5 ms·
A concept from physics called negentropy could help your life run smoother
- theGeatZhopa 4y agoI'll rather go for a mutual equilibrium, exactly as it is defined within the thermodynamics.
- jaggs 4y agoLove this. My grandmother and her generation practiced it all the time. "A stitch in time, saves nine."
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoIsn't this simply being organized?
- planetsprite 4y agoThat doesn't sound as cool
- number6 4y agoIf you tell people that you want to implement a quality management system with a CIP-cyclus and a risk assessment system. It starts to sound really boring and unnecessary, but it's just the same as finding the biggest problems in your organization (energy drains) and plan to do something about it in a controlled manner
- pixl97 4y agoTake a set of objects, how many different ways is there to order it? Which order takes the least energy ( a state of disorder). Which order maximizes happiness? There are a lot of people that are 'organized' yet are unhappy or tired out because of the energy expenditure used to maintain that state of organization is not sustainable. Being able to adapt by removing high energy/low reward expenditures from your routine when needed it a method to avoid burnout.
- alexfromapex 4y agoWeird how people can arrive at the same ideas but I have never called it by any physics terms. I have been focusing on daily occurrences that bother me because those are the ones that grind down your soul. For example, our shower towels were gross and I shower every day so I got new ones. I also got a really comfortable pillow because I use it every day. I make financial decisions based off of how often things bother me.
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- elefanten 4y agoWhy is the sock on the ground an example of lost energy? Maybe dropping it results in extra work required to pick it up. But leaving it on the floor is no further energy loss.
- prox 4y agoIt is more of an example. Say you drop a sock and other clothing items every day, you will be swamped in clothing soon. -If you lived with people a lot, you know these types exist. And it might point to a behavior where you let things be (in an entropic state) which could spiral out of control, where the amount of work to fix it (negentropy) is a big energy expenditure and needs more and more effort to organize.
- retrac 4y agoClutter really ought to be considered a sort of mental energy trap. It takes energy to avoid it, to physically shuffle it around, and it simply saps mood. I used to think I was immune to such effects, but I'm not. It's most obvious after cleaning up from a really bad to a really nice state. A space that can be bright and inviting eventually ends up claustrophobic and repellent. An enormous amount of mental and physical energy goes into either shuffling or mentally avoiding engaging with the mess. I've known people who literally seem blind to it -- but they don't trip over their indoor obstacle courses -- burning energy there both literally and figuratively. One sock is the start!
- euroderf 4y ago100% this. A cluttered living space seems to make it near impossible to think clearly. The obvious proof of this is that spending two or three hours straightening up a cluttered room - organizing it and cleaning it down to the dust on the molding - creates a fresh ecosystem where suddenly a lightness of thought, a lightness of being, drifts in and settles down, brushing away and flushing away mental clutter too.
- bawolff 4y agoThat may all be true, but i think its an argument that physics entropy is bad metaphor for human "energy", and doesn't really match.
- seydor 4y agoWhen did phys.org start featuring Mary kondo?
- ritzaco 4y agoI'm not a physicist, so maybe I missed the connection between negentropy and some very generic life advice. In terms of actual energy usage, the examples don't make sense to me. It doesn't take 3x as much energy to pick up 3 socks from the floor, or wipe a counter that is 3x as dirty, so if you actually want to conserve energy you should let something get to its maximum-acceptable dirty state before cleaning/tidying.
- leobg 4y agoThat’s what I try to explain to my wife all the time!
- THENATHE 4y agoWhat I took away from this is that the location of the socks matter. If you have three socks that are all on top of eachother, it takes essentially the same effort to grab all 3. If you have three socks that are strewn across the room, it might take more than 3x the energy because you also have to move inbetween the socks. If you scale this up to large levels, the concept of negentropy is "daily life application" terms is "will this task have any corresponding or seemingly unrelated tasks that will be made easier or more difficult by doing this, or in what order I do this relative to them?" and if so, "how can I adjust the order or process of these tasks to optimize the flow?" In the sock situation, two options are: wait until there are far mor socks, or also vacuum at the same time since you already need to bend over for vacuuming.
- m3nu 4y agoSaid differently: good decisions save time in the future, bad decisions keep on wasting time. The goal is to compound the benefits of good decisions.
- satisfice 4y agoThis reminds me of a dialogue from Gregory Bateson's Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind: Daughter: Daddy, why do things get in a muddle? Father: What do you mean? Things? Muddle? D: Well, people spend a lot of time tidying things, but they never seem to spend time muddling them. Things just seem to get in a muddle by themselves. And then people have to tidy them up again. F: But do your things get in a muddle if you don’t touch them? D: No—not if nobody touches them. But if you touch them—or if anybody touches them—they get in a muddle and it’s a worse muddle if it isn’t me. F: Yes—that’s why I try to keep you from touching the things on my desk. Because my things get in a worse muddle if they are touched by somebody who isn’t me. D: But do people always muddle other people’s things? Why do they, Daddy? F: Now, wait a minute. It’s not so simple. First of all, what do you mean by a muddle? D: I mean—so I can’t find things, and so it looks all muddled up. The way it is when nothing is straight F: Well, but are you sure you mean the same thing by muddle that anybody else would mean? D: But, Daddy, I’m sure I do—because I’m not a very tidy person and if I say things are in a muddle, then I’m sure everybody else would agree with me. F: All right—but do you think you mean the same thing by “tidy” that. other people would? If your mummy makes your things tidy, do you know where to find them? D: Hmm… sometimes—because, you see, I know where she puts things when she tidies up F: Yes, I try to keep her away from tidying my desk, too. I’m sure that she and I don’t mean the same thing by “tidy.” D: Daddy, do you and I mean the same thing by “tidy?” F: I doubt it, my dear—I doubt it.
- BlueTemplar 4y agoYep, and that's why the whole concept of entropy and especially negentropy is superfluous, it's just lack of information ! http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/entropy.html#sec-s-not-knowing http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/entropy.html#sec-s-not-kn... (However, it is perhaps useful to separate them into two concepts when teaching the 19th century thermodynamics, since it would be hard to avoid questions about the subjectivity of information ?)
- IIAOPSW 4y agoI agree profoundly with everything except "the concept is superfluous". Yes its just a lack of information, or as I say it "entropy is the name of the bits you don't have." That's a profoundly useful thing. You can talk about the password entropy (the bits in the search space for the password you don't have), the mutual entropy (how many bits does Alice have that Bob is missing) etc.
- pdimitar 4y agoYeah, very cute, but this makes one hugely optimistic assertion: That you have executive power to change things in your job. Sure in my personal life I already started being much more wary of what drains my energy and started gradually changing this or that, to very encouraging results. And I love it. But when it comes to environments you can't change at their core, other strategies are needed. Also the general tone of the article rings kind of hollow since it sounds like "hustle hard and don't let up", which really is not helping its otherwise good message.
- sn41 4y ago> After thinking about energy for so long, I began to wonder—as others have – whether applying physics concepts to social systems could help them run better. This is the point where I say "uh oh".
- cwillu 4y agoThe time for action is when they start reorganizing things into neat rectangular grids. “Ye olde organically-evolved peasant villages tended to be complicated confusions of everybody trying to raise fifty different crops at the same time on awkwardly shaped cramped parcels of land. Modern scientific rationalists came up with a better idea: giant collective mechanized farms growing purpose-bred high-yield crops and arranged in (say it with me) evenly-spaced rectangular grids.” https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...
- mjklin 4y agoYour “physics envy” alarm went off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_envy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_envy
- proc0 4y agoI thought this article was going to go a bit deeper with this. Living beings raise the entropy of the environment to lower the entropy of the living system. This is why living beings for the most part consume other living beings. Life must consume lower entropy i.e. food, and produce higher entropy waste in a cycle, in order to stay alive. This is also true for higher ordered systems, especially if they're composed of living beings. Societies must consume lower entropy i.e. resources, and produce waste in a cycle. Knowing this you can optimize the cycle itself, and also be more aware of how much you are raising the entropy of the environment.
- begueradj 4y agoThis reminds me of the "Broken Windows Theory": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
- bawolff 4y agoI kind of hate articles like this. Taking some cliched advice (a stitch in time saves nine) and pretending that you can get to it from some intellectual principle of science, which somehow makes it more true or "wise". Like what insight is entropy or negentropy providing into this situation? If you hadn't heard of negrntropy would you be under the mistaken impression that your apartment was going to clean itself?