4 ms·

I'm scratching my head trying to understand what the author is trying to say. It feels like he doesn't like the idea of entropy for political and ideological r

I'm scratching my head trying to understand what the author is trying to say. It feels like he doesn't like the idea of entropy for political and ideological reasons. Reminds me of Soviet support for Lamarckianism. I take his point about misapplying scientific theories to socio-economic policies, and entropic thinking certainly can be misapplied in domains where it doesn't make sense ... but is that our problem today? Entropy is not part of the cultural and mainstream consciousness like Darwinism is. If anything, we don't take the idea of entropy seriously enough.

drcode 6y ago
I kind of share the authors dislike for the concept of entropy, at an instinctual level. But the fact remains that we know that energy is conserved, but there is still something happening as time progresses, where the world is changing from one state into another. Calling this difference "entropy" seems like the only solution, even if the definition for entropy is hard to really get comfortable with. (Though I appreciate it can be made very rigorous for specific physical calculations)
aeternum 6y ago
It seems like he is arguing for more environmentalism because the less energy we use, the longer it will take to reach the heat death of the universe? It's a pretty ridiculous way of looking at things since any human activity is still an exceedingly insignificant entropy gain, even if looking only at our solar system.
- fsckboy 6y ago
  not to mention and speaking as a human, human activity is the only justifiable reason to support entropy gain. Like, what else is enthalpy worth to us? so the universe can be here longer without us? (assuming we had any say in the matter)
Izkata 6y ago
> Entropy is not part of the cultural and mainstream consciousness like Darwinism is. Taking advantage of this to drop one of my favorite book series (though I'm a few books behind): _Young Wizards_ [0], where wizards exist in-universe to fight entropy, so that the universe can continue to exist as long as possible. The series is possibly best known by the name of the first book, _So You Want to Be a Wizard_, which for a long time I thought was the name of the series. (Another interesting thing about this series is that magic is treated as a programming language for reality, a few books in going so far as referring to subroutines, variables, and so on) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Wizards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Wizards

drcode 6y ago

I kind of share the authors dislike for the concept of entropy, at an instinctual level. But the fact remains that we know that energy is conserved, but there is still something happening as time progresses, where the world is changing from one state into another. Calling this difference "entropy" seems like the only solution, even if the definition for entropy is hard to really get comfortable with. (Though I appreciate it can be made very rigorous for specific physical calculations)

aeternum 6y ago

It seems like he is arguing for more environmentalism because the less energy we use, the longer it will take to reach the heat death of the universe? It's a pretty ridiculous way of looking at things since any human activity is still an exceedingly insignificant entropy gain, even if looking only at our solar system.

fsckboy 6y ago
not to mention and speaking as a human, human activity is the only justifiable reason to support entropy gain. Like, what else is enthalpy worth to us? so the universe can be here longer without us? (assuming we had any say in the matter)

Izkata 6y ago

> Entropy is not part of the cultural and mainstream consciousness like Darwinism is. Taking advantage of this to drop one of my favorite book series (though I'm a few books behind): _Young Wizards_ [0], where wizards exist in-universe to fight entropy, so that the universe can continue to exist as long as possible. The series is possibly best known by the name of the first book, _So You Want to Be a Wizard_, which for a long time I thought was the name of the series. (Another interesting thing about this series is that magic is treated as a programming language for reality, a few books in going so far as referring to subroutines, variables, and so on) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Wizards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Wizards