12 ms·

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 un

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.
      - dron57 4y ago
        That's absolutely an S-curve. Any animal population will eventually run out of resources.
    - tlholaday 4y ago
      Dark Energy astrophysics.
      - uoaei 4y ago
        You seem confident an "ultraviolet catastrophe"-like scenario won't play out there, too.
- toss1 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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."
    - toss1 4y ago
      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.
      - lazide 4y ago
        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.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    [deleted]
toss1 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  > Yet so many supposedly intelligent managers use such approaches... Yet so many supposedly intelligent engineers work for such managers...
  - toss1 4y ago
    Yup!
nightski 4y ago
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.
- ngvrnd 4y ago
  The author wrote "uncontrolled growth", not "any growth".
- superb-owl 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
IncRnd 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 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 4y ago
  > 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
  - vincentmarle 4y ago
    There are many more definitions of entropy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(disambiguation)
    - tingletech 4y ago
      none of these seem consistent with how the original article uses "entropy". The original article specifically mentions thermodynamic entropy in its strained analogy.
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    Entropy is a term of art in computer science/tech as well, which is apparently the target audience of the blog. Looking at the About page shows the blog is about programming, hacking, and entrepreneurship. This is similar to when a programmer uses the word auto in a car dealership to mean something other than automobile - because it means something different in a different field. Even when that person first explains what he is about to refer to with the word auto, it is still the wrong word to use in that context. Your link explains this: "In 1948, Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon developed similar statistical concepts of measuring microscopic uncertainty and multiplicity to the problem of random losses of information in telecommunication signals. Upon John von Neumann's suggestion, Shannon named this entity of missing information in analogous manner to its use in statistical mechanics as entropy, and gave birth to the field of information theory. This description has been identified as a universal definition of the concept of entropy." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
Consultant32452 4y ago
I would add the whole monetary system is designed this way with inflation.
buescher 4y ago
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - Edward Abbey
lr4444lr 4y ago
Growth really means productivity. That doesn't mean simply "more": it means "more with less".
0134340 4y ago
I think if you wanted to find a way to view the negatives of business, government and other forms of potentially malignant growth in the eyes of basic physics, I'd Mass/Energy Equivalence would be a better scope. Throughout the universe we see that bigger growth in a system, entity, body, etc means less adaptive potential, slower change potential, because latency of information increases. When latency increases too much it can be fatal to a system that 'communicates' or is synchronized in some way to remain a consistent system, entity, body, group etc. What holds all bodies together on the macro and micro seems to be information synchronization. And when particles, bodies, etc can't synchronize information in a timely manner, things degenerate from there and the system undergoes a state change. One of those degenerative factors is growth. Just as in an orchestra, if it becomes too big you lose synchronization. Other disturbances I'd argue use those same basic principles to corrupt a system; they interfere with the synchronization of information unless it can form a new changed state compatible with a revised system. I recently talked about this in a very broad sense throughout a few blog entries but mostly it's just me being a dumdum: https://0134340.blogspot.com/2022/06/bottom-to-top-principle.html https://0134340.blogspot.com/2022/06/bottom-to-top-principle...

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.
    - dron57 4y ago
      That's absolutely an S-curve. Any animal population will eventually run out of resources.
  - tlholaday 4y ago
    Dark Energy astrophysics.
    - uoaei 4y ago
      You seem confident an "ultraviolet catastrophe"-like scenario won't play out there, too.
toss1 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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."
  - toss1 4y ago
    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.
    - lazide 4y ago
      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.
photochemsyn 4y ago
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 4y ago
  [deleted]

toss1 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
> Yet so many supposedly intelligent managers use such approaches... Yet so many supposedly intelligent engineers work for such managers...
- toss1 4y ago
  Yup!

nightski 4y ago

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.

ngvrnd 4y ago
The author wrote "uncontrolled growth", not "any growth".
superb-owl 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.

IncRnd 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 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 4y ago
> 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
- vincentmarle 4y ago
  There are many more definitions of entropy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(disambiguation)
  - tingletech 4y ago
    none of these seem consistent with how the original article uses "entropy". The original article specifically mentions thermodynamic entropy in its strained analogy.
- IncRnd 4y ago
  Entropy is a term of art in computer science/tech as well, which is apparently the target audience of the blog. Looking at the About page shows the blog is about programming, hacking, and entrepreneurship. This is similar to when a programmer uses the word auto in a car dealership to mean something other than automobile - because it means something different in a different field. Even when that person first explains what he is about to refer to with the word auto, it is still the wrong word to use in that context. Your link explains this: "In 1948, Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon developed similar statistical concepts of measuring microscopic uncertainty and multiplicity to the problem of random losses of information in telecommunication signals. Upon John von Neumann's suggestion, Shannon named this entity of missing information in analogous manner to its use in statistical mechanics as entropy, and gave birth to the field of information theory. This description has been identified as a universal definition of the concept of entropy." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

Consultant32452 4y ago

I would add the whole monetary system is designed this way with inflation.

buescher 4y ago

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - Edward Abbey

lr4444lr 4y ago

Growth really means productivity. That doesn't mean simply "more": it means "more with less".

0134340 4y ago

I think if you wanted to find a way to view the negatives of business, government and other forms of potentially malignant growth in the eyes of basic physics, I'd Mass/Energy Equivalence would be a better scope. Throughout the universe we see that bigger growth in a system, entity, body, etc means less adaptive potential, slower change potential, because latency of information increases. When latency increases too much it can be fatal to a system that 'communicates' or is synchronized in some way to remain a consistent system, entity, body, group etc. What holds all bodies together on the macro and micro seems to be information synchronization. And when particles, bodies, etc can't synchronize information in a timely manner, things degenerate from there and the system undergoes a state change. One of those degenerative factors is growth. Just as in an orchestra, if it becomes too big you lose synchronization. Other disturbances I'd argue use those same basic principles to corrupt a system; they interfere with the synchronization of information unless it can form a new changed state compatible with a revised system. I recently talked about this in a very broad sense throughout a few blog entries but mostly it's just me being a dumdum: https://0134340.blogspot.com/2022/06/bottom-to-top-principle.html https://0134340.blogspot.com/2022/06/bottom-to-top-principle...