis Khan was neither a tyrant nor a monarch, nor was cutting off heads a part of his everyday life. He actually got more Mongol people more rights and a higher quality of life. I would request you to read a detailed and accurate account of his life by a historian. For example, Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy by Frank McLynn https://amzn.com/B00X2ZW5ZI https://amzn.com/B00X2ZW5ZI
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    Do you find the following inaccurate or biased, and if so, for the uninformed, briefly why? "Campaigns initiated in his lifetime include those against the Qara Khitai, Khwarezmia, and the Western Xia and Jin dynasties, and raids into Medieval Georgia, the Kievan Rus', and Volga Bulgaria. These campaigns were often accompanied by large-scale massacres of the civilian populations, especially in the Khwarazmian- and Western Xia–controlled lands. Because of this brutality, which left millions dead, he is considered by many to have been a brutal ruler"
    - totony 6y ago
      From what I've seen Ganghis Khan was brutal against non-surrendering nations, but beneficial for those who followed him. E.g. you woulsn't see him cutting his subjects heads, and his brutality was pretty much an intimidation tactic so others army would join him.
      - fiblye 6y ago
        That's how authoritarian regimes usually work. Do everything they say and you'll be okay. The problem is a decent number of people don't want to be absolutely subservient.
        perl4ever 6y ago
        >Do everything they say and you'll be okay This is an extremely odd thing to say about authoritarians right now, although this may be my American perspective, since people have been pointing out recently how futile it can be when dealing with police in the US. Still, I kind of think it's universal - being polite to authority is utterly useless once you are a suspect, thought to be dangerous, or have something they want. It made a lasting impression on me when I was stopped in my car as a teenager and an officer decided that I must be a drug smuggler because I was too quiet/nervous. Edit: I guess if you interpret "everything" broadly enough, your statement is somewhat plausible, but "everything" includes many situations where an authority asks you something that is theoretically or ought to be voluntary and you have to be aware that it's not really a choice. And it's still not always true.
      - perl4ever 6y ago
        >brutal against non-surrendering nations This is ambiguous about cities or nations that resisted and then surrendered. There seem to be a lot of references to how surrender was followed by everyone being killed or enslaved. I kind of think that's an area of contrast between their standards and today's. You can point to "civilized" countries destroying whole cities in the 20th century, but doing it after your enemy is defeated is much more frowned on. Also, when you say "beneficial for those who followed him" it elides what it meant when they enslaved the women and children from a conquered population. I don't think they generally allowed individuals to choose whether to be among those massacred or not. And what happened next probably wasn't consistent with modern human rights standards, which again, I think goes back to the original point that started the subthread.
    - e15ctr0n 6y ago
      > considered by many to have been a brutal ruler He raided these places in military campaigns; he did not rule them at the time of the raids. So he was not a brutal ruler. In fact, he was a benevolent ruler, distributing loot equally and promoting on merit rather than nepotism. As another commentator has pointed out, the brutality was an intimidation tactic. It was very selectively applied. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708182 He also did much to bring modern human rights to his subjects. You can read about it in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford, an anthropologist who lives in Mongolia part-time. https://amzn.com/B000FCK206 https://amzn.com/B000FCK206
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Wasn't expecting to see Khan revisionism here, but I suppose for every mass murderer there are people who like defending them.
- galacticaactual 6y ago
  It's unclear what you're rebutting here. My position is that on a cyclic basis, there will always be societal elements that will trend towards the negative and nefarious as long as it is tolerated. The fact that the global minimum for such things manifested themselves much more severely (as in your example) in the past does not change the fact that it still occurs today.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
supernova87a 6y ago
Suggest you read my comment above, before you let this one story make you think the decline of civilization is imminent.
- galacticaactual 6y ago
  Nowhere did I say I think "the decline of civilization is imminent."
crdrost 6y ago
Speaking with my physics hat on I have to caution against this -- I wouldn't call it entropy, and I am very happy abusing that word in a variety of other contexts. (Like at church I will call Satan entropy.) But the reason I'd balk here is that entropy as a phenomenon happens in absence of a driving force. (1) In the present WSJ case, this is not mere indifference on the part of readers: storytelling is deeply a part of what makes us human and readers do actively turn away from flat descriptions of events to storied accounts—the WSJ is just satisfying the demand. Like, this part of the WSJ, the A-hed is actively edited to be a bit more fluff and less hard reporting to try and rope more of these folks in, as observed in comments above. (2) In the case of shitty politicians, at least in the US, something even more remarkable is happening. The very construction of the US's voting system has a very non-obvious fixed point (as a transformation polity → polity), so that fixed-point theorems from mathematics seem to impose their own biasing force on the candidates. Or to use more economic language, the rules of elections in the USA actively incentivize its politicians to be shitty. Well, the parties are incentivized to be spineless and the politicians are incentivized to belong to one and thus inherit the shittiness—but it's the same thing. [note] Entropy still has a part to play when you introduce a bias voltage like this, but it is usually the exact opposite. Entropy explains why air molecules are not falling to the floor in spite of the fact that there is a clear bias force—gravity—that makes everything else fall to the floor quite swiftly and the air molecules have certainly had enough time to start hitting the ground. Similarly, entropy may be more helpful in explaining why some news is still buried inside the Wall Street Journal articles or why the US political parties are able to work together on various operations to bomb remote lands. [note] I can discourse at length about the downfall of the Whigs but the short and fast of it is that they had a spine or agenda of core issues, chiefly economic. They brokered compromises under one Whig president about the issue-of-the-day, slavery, to try and refocus attention on their agenda items. They nominated General Scott in 1852 to represent them. The spineless political party they were against, used the opportunity to nominate a candidate who nobody really knew and who was himself a compromise, a Southerner who was personally anti-slavery, and mirrored their opponents' agenda quite thoroughly. (Something, I should note, you can only do if your opponent has a spine and you don’t.) Voter turnout in the election of 1852 was incredibly low as a result, and that Southerner won the electoral college in a landslide, despite the fact that he did not actually do any campaigning. “I don't know what he is gonna do about the issue-of-the-day but he seems to have something in common with me” actively won out against “he thinks the issue-of-the-day is a distraction from the real problems and will broker compromises on it to try and address those real problems,” which, I don’t know, maybe was a fluke. But what wasn’t a fluke was the aftermath: any landslide loss leads to self-reflection, right, but if you have a spine it is worse: the internal tensions in the Whigs over that issue-of-the-day broke the party into two chunks and suddenly the party was no more, and a similarly spineless party ultimately took its place in the great two party system of the USA. That party’s spinelessness means that it has weathered similarly disastrous losses as the one which broke the Whigs with almost no alarm and has also led to it slowly reversing its geographic constituency from North to South as the opposite has happened to its spineless opponent, which is again much more of an interesting random-walk phenomenon that one could ascribe to entropy.

gretch 6y ago

This theory doesn't hold up against the test of time. We used to have tyrant monarchs - Genghis Khan would roam the steppe and cutting people's heads off and that would be normal every day life. There are still bad things today, but more people have more rights and a higher quality of life.

e15ctr0n 6y ago
> Genghis Khan Genghis Khan was neither a tyrant nor a monarch, nor was cutting off heads a part of his everyday life. He actually got more Mongol people more rights and a higher quality of life. I would request you to read a detailed and accurate account of his life by a historian. For example, Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy by Frank McLynn https://amzn.com/B00X2ZW5ZI https://amzn.com/B00X2ZW5ZI
- perl4ever 6y ago
  Do you find the following inaccurate or biased, and if so, for the uninformed, briefly why? "Campaigns initiated in his lifetime include those against the Qara Khitai, Khwarezmia, and the Western Xia and Jin dynasties, and raids into Medieval Georgia, the Kievan Rus', and Volga Bulgaria. These campaigns were often accompanied by large-scale massacres of the civilian populations, especially in the Khwarazmian- and Western Xia–controlled lands. Because of this brutality, which left millions dead, he is considered by many to have been a brutal ruler"
  - totony 6y ago
    From what I've seen Ganghis Khan was brutal against non-surrendering nations, but beneficial for those who followed him. E.g. you woulsn't see him cutting his subjects heads, and his brutality was pretty much an intimidation tactic so others army would join him.
    - fiblye 6y ago
      That's how authoritarian regimes usually work. Do everything they say and you'll be okay. The problem is a decent number of people don't want to be absolutely subservient.
      - perl4ever 6y ago
        >Do everything they say and you'll be okay This is an extremely odd thing to say about authoritarians right now, although this may be my American perspective, since people have been pointing out recently how futile it can be when dealing with police in the US. Still, I kind of think it's universal - being polite to authority is utterly useless once you are a suspect, thought to be dangerous, or have something they want. It made a lasting impression on me when I was stopped in my car as a teenager and an officer decided that I must be a drug smuggler because I was too quiet/nervous. Edit: I guess if you interpret "everything" broadly enough, your statement is somewhat plausible, but "everything" includes many situations where an authority asks you something that is theoretically or ought to be voluntary and you have to be aware that it's not really a choice. And it's still not always true.
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      >brutal against non-surrendering nations This is ambiguous about cities or nations that resisted and then surrendered. There seem to be a lot of references to how surrender was followed by everyone being killed or enslaved. I kind of think that's an area of contrast between their standards and today's. You can point to "civilized" countries destroying whole cities in the 20th century, but doing it after your enemy is defeated is much more frowned on. Also, when you say "beneficial for those who followed him" it elides what it meant when they enslaved the women and children from a conquered population. I don't think they generally allowed individuals to choose whether to be among those massacred or not. And what happened next probably wasn't consistent with modern human rights standards, which again, I think goes back to the original point that started the subthread.
  - e15ctr0n 6y ago
    > considered by many to have been a brutal ruler He raided these places in military campaigns; he did not rule them at the time of the raids. So he was not a brutal ruler. In fact, he was a benevolent ruler, distributing loot equally and promoting on merit rather than nepotism. As another commentator has pointed out, the brutality was an intimidation tactic. It was very selectively applied. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708182 He also did much to bring modern human rights to his subjects. You can read about it in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford, an anthropologist who lives in Mongolia part-time. https://amzn.com/B000FCK206 https://amzn.com/B000FCK206
- pjc50 6y ago
  Wasn't expecting to see Khan revisionism here, but I suppose for every mass murderer there are people who like defending them.
galacticaactual 6y ago
It's unclear what you're rebutting here. My position is that on a cyclic basis, there will always be societal elements that will trend towards the negative and nefarious as long as it is tolerated. The fact that the global minimum for such things manifested themselves much more severely (as in your example) in the past does not change the fact that it still occurs today.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

supernova87a 6y ago

Suggest you read my comment above, before you let this one story make you think the decline of civilization is imminent.

galacticaactual 6y ago
Nowhere did I say I think "the decline of civilization is imminent."

crdrost 6y ago

Speaking with my physics hat on I have to caution against this -- I wouldn't call it entropy, and I am very happy abusing that word in a variety of other contexts. (Like at church I will call Satan entropy.) But the reason I'd balk here is that entropy as a phenomenon happens in absence of a driving force. (1) In the present WSJ case, this is not mere indifference on the part of readers: storytelling is deeply a part of what makes us human and readers do actively turn away from flat descriptions of events to storied accounts—the WSJ is just satisfying the demand. Like, this part of the WSJ, the A-hed is actively edited to be a bit more fluff and less hard reporting to try and rope more of these folks in, as observed in comments above. (2) In the case of shitty politicians, at least in the US, something even more remarkable is happening. The very construction of the US's voting system has a very non-obvious fixed point (as a transformation polity → polity), so that fixed-point theorems from mathematics seem to impose their own biasing force on the candidates. Or to use more economic language, the rules of elections in the USA actively incentivize its politicians to be shitty. Well, the parties are incentivized to be spineless and the politicians are incentivized to belong to one and thus inherit the shittiness—but it's the same thing. [note] Entropy still has a part to play when you introduce a bias voltage like this, but it is usually the exact opposite. Entropy explains why air molecules are not falling to the floor in spite of the fact that there is a clear bias force—gravity—that makes everything else fall to the floor quite swiftly and the air molecules have certainly had enough time to start hitting the ground. Similarly, entropy may be more helpful in explaining why some news is still buried inside the Wall Street Journal articles or why the US political parties are able to work together on various operations to bomb remote lands. [note] I can discourse at length about the downfall of the Whigs but the short and fast of it is that they had a spine or agenda of core issues, chiefly economic. They brokered compromises under one Whig president about the issue-of-the-day, slavery, to try and refocus attention on their agenda items. They nominated General Scott in 1852 to represent them. The spineless political party they were against, used the opportunity to nominate a candidate who nobody really knew and who was himself a compromise, a Southerner who was personally anti-slavery, and mirrored their opponents' agenda quite thoroughly. (Something, I should note, you can only do if your opponent has a spine and you don’t.) Voter turnout in the election of 1852 was incredibly low as a result, and that Southerner won the electoral college in a landslide, despite the fact that he did not actually do any campaigning. “I don't know what he is gonna do about the issue-of-the-day but he seems to have something in common with me” actively won out against “he thinks the issue-of-the-day is a distraction from the real problems and will broker compromises on it to try and address those real problems,” which, I don’t know, maybe was a fluke. But what wasn’t a fluke was the aftermath: any landslide loss leads to self-reflection, right, but if you have a spine it is worse: the internal tensions in the Whigs over that issue-of-the-day broke the party into two chunks and suddenly the party was no more, and a similarly spineless party ultimately took its place in the great two party system of the USA. That party’s spinelessness means that it has weathered similarly disastrous losses as the one which broke the Whigs with almost no alarm and has also led to it slowly reversing its geographic constituency from North to South as the opposite has happened to its spineless opponent, which is again much more of an interesting random-walk phenomenon that one could ascribe to entropy.