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Entropy Is Fatal

metamuas 4y ago
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++.
jschveibinz 4y ago
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-surprising-paradox-behind-our-universe-60f11409da9b https://medium.com/@marktraphagen/entropy-and-complexity-the...
- bob1029 4y ago
  > 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?
  - jschveibinz 4y ago
    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…
  - pizza 4y ago
    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_Summer_School_2019.pdf https://philphys.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/Barbour-Saig_Su... [1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/606722/how-do-different-definitions-of-entropy-connect-with-each-other?noredirect=1&lq=1 https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/606722/how-do-di... [2] https://monoskop.org/images/2/2f/Shannon_Claude_E_1956_The_Bandwagon.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/2/2f/Shannon_Claude_E_1956_The_B...
  - Comevius 4y ago
    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_Thermodynamics_of_Prediction https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221703137_Thermodyn...
  - tingletech 4y ago
    thermodynamic entropy is to heat as Shannon entropy is to information?
    - contravariant 4y ago
      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).
superb-owl 4y ago
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.
- sumy23 4y ago
  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.
  - darkerside 4y ago
    In the long run, most J curves are actually S curves
    - sophacles 4y ago
      I question the "most" here, rather than "all". Examples of J curves that aren't S curves?
      - sumy23 4y ago
        2^x
      - DeathArrow 4y ago
        >Examples of J curves that aren't S curves? Reindeer population growth in Alaska.
        uoaei 4y ago
        Wait a few decades and it will probably plateau at, if not shrink from, a maximum.
ngvrnd 4y ago
Also inevitable.
akhmatova 4y ago
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.
pizza 4y ago
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
xkcd-sucks 4y ago
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 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep04142
- molbioguy 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
iamjbn 4y ago
Integrate Bitcoin into your business and all the arguments in the write up just unwind.
photochemsyn 4y ago
> "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.
Helmut10001 4y ago
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.
hapiri 4y ago
When I read "fatal" I don't imagine the "death" but more "inevitable".
throw10920 4y ago
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/ https://danluu.com/discontinuities/
- kubanczyk 4y ago
  > 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.
harshreality 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
Lyapunov_Lover 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- agumonkey 4y ago
  noise is the way out of local optimums ?
  - a-nikolaev 4y ago
    pretty much
    - 4y ago
tdullien 4y ago
Recommendation: People should read the original "Parkinson's Law".
jussivee 4y ago
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 :)
nathias 4y ago
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.
cryptonector 4y ago
https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question 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.
- proc0 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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/2022/05/23/198-nick-lane-on-powering-biology/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/05/23/198-...
  - cryptonector 4y ago
    > In other words life produces lots of negentropy, probably exponentially, unlike other systems like celestial bodies. Exponentially? I guess, in the sense that from fertilized egg to adult, lifeforms grow exponentially, you're right, but adults usually do not keep growing. So I would say "sustained", and once the negentropy (I don't like that term either) operation is no longer sustained -and so local entropy is once more on the rise-, then the being has died. For stars, I think the issue is that local entropy does not go down. Collapse is avoided on a sustained basis, and when that stops being so, the star dies (and possibly leads to the creation of new stars, which looks like reproduction). That looks like life, but it isn't because local entropy still goes up.
sandgiant 4y ago
I think the author misunderstands what entropy is. It's not a measure of complexity. If anything is the opposite.
thisisbrians 4y ago
virtually nobody understands NFTs that doesn't actively participate in the space. do with that information what you will.
quadcore 4y ago
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"
GuB-42 4y ago
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.
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
Entropy is not fatal. Areas of low entropy appear as creation, and that creation contains it's own destruction. Entropy is a quantity. Qualities can only change, they do not live or die. The article should have been titled "Low Entropy is Fatal", or "Larger areas Low Entropy Areas are More Quickly Fatal than Small Areas of Low Entropy". Which is also wrong. All areas of low entropy are fatal, it is just easier to see the larger low entropy areas failing than the smaller ones. And larger areas of low entropy need more energy to keep the entropy low. Which is why minimalism is easier, it just shrinks the low entropy area to one that needs less energy. Also... You, as a human, are a low entropy area. Your whole existence is predicated on continuing to sustain your area of low entropy. How do we do this? By enabling electrons to flow through our mitochondria and stealing their angular momentum. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33671585/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33671585/ Areas of low entropy have a constant stream of electrons flowing through them. For humans the electron transport chain in our mitochondria steals the electrons angular momentum energy. Our mitochondria steal the angular momentum of electrons. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.9b09262 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.9b09262 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1407716111 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1407716111 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010854501003228 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00108... The mitochondria are quantum machines that capture the free energy from electrons. Black holes are also quantum machines. Anywhere you see an area of low entropy you see a quantum machine. Quantum machines are powered by the angular momentum of electrons to make areas of low entropy. Electron spin makes all matter possible, everything object a quantum machine that uses the angular momentum of an electron (which happens to be the speed of light!). https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=97706 https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=... IMHO, Black holes are black because they capture all of an electrons angular momentum. Very efficient quantum machines indeed.
soheil 4y ago
> So when they have no incentive to take the "right" decisions, they will, most of the time, allocate the available energy towards useless work, sometimes for ego reasons, sometimes by ignorance, sometimes by corruption. This neatly sums up the reason for Apple's ever expanding set of Animojis with every iOS release.
soheil 4y ago
I wonder what the author's view of the gaming industry is. On the one hand I agree with him that useless work or work that achieves little shouldn't be done. (in case of gaming a lot of work provides entertainment which could have been achieved by other much more efficient means.) On the other hand we're not gas molecules confined in a chamber. So as much as we'd like to apply the laws of thermodynamics to our lives it just won't work. The reason we exist is a mystery. Usefulness takes an entirely different shape when you're not sure what it is that you're trying to optimize for. Useful to what end?
soheil 4y ago
> Yet, not doing things is what, most of the time, brings the greatest results. The only result nihilism brings is a slow and dangerous detachment from reality and the world we live in.
roeles 4y ago
I think what you are trying to communicate is well written in the book "essentialism".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

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++.

jschveibinz 4y ago

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-surprising-paradox-behind-our-universe-60f11409da9b https://medium.com/@marktraphagen/entropy-and-complexity-the...

bob1029 4y ago
> 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?
- jschveibinz 4y ago
  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…
- pizza 4y ago
  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_Summer_School_2019.pdf https://philphys.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/Barbour-Saig_Su... [1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/606722/how-do-different-definitions-of-entropy-connect-with-each-other?noredirect=1&lq=1 https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/606722/how-do-di... [2] https://monoskop.org/images/2/2f/Shannon_Claude_E_1956_The_Bandwagon.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/2/2f/Shannon_Claude_E_1956_The_B...
- Comevius 4y ago
  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_Thermodynamics_of_Prediction https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221703137_Thermodyn...
- tingletech 4y ago
  thermodynamic entropy is to heat as Shannon entropy is to information?
  - contravariant 4y ago
    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).

superb-owl 4y ago

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.

sumy23 4y ago
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.
- darkerside 4y ago
  In the long run, most J curves are actually S curves
  - sophacles 4y ago
    I question the "most" here, rather than "all". Examples of J curves that aren't S curves?
    - sumy23 4y ago
      2^x
    - DeathArrow 4y ago
      >Examples of J curves that aren't S curves? Reindeer population growth in Alaska.
      - uoaei 4y ago
        Wait a few decades and it will probably plateau at, if not shrink from, a maximum.

ngvrnd 4y ago

Also inevitable.

akhmatova 4y ago

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.

pizza 4y ago

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

xkcd-sucks 4y ago

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 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep04142

molbioguy 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.

iamjbn 4y ago

Integrate Bitcoin into your business and all the arguments in the write up just unwind.

photochemsyn 4y ago

> "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.

Helmut10001 4y ago

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.

hapiri 4y ago

When I read "fatal" I don't imagine the "death" but more "inevitable".

throw10920 4y ago

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/ https://danluu.com/discontinuities/

kubanczyk 4y ago
> 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.

harshreality 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.

Lyapunov_Lover 4y ago

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.

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agumonkey 4y ago
noise is the way out of local optimums ?
- a-nikolaev 4y ago
  pretty much
  - 4y ago

tdullien 4y ago

Recommendation: People should read the original "Parkinson's Law".

jussivee 4y ago

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 :)

nathias 4y ago

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.

cryptonector 4y ago

https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question 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.

proc0 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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/2022/05/23/198-nick-lane-on-powering-biology/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/05/23/198-...
- cryptonector 4y ago
  > In other words life produces lots of negentropy, probably exponentially, unlike other systems like celestial bodies. Exponentially? I guess, in the sense that from fertilized egg to adult, lifeforms grow exponentially, you're right, but adults usually do not keep growing. So I would say "sustained", and once the negentropy (I don't like that term either) operation is no longer sustained -and so local entropy is once more on the rise-, then the being has died. For stars, I think the issue is that local entropy does not go down. Collapse is avoided on a sustained basis, and when that stops being so, the star dies (and possibly leads to the creation of new stars, which looks like reproduction). That looks like life, but it isn't because local entropy still goes up.

sandgiant 4y ago

I think the author misunderstands what entropy is. It's not a measure of complexity. If anything is the opposite.

thisisbrians 4y ago

virtually nobody understands NFTs that doesn't actively participate in the space. do with that information what you will.

quadcore 4y ago

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"

GuB-42 4y ago

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.

FollowingTheDao 4y ago

Entropy is not fatal. Areas of low entropy appear as creation, and that creation contains it's own destruction. Entropy is a quantity. Qualities can only change, they do not live or die. The article should have been titled "Low Entropy is Fatal", or "Larger areas Low Entropy Areas are More Quickly Fatal than Small Areas of Low Entropy". Which is also wrong. All areas of low entropy are fatal, it is just easier to see the larger low entropy areas failing than the smaller ones. And larger areas of low entropy need more energy to keep the entropy low. Which is why minimalism is easier, it just shrinks the low entropy area to one that needs less energy. Also... You, as a human, are a low entropy area. Your whole existence is predicated on continuing to sustain your area of low entropy. How do we do this? By enabling electrons to flow through our mitochondria and stealing their angular momentum. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33671585/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33671585/ Areas of low entropy have a constant stream of electrons flowing through them. For humans the electron transport chain in our mitochondria steals the electrons angular momentum energy. Our mitochondria steal the angular momentum of electrons. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.9b09262 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.9b09262 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1407716111 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1407716111 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010854501003228 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00108... The mitochondria are quantum machines that capture the free energy from electrons. Black holes are also quantum machines. Anywhere you see an area of low entropy you see a quantum machine. Quantum machines are powered by the angular momentum of electrons to make areas of low entropy. Electron spin makes all matter possible, everything object a quantum machine that uses the angular momentum of an electron (which happens to be the speed of light!). https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=97706 https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=... IMHO, Black holes are black because they capture all of an electrons angular momentum. Very efficient quantum machines indeed.

soheil 4y ago

> So when they have no incentive to take the "right" decisions, they will, most of the time, allocate the available energy towards useless work, sometimes for ego reasons, sometimes by ignorance, sometimes by corruption. This neatly sums up the reason for Apple's ever expanding set of Animojis with every iOS release.

soheil 4y ago

I wonder what the author's view of the gaming industry is. On the one hand I agree with him that useless work or work that achieves little shouldn't be done. (in case of gaming a lot of work provides entertainment which could have been achieved by other much more efficient means.) On the other hand we're not gas molecules confined in a chamber. So as much as we'd like to apply the laws of thermodynamics to our lives it just won't work. The reason we exist is a mystery. Usefulness takes an entirely different shape when you're not sure what it is that you're trying to optimize for. Useful to what end?

soheil 4y ago

> Yet, not doing things is what, most of the time, brings the greatest results. The only result nihilism brings is a slow and dangerous detachment from reality and the world we live in.

roeles 4y ago

I think what you are trying to communicate is well written in the book "essentialism".

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